Elizaveta Aleksandrovna Shabelskaya-Bork was a Russian writer, actress and entrepreneur.
Biography
Shabelskaya-Bork was born into a noble family of the Russian Empire's Kharkov Governorate. She lived in Germany for much of her life. Around 1903, she married A.N. Bork, after whom she took the name Shabelskaya-Bork. Around the age of thirty, she acquired literary fame, but greater widespread recognition only came with the publication of the novelSatanisty XX veka . In 1902, Shabelskaya was accused by her former lover, the Minister of FinanceVladimir Kovalevsky, for forgery of bills in his name totaling 120 thousand rubles. In 1903, calligraphic examination confirmed that the bills were counterfeit. However, Shabelskaya insisted on transferring the case from a commercial court to a criminal one. The defense of Shabelskaya was led by the attorney Sergey Margolin. On November 23, 1905, E. A. Shabelskaya was declared acquitted in court. The civil lawsuitfiled in the amount of 120,000 rubles by Privy Councilor Kovalevsky was left without consideration. Subsequently, Shabelskaya released the novel Vekselya anterprinyorshi, based on the materials of the case. After the 1905 Russian Revolution, she became an ideological monarchist, supporting the mass monarchist Black Hundreds movement. She worked for about seven years in the Russkoe znamya, the newspaper of the Main Council of the Union of the Russian People, working closely with Alexander Dubrovin. At the end of 1913, she left the newspaper due to a personal conflict with Poluboyarinova. Shabelskaya-Bork died on August 15, 1917, at 10 a.m. in the Sust-Zareche estate of the Novgorod Governorate after a long illness. Around April 1922, Alexander Amfiteatrov wrote memoirs about her similar to an obituary. Officer Pyotr Shabelsky-Bork, who took the pseudonym in honor of Shabelskaya-Bork, participated in the assassination attempt on Pavel Milyukov in March 1922. The conspiracy led to the death of Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, the father of the famous writer Vladimir Nabokov. Popov claimed to be the godson of Shabelskaya-Bork, although he actually only met her in 1916.
