This portrait of Maria and members of the Decembrist circle is based on the unpublished memoirs and diaries of the princess, which the Volkonsky family made available to the author. Beautiful, cultivated, and the daughter of a hero of the Napoleonic wars, Maria Volkonsky had been married only one year when in 1825 the tsar sentenced her husband, Decembrist leader Sergey Volkonsky to life imprisonment in Siberia. Despite her family's and the tsar's opposition, Maria was determined to join her husband in exile. She was more than halfway there when the tsar decreed that she could never return from Siberia.
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