Mariia Kasparovna Reichel

(maiden name, Ern). Born 1823 in Tobol’sk; died Aug. 20, 1916, in Bern. Russian memoirist and close friend of A. I. Herzen’s family.

Reichel went abroad with Herzen in January 1847. In 1849 she married the German musician A. Reichel and settled in Paris. In 1857 she moved to Dresden, and in 1867, to Bern. She actively helped the Free Russian Printing House, mainly by acting as an intermediary between Herzen and his Moscow correspondents but also by helping to circulate its publications. The recipient of more than 400 of Herzen’s letters, she wrote Passages From the Memoirs of M. K. Reichel and A. I. Herzen’s Letters to Her (published in Materials for a Biography of A. I. Herzen, fasc. 1, 1909).