Her father, Nikolay Afanasievich Goncharov, a scion of the family of paper manufacturers from Kaluga, was pronounced demented in 1815; the household was managed by his wife, Natalia Ivanovna Zagriajskaya, an imperious lady with connections within Muscovite nobility.

Her ancestors included Euphrosine Ulrike von Liphart and Ivan Aleksandrovich Zagryazhskij[1] Natalie (as she was familiarly known) met Alexander Pushkin at the age of 16, when she was one of the most talked-about beauties of Moscow.

[1] After many hesitations, Natalia eventually accepted a proposal of marriage from Pushkin in April 1830, but not until she had received assurances that the tsarist government did not intend to persecute the libertarian poet.

Some, including Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva, covertly[3] or overtly [4] blamed Pushkin's death on her, feeling that she did not understand his greatness and failed to take an appropriate interest in his art.

It does seem that she preferred worldly pleasures to his company, though to some extent she was obliged to socialise separately from him; for example, even during her pregnancies, she often had to chaperone her sisters in the court, since there was no one else to do so, and only by going into society could they find husbands.

However, modern research into archival materials and contemporary memoirs, including those of family members (who always mentioned Natalia Nikolayevna with great warmth and respect), leads to a more sympathetic view.

[5] It stands to her credit that she preserved Pushkin's letters to her [6] (which suggests that she had some idea of the significance of his written heritage), and subsequently she allowed them to be published.