Family
Struve was the second of a dynasty of astronomers through five generations. He was the great-grandfather of Otto Struve and the father of Otto Wilhelm von Struve. He was also the grandfather of Hermann Struve, who was Otto Struve's uncle.
In 1815 he married Emilie Wall (1796–1834) in Altona, who bore 12 children, 8 of which survived early childhood. In addition to Otto Wilhelm von Struve, other children were Heinrich Vasilyevich Struve (1822–1908), a prominent chemist, and Bernhard Vasilyevich Struve (1827–1889), who served as a government official in Siberia and later as governor of Astrakhan and Perm.
After his first wife died, he remarried to Johanna Henriette Francisca Bartels (1807–1867), a daughter of the mathematician Martin Bartels, who bore him six more children. The most well-known was Karl de Struve (1835–1907), who served successively as Russian ambassador to Japan, the United States, and the Netherlands.
Bernhard's son Peter Berngardovich Struve (1870–1944) is probably the best known member of the family in Russia. He was one of the first Russian marxists and penned the Manifesto of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party upon its creation in 1898. Even before the party split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Struve left it for the Constitutional Democratic party, which promoted ideas of liberalism. He represented this party at all the pre-revolutionary State Dumas. After the Russian Revolution, he published several striking articles on its causes and joined the White movement. In the governments of Pyotr Wrangel and Denikin he was one of the ministers. During the following three decades, he lived in Paris, while his children were prominent in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia.
Read more about this topic: Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Von Struve
Famous quotes containing the word family:
“The East is the hearthside of America. Like any home, therefore, it has the defects of its virtues. Because it is a long-lived-in house, it bursts its seams, is inconvenient, needs constant refurbishing. And some of the family resources have been spent. To attain the privacy that grown-up people find so desirable, Easterners live a harder life than people elsewhere. Today it is we and not the frontiersman who must be rugged to survive.”
—Phyllis McGinley (19051978)
“Realizing that his time was nearly spent, he gave full oral instructions about his burial and the manner in which he wished to be remembered.... A few minutes later, feeling very tired, he left the room, remarking, I have no disposition to leave this precious circle. I love to be here surrounded by my family and friends. Then he gave them his blessing and said, I am ready to go and I wish you goodnight.”
—For the State of New Hampshire, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Being so wrong about her makes me wonder now how often I am utterly wrong about myself. And how wrong she might have been about her mother, how wrong he might have been about his father, how much of family life is a vast web of misunderstandings, a tinted and touched-up family portrait, an accurate representation of fact that leaves out only the essential truth.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)