Maria Keksholmska-Aishe

In early January 1878, Russian troops were leaving the Balkans on a victorious march. Turkey had already suffered not its first defeat in the duel with the Russian Empire. But, as always happened, the fruits of this victory were negligible for the Russians. Among the Russian troops there were also regiments from Ukraine—Volhynian, Podolian, Zhytomyr, Izyum, Sumy, and many others. Many Ukrainians were also part of other military formations stationed in Ukraine or Poland. The press of that time covered not only the general course of military operations, but also individual examples of heroism, provided descriptions of localities, the customs of the local peoples, and even the good deeds of Russian soldiers. As one newspaper of that time wrote: "Private Mikhail Sayenko of the Kexholm Grenadier Regiment of the Emperor of Austria, passing by numerous groups of dead on the Adrianople highway, heard a child crying... Looking closer, he saw among the killed Turkish peasants a three-year-old girl embracing her dead mother." The reader may perhaps recall a similar plot from Valentin Pikul’s work “Bayazet.” There is nothing surprising here, since the Russian writer quite often used information from the Russian press of those times in his works, and much was written about Aishe then. With the return of the Kexholm Regiment to Warsaw, its officers at a meeting, understandably, not without instructions from "above," recognized Aishe as a daughter of the regiment. The girl was baptized according to the Orthodox rite with the name Maria—in honor of the Russian empress, the wife of Alexander II. Maria received her surname from the name of the regiment—"Kexholmskaya" (the regiment's name comes from the city of Kexholm, located on the shore of Lake Ladoga, and belonged, in particular, to Sweden, Finland, and Russia; since 1948 it has been the city of Priozersk in Leningrad Oblast, Russia). Masha Keksholmska, a pretty dark-eyed girl, lived with one of the regiment’s officers and was constantly under the care of seventy “fathers,” a kind of mustachioed nannies. In 1883 she entered the Warsaw Mariinsky Institute, which officers also visited. Her grades—always the highest—were posted and announced at officers’ gatherings. In Lutsk, a girl met and then fell in love with a cornet of the Izium Dragoon Regiment. Here it should be recalled that dragoons are the same as hussars. It is just that in the Russian Empire in the 1880s a military reform was carried out that simplified the uniform and purpose of certain military formations. Twenty years later, the son of Alexander III, Nicholas II, a lover of beauty and parades, revived the hussar formations. The officers of the Lutsk Hussars were educated people, cared about the improvement of the city and the preservation of historical monuments, and, on the advice of Olena Pchilka—Lesya Ukrainka’s mother, who lived next door to them—read Ukrainian books. Russian regiments were stationed in the suburbs of Lutsk—in Teremno, Kras Emperor Alexander III also favored the Izyum men, and it was he who blessed the marriage between the “hostage” of the Russian throne, Masha-Aishe, and the dragoon Alexander Osipovich Schlemmer, whose family also had an estate near Lutsk, at Zaborol. Before that, of course, in the autumn of 1890 Emperor Alexander III personally met the daughter of the regiment while he was in Volhynia. Incidentally, the emperor’s visit accelerated the appearance of rail service in Lutsk: in 1890, in preparation for Alexander III’s arrival, a railway branch was laid from the Kyiv-Kovel-Brest main It is also unknown to us whether there was “ardent love” between the newlyweds, or whether it was after all another ideological design of the imperial circles. But how it was with Maria and Alexander is hard to say even when rereading the press of that time. Only one thing is known for certain (and no one will deny it): that hussars (or rather dragoons) were in no hurry to marry young, as Cornet Shlemmmer did, because they loved women no less than their moustaches, cards, and wine. And if such a thing did happen, the path to betrayal was open by itself; it would have been demanded by the unwritten rules of hussar etiquette, a kind of encyclopedia of the Rzhevsky lieutenants... Even adventurers appeared who told newspapermen that they were the ones who had first seen and warmed the little Turkish girl. But the young couple no longer sent them money, limiting themselves to autographed portraits. Thus ended this brilliant fairy tale about the Turkish “Cinderella.” As in novels, so in life, fairy-tale stories end with marriage... The girl was forgotten; indeed, jingoistic patriotism also turned out to be dangerous for a time. After the death of Alexander III, some top military circles tried to install the hero of the Turkish War, General Skobelev, as emperor of the Russian state. And it is unknown how history would have turned out if the general had not mysteriously died of heart failure in his mistress’s bed. After that, imperial circles began to “tighten the screws,” imposing a kind of veto on memories of the recent war. The story of Ayşe also fell among the forbidden topics... At the beginning of the story, we mentioned Vira Panyutina—an educator and the godmother of Maria-Aishe, who took her in at her house in Lutsk. Fate decreed that she would appear again in the newspaper columns, but not as an accomplice—rather, as a heroine herself. During World War I, three of her sons were killed at once in one of the battles. Her maternal grief was used by UPA patriots for their own purposes. Oleksii Zlatohorskyi