Assigned female at birth, he ran away from home and lived as a man while enlisting in an uhlan (light cavalry) regiment.

[1] His memoir, The Cavalry Maiden, is a significant document of its era because few junior officers of the Napoleonic Wars published their experiences, and because it is one of the earliest autobiographies in the Russian language.

[9][10] His father placed him in the care of his soldiers after an incident that nearly killed him in infancy when his abusive mother threw him out the window of a moving carriage.

[11] After his father retired from service, he continued playing with broken sabers and frightened his family by secretly taming a stallion that they considered unbreakable.

[12] In 1801, he married a Sarapul judge, Vasily Stefanovich Chernov, who was seven years his senior, and gave birth to a son on January 4, 1803.

[13] On September 17, 1806,[14][4] he dressed as a man in a Cossack uniform and ran away from home,[14] enlisting in the Polish Horse Regiment (later classified as uhlans) under the alias Alexander Sokolov.

He transferred away from the hussars to the Lithuanian Uhlan Regiment in order to avoid the colonel's daughter who had fallen in love with him.

During the Battle of Borodino, a cannonball wounded him in the leg, yet he continued serving full duty for several days afterwards until his command ordered him away to recuperate.

Alexandrov added background about his early childhood but changed his age by seven years and eliminated all reference to his marriage.

He was also distressed that publisher Pushkin had changed the title from his male to his former female name, Durova, writing “the name which you called me, dear sir Aleksandr Sergeevich, in the preface haunts me!

[22][23] Besides being a rare example of a female soldier's military memoir, The Cavalry Maiden is one of the few sustained accounts of the Napoleonic wars to describe events from the perspective of a junior officer[citation needed] and one of the earliest autobiographical works in Russian literature.

Durova became a figure of some cultural interest in Eastern Europe but remained largely unknown to the English-speaking world until Mary Fleming Zirin's translation of The Cavalry Maiden in 1988.