She was born on 25 December 1805 to Russian General Nikolay Raevsky and Sophia Konstantinov and lived until 10 August 1863. Her husband of a year, Sergei Volkonsky, was arrested and sent to Siberia for participating in the Decembrist Revolt that resulted when the heir-apparent to Alexander I, Konstantine, renounced his claim to the throne in December 1825. Nicholas (I) stepped forward and the forces of progress and reaction briefly confronted each other. The reactionary Nicholas I won. She was called the Princess of Siberia by the residents of Irkutsk.
Her Wikipedia article, as Mariya Volkonskaya, is here. This parargraph from Wikipedia's article about the Decembrist Revolt has this paragraph, "Suspicion also fell on several eminent persons who were on friendly terms with the Decembrist leaders and could have been aware of their clandestine organizations, notably Aleksandr Pushkin, Alexander Griboedov, and Aleksey Yermolov. Wives of many Decembrists followed their husbands into exile. The expression Decembrist wife is a Russian symbol of the devotion of a wife to her husband. Maria Volkonsky, the wife of the Decembrist leader Sergei Volkonsky, notably followed her husband to his exile in Irkutsk. Despite the spartan conditions of this banishment, Sergei Volkonsky and his wife, Maria, took opportunities to celebrate the liberalizing mode of their exile. Sergei took to wearing an untrimmed beard (rejecting Peter the Great's reforms and salon fashion), wearing peasant dress and socialising with many of his peasant associates with whom he worked the land at his farm in Urik. Maria, equally, established schools, a foundling hospital and a theater for the local population. Sergei returned after thirty years of his exile had elapsed, though his titles and land remained under royal possession. Other exiles preferred to remain in Siberia after their sentences were served, preferring its relative freedom to the stifling intrigues of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and after years of exile there was not much for them to return to. Many Decembrists thrived in exile, in time becoming landowners and farmers. In later years, they would become the idols for the populist movement of the 1860s and the 1870s, where their advocacy for reform and their anti-serfdom platform established a great admiration for their actions, including the writer Leo Tolstoy."
There are two additional Maria Volkonskayas in these albums, Maria Kikina Volkovskaya and Maria Mikhailovna Volanskaya.
