To Russia with love – Frank McNally on the Irish heritage of the ‘father of Russian journalism’

If the name of Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky, a once famous Russian aristocrat and writer, has been largely forgotten by history, there is probably not much hope for his mother’s. Yet the remarkable fact remains that, as mentioned briefly in his biographies, she was an O’Reilly, from Ireland (and probably Cavan if you go back far enough).

The little else recorded about her suggests that she first married a Quinn, and that she was still officially married to him when, as Jenny Quinn O’Reilly, she became the wife of Prince Andrey Vyazemsky, descendant of an ancient Russian dynasty.

The other dynasts did not approve the match but, severely smitten, he made it anyway. When it produced a son, Pyotr, in 1792, the wealthy Vyazemsky is said to have celebrated by buying a village.

Alas, Jenny O’Reilly did not live to see the boy grow up. She died in 1802, aged only 40. Her husband followed a few years later, leaving their teenage son rich and a prince, but orphaned.

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Like many young Russian men of his era, Pyotr was soon caught up in the Napoleonic Wars, most memorably at the infamous Battle of Borodino (1812) which, unlike thousands of others, he survived.

That was officially a French victory, although the fighting retreat of the Russian army and the general slaughter on both sides made it a pyrrhic one. Napoleon’s army was able to “crawl” towards Moscow, as Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace, but was now “doomed to perish, bleeding to death from the mortal wound” that Borodino inflicted.

By his own later accounts, Vyazemsky was a poor soldier, “a mediocre horse-rider” and so inexperienced that he mistook the first bullet that flew over his head as the sound of a “whip”, until he looked around and realised there was nobody behind him.

“I was as if in a dark or, rather, burning forest,” he wrote. “Owing to my short-sightedness [and] lack of any military abilities or mere experience, I could not understand anything of what was going on […] I might well be inquiring during the battle: ‘Are we beating them or are they beating us?’”

His deglorification of war was so Tolstoyan that it has been debated whether his memoir influenced War and Peace or vice versa. It has also been suggested that Vyazemsky was part of the model for Count Pierre Bezukhov, one of Tolstoy’s lead characters, based mainly on the author himself. Either way, Vyazemsky did not like the novel’s treatment of Borodino. He accused Tolstoy of reducing the event to “caricature and vulgarity”.

As a poet, Vyazemsky was best known for such works as The Russian God (written in 1828 but not published until years later), a bitterly satirical account of the state of the country:

“God of snowstorms, God of potholes,/Every wretched road you’ve trod/Coach inns, cockroach haunts and ratholes/ – that’s him, that’s your Russian God./God of frostbite, God of famine,/beggars, cripples by the yard/farms with no crops to examine – /That’s him, that’s your Russian God.”

He was a better prose writer than poet, however. Alexander Pushkin, his best friend, thought him Russia’s greatest. And Vyazemsky used his feisty journalism to champion the literary Romantics, including Pushkin, who quoted him in many of his works. Their extensive correspondence has itself been called “a treasure-house of wit, fine criticism, and good Russian”.

Some of Vyazemsky’s best writing was published posthumously in Old Notebook, “an inexhaustible mine of sparkling information” on major and minor figures of early 19th-century Russia. In his later years, he also served as minister for national education and as head of the state censorship office.

But he had the questionable fortune of outliving most of his contemporaries. And although he wrote his best work in the final years of his life, according to one account, “he had been forgotten and abandoned by critics and the public long before he died”.

When the end came, in 1878, his obituaries included a breezy account in London’s Mayfair Magazine, reprinted by The Irish Times, which didn’t mention the poetry but did credit his maternal heritage:

“One of the leading journalists in Russia, Prince Peter Vyazemsky, died a few days ago. My Irish friends will be glad to hear that his mother was a Miss O’Reilly, a Dublin lady who went to Russia ninety years ago. Prince Andrei Vyazemsky fell in love with her at a ball given by the Empress Catherine, and eventually married her.

“The son was remarkable for his wit, which was of the pure Hibernian character […] He began his apprenticeship to literature seventy years ago, and amidst his varied triumphs was proud to the last of three things: first, that he was the Father of Russian journalism; second, that he was descended from Rurik, the founder of the Russian Empire; and third, that his mother was an Irishwoman.”