Nelka

In attempting this biographical sketch of Nelka I am using the memories of 45 years together and also a great number of letters as material. Her Aunt, Miss Susan Blow, had the habit of keeping Nelka's letters over the years. There are some as early as when Nelka was only five years old and then up to the year 1916, the year her aunt died. These letters reflect very vividly the personality, the ideas, the aspirations, the disappointments and the hopes of a person over a period of a long life. They paint a very real picture of her personality and for this reason I am using quotations from these letters very extensively.

Nelka de Smirnoff was born on August 19, 1878 in Paris, France.

Her father was Theodor Smirnoff, of the Russian nobility. Her grandmother had tartar blood in her veins and was born Princess Tischinina. Nelka's father was a brilliant man, finishing the Imperial Alexander Lyceum at the head of his class. A versatile linguist, he joined the Russian diplomatic service and occupied several diplomatic posts in various countries, but died young, when Nelka was only four years old, and was buried in Berlin. Nelka therefore hardly knew him, though she remembered him and throughout her life had a great veneration for him and loyalty for his memory.

Nelka's mother was Nellie Blow, the daughter of Henry T. Blow of St. Louis, Missouri. The Blow family, of old southern aristocratic stock, moved from Virginia to St. Louis in 1830. Henry T. Blow was then about fifteen years old and had several brothers and sisters. He was a successful business man who became very wealthy and was also a prominent public and political figure, both in St. Louis and nationally. He was a friend of both Abraham Lincoln and of President Grant and received appointments from them. He was minister to Venezuela and later Ambassador to Brazil. He was active in politics from 1850 on. Though his brothers were southern democrats, Henry Blow took a stand against slavery and upheld the free-soil movement. During the Civil War he was the only one of the family to take the side of the Union and spent much of his time getting his brothers out of prison camps. For a time he was state senator and for two terms was Congressman in Washington. He also served as one of the three Commissioners for the District of Columbia.

He was married to Minerva Grimsley and had ten children. His daughter Nellie Blow, while in Brazil with her father, met Theodor Smirnoff who was then secretary at the Russian Embassy there. She married him in Carondolet, part of St. Louis, where the family lived, in 1872. They had three children, a boy and a girl, who died in infancy in St. Petersburg, Russia, and another girl, Nelka, who was born in 1878 and was therefore the only living child.

Henry T. Blow's oldest daughter (and Nelka's aunt) Miss Susan Blow was a prominent figure in the American educational movement, writing and lecturing on education, and the one who introduced the Froebel kindergarten system in the United States. The youngest daughter, Martha, married Herbert Wadsworth of Geneseo, N.Y. She was a very talented musician and painter and later became a very known horsewoman.

After Nelka's father died in Europe, her mother returned to America and it was the first time that Nelka came here. As a daughter of a Russian, Nelka was also a Russian subject and remained a Russian that way to the end. After the Russian Revolution, having no allegiance to the Soviet Government, she became what is known as "stateless," a position which in later years she liked, for she always said that she belonged to the World, not just one country.