Family
Potemkin had no legitimate descendants, though it is probable he had illegitimate issue. Four of his five sisters lived long enough to bear children, but only the daughters of his sister Marfa Elena (sometimes rendered as 'Helen') received Potemkin's special attention. The five unmarried Engelhardt sisters arrived in court in 1775 on the direction of their recently widowed father Vassily. Legend suggests Potemkin soon seduced many of the girls, one of whom was twelve or thirteen at the time. An affair with the third eldest, Varvara, can be verified; after that had subsided, Potemkin formed close—and probably amorous—relationships successively with Alexandra, the second eldest, and Ekaterina, the fifth.
Potemkin also had influential relatives. Potemkin's sister Maria, for example, married Russian senator Nikolay Samoylov: their son Alexander was decorated for his service under Potemkin in the army; their daughter Ekaterina married first into the Raevesky family, and then the wealthy landowner Lev Davydov. She had children with both husbands, including highly decorated General Nikolay Raevsky, Potemkin's great-nephew. His wider family included several distant cousins, among them Count Pavel Potemkin, another decorated military figure, whose brother Mikhail married Potemkin's niece Tatiana Engelhardt. A distant nephew, Felix Yusupov, helped murder Rasputin in 1916.
Read more about this topic: Grigory Potemkin
Famous quotes containing the word family:
“The law is equal before all of us; but we are not all equal before the law. Virtually there is one law for the rich and another for the poor, one law for the cunning and another for the simple, one law for the forceful and another for the feeble, one law for the ignorant and another for the learned, one law for the brave and another for the timid, and within family limits one law for the parent and no law at all for the child.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Family lore can be a bore, but only when you are hearing it, never when you are relating it to the ones who will be carrying it on for you. A family without a storyteller or two has no way to make sense out of their past and no way to get a sense of themselves.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“I swear ... to hold my teacher in this art equal to my own parents; to make him partner in my livelihood; when he is in need of money to share mine with him; to consider his family as my own brothers and to teach them this art, if they want to learn it, without fee or indenture.”
—Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 B.C.)