A VERY MODERN WOMAN.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1265, 28 May 1896, Page 10

A VERY MODERN WOMAN.

Sonia Kovalevsky was one of the daughters of General Krukovsky. When ’ she was nine years old she flew into a 1 passion of jealousy caused by a little girl who was sitting on tho knee of her handsome young uncle. She bit him in the arm till it bled, merely because she believed that lie liked the child better than herself. When she was 17 or IS she and her elder sister Aujuta spent the winter months in St. Petersburg. The old - fashioned notions of their family allowed them little liberty, and the two girls longed for independence. To attain this independence Aujuta decided to make an offer of marriage t o a young student, Yaldemar Kovalevsky. The marriage was to bo purely formal, to enable the couple to go abroad to study, when they were to release each other from all claims founded on tho marriage. Such formal marriages wero at tho time in Russiajust pretty (or plain) Fanny’s way. The proposal was made. Kovalevsky replied that ho was much obliged, but of the two he would rather take Sonia. An objection was entered by Papa Krukovsky; but only oil a technical point. Military discipline must be observed. His daughters must bo promoted in order of seniority. So Sonia, when her parents were out at a party, ran away secretly to Kovalevsky, sending back a note in these words:—“l am with \ aldemar; do not oppose our marriage any longer.” Sonia and her husband went abroad on "their honeymoon, during which the most delirous excitement was a visit to George Eliot, in London. Thence Yaldemar departed to Jena and Munich, while Sonia, her sister, and a friend (female) went to Heidelberg. After two terms Aujuta went secretly to Paris, while Sonia and Yaldemar went together to Berlin. They lived, however, in opposite ends of the town. Sonia, who was rapidly becoming a profound mathematician, was a little ashamed of Yaldemar and did not introduce him as her husband to her friends ; but ho bad the privilege of taking her out for walks and doing a thousand and one domestic offices and errands. Sonia was, indeed, as distracting to the student as she was unsatisfying to the husband. Not content with making him run errands, she was always popping into his bachelor rooms and preventing tho good youth working. He had fled to Jena, it seems, to escape Sonia’s wilful squandering of his time. Meanwhile Aujuta, in Paris, had taken up with a Communist condemned to he shot. Sonia rushed her Yaldemar to the rescue. Appeal was made to papa, the General. Thiers was squared, and Aujuta and her Communist escaped to marry and bo miserable. Krukovsky, like a sensible soldier, bad some sympathy with Aujuta’s genuine passions. Sonia’s unwholesome “ platonics” made him rather sick. In 1874- Sonia, aged 22, published an able treatise on “ The Theory of Partial Differential Equations,” took her degree, and returned with Kovalevsky to her Russian home. Threo years later her father died. In her grief and nervous excitement she was no longer satisfied with the higher mathematics, and the seven-year-old marriage was consummated. For some time before this, indeed, she had been sick of tho sight of figures and was now all for love. But she could not have it both ways of the patent reversible husband. Kovalevsky, who bad run her errands in Berlin and thou gone to bed at the other end of the town, did not serve her turn equally well when she desired him to play tho passionate married lover. So after tho birth of his daughter she left him and carried on with a young p 0 ] e — a revolutionary, a mathematician, a poet. Ho sat talking with her till 2 a.m. and departed by way of the garden-wall, to the scandal of the neighbourhood. As long as Krukovsky had lived he had supplied the funds for Sonia’s little experiments. Now that ho was dead she and Kovalevsky wore pressed for cash. They speculated rashly and ruinously. Kovalevsky was appointed Professor of Palmontology at Moscow ; but having invested in a petroleum swindle and been ruined, be blow out his silly palaeontological brains. Sonia incontinently wont into a nervous fever, and on her recovery accepted an appointment at Stockholm as lecturer to a woman’s rights movement. Again she found herself in uncongenial circumstances. It is to bo observed that she always had been in uncongenial circumstances, though she had always dono what her whims dictated, regardless of everybody’s rights and feelings. Her lectures bored her, her students bored her, the woman’s-rigliters bored her. Her intellectual success was now nothing to her; she only wanted to ho loved. She had never been good looking, and she was, we are told, at this time a wizened little old woman with eyes like green gooseberries in «vrup. Hi r impressionable nature suffered acutely, says Madame Jlansson, from being so unlike t he ordinary victorious type of beauty. In the course of time sho made acquaintance with a cousin of her husband, whom she called “ fat M.” Sho wanted to have fat M. always at her side ; and though fat M. did not return this strong affection, he was made to travel about with her from Stockholm to Russia, and from Russia to Paris and to Italy, till they were tired to death of each other. At last, we learn, she longed to die, but was afraid of death, film caught cold, was wilfully careless with it, and died in 1.891, aged 39.