Avdotia Istomina

She was orphaned at a young age, but was accepted into the Imperial Theater School, where children could live in complete security.

[1] A pupil of Charles Didelot, she debuted in the Imperial Russian Ballet in 1815 to immediate acclaim.

Several people were killed duelling for her heart, and her honour was defended in the fourfold duel (1817): Count Zavadovsky killed Count Sheremetev, while the Decembrist Yakubovich shot through a palm of the playwright Alexander Griboedov.

Her dancing is the subject of a brilliant stanza in Eugene Onegin, which was described by Vladimir Nabokov as the most mellifluous lines in the whole of Russian poetry.

Late in life she remarried, this time to the dramatic actor Pavel Ekunin (ru: Павел Семенович Экунин).