Filipp Vigel

He accompanied Count Golovkin on his 1805 mission to China, presided over the department of foreign religions and governed the town of Kerch.

Vigel witnessed every major event of Alexander I's reign and conversed with other Russian cultural figures.

His colleagues at the Arzamas Society included Alexander Pushkin, who gently mocked Vigel's homosexual proclivities in a verse epistle.

Vigel is remembered primarily for his copious memoirs covering the history of Russia from the reign of Emperor Paul to the November Uprising (1831).

They are considered unreliable in so far as they concern the Western-leaning literati such as Nikolai Gogol and Pyotr Chaadayev.