The year was 1807. Napoleon and his Grande Armée, having defeated the vaunted Prussian army the year before, was on the move again, and the Russian army was marching west to meet him. Among the multitude of Russian units was the Polish Lancer Regiment, whose recruiting parties rode alongside its line of march, trying to fill vacancies in its ranks. One rainy night in March a young man presented himself to one of those parties and politely asked to join the regiment. His only answer to the captain’s questions about his background was that he was a Russian nobleman who left his family to join the military in spite of its disapproval. The volunteer, who called himself Aleksandr Sokolov, enlisted as a ‘gentleman-ranker.’ Nobody suspected that this slim, dark-eyed man was, in fact, a young woman named Nadezhda A. Durova.

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Turbulence awaited Nadezhda even before her birth on September 17, 1783. Her mother, Aleksandra Aleksandrova, was the beautiful daughter of a wealthy Ukrainian landowner. Out of many suitors, she gave preference to a dashing hussar officer, Andrei Durov. Aleksandra’s father was appalled at the prospect of his daughter marrying a Russian and a soldier to boot. He categorically forbade the union, but Aleksandra eloped.

When she found out she was pregnant, Aleksandra dreamed about the beautiful baby boy she was going to have. The first labor pains, however, came as a shock. After a very difficult birth, she demanded to see her son, only to be presented with a girl with thick, dark hair, screeching at the top of her lungs. Aleksandra turned away in disgust.

Soon after Nadezhda’s birth her father’s regiment received orders to move to another town. Since it was peacetime, married soldiers’ families were allowed to accompany them. One day on the march, Nadezhda’s mother was in a particularly foul mood. Her daughter had kept her up all night, the carriage was uncomfortable and the road was bumpy. Incensed with the girl’s incessant crying and the nanny’s futile efforts to pacify her, Aleksandra grabbed her daughter and threw her out the window of the moving carriage.

Hardened veteran cavalrymen gasped in horror. Her father galloped back from the head of his troop. He dismounted, picked up his bleeding, unconscious daughter and placed her on his saddle. To everyone’s surprise the girl lived. From that time on, Aleksandra was allowed to take no part in raising the infant Nadya, as Nadezhda was called for short. One of Durov’s troopers was assigned as a mentor to the little girl. From the very beginning Nadya’s favorite toy was an unloaded pistol. She loved to pull the trigger to hear the clicking noises.

Two diametrically opposed forces were pulling at Nadya’s young life: a demanding, unforgiving mother and a caring, loving and understanding father. As the years went by, two more daughters and a son were added to the Durov family. Andrei retired from the army and settled on his estate near a small village he owned. For his military service he was appointed chief of police.

The more Nadya’s independent spirit grew, the more her mother tried to break her. The girl was forced to spend countless hours sewing and crocheting, for which she had neither talent nor interest. She much preferred to ride through the nearby fields on her father’s horse, Alchides. Aleksandra’s constant lamentations about a woman’s subservient role in society and family instilled in Nadya a deep-seated resentment for her own sex. Her skin, tanned by the sun, was also marred by chicken pox. Her manners, influenced by living among soldiers from infancy, grew less and less ladylike. She felt stifled in her mother’s house.

When Nadya was 18 she jumped at the chance to escape by accepting a marriage proposal from a junior court clerk named V. Chernov. In 1803 she gave birth to a son, Ivan. However, while her memoirs often describe events of her life in minute detail, Nadezhda Durova was strangely reticent about her husband and son, and what prompted her to leave them and return to her father’s house shortly after giving birth. Perhaps she found married life stifling as well.

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