MAISTRE, FRANÇOIS-XAVIER de. - Savoyard writer, brother of Joseph, b. at Chambéry on 8 November 1763 into a noble family of magistrates with legitimist and deeply Catholic traditions, d. at Strelna (near St. Petersburg) on 13 June 1852. He spent his youth partly in Savoy and partly in Piedmont. Following the invasion of the Kingdom of Sardinia by the French revolutionary army, he left his homeland, like many other officers, and settled in Russia. He fought in Georgia against the insurgent populations, took part in the 1812 campaign against Napoleon, and after the Battle of Leipzig left his military career with the rank of general. In 1813 he married Princess Sophie Zagriatsky. In 1826 he returned to Savoy, and subsequently stayed for a long time in Italy, where he lost the last two of his surviving children. In 1839, after a journey to France, he returned to Russia, where he died.
The variety of aspects in his works is remarkable, in which there is a common foundation of a spontaneous and deeply felt realism. The Voyage autour de ma chambre (composed when de M. was in Turin during some forty days of close arrest and published at Lausanne in 1795), is a graceful fantasy in which eighteenth-century taste is joined to Romantic inspiration, while in the Expédition nocturne autour de ma chambre (in Oeuvres complètes de X. de M., Paris 1825) the Romantic element is accentuated by a melancholy lyricism. Le lépreux de la cité d'Aoste (published with a new edition of the Voyage in 1811 at St. Petersburg), is inspired by a lofty Christian conception (de M. lived at Aosta from 1793 to 1797). In Russia he composed two novellas: Les prisonniers du Caucase and La jeune sibérienne (both published in the already cited edition of the Oeuvres complètes de X. de M.). The first, which unfolds in an atmosphere of war with intensely dramatic scenes, in all likelihood inspired Tolstoy's Prisoner of the Caucasus. The second is the plain and moving account of the true story of a young Russian girl who, with the sole help of her faith in God, travels on foot to Moscow from Siberia to ask the Tsar for a pardon for her innocent father. These last two works, together with the fragments of three other tales that de M. never brought to completion (published posthumously in E. Réaume, Oeuvres inédites de X. de M. Premiers essais. Fragments et correspondance, Paris 1877), constitute a realistic portrayal of the Russian world in its social, military and religious aspects, which foreshadows the marvellous depiction of Tolstoy's novels, especially of War and Peace. He also wrote various poems and a free imitation of some of Kryloff's fables. He collaborated on Les soirées de St-Pétersbourg of his brother Joseph with the picturesque description of the opening. Some scientific memoirs of his also exist in the Bibliothèque de Genève and communications in the Atti della R. Accademia delle scienze di Torino.
