Born on 16 February 1786 in St. Petersburg to Paul I of Russia and his wife Sophie Dorothea of Württemberg, she was named after her mother and their third daughter and fifth child. Maria Pavlovna was raised at her father's palaces at Pavlovsk and at the nearby Gatchina. She was the sister of:
Alexander I, Tsar of Russia, m. Luise Auguste, Princess of Baden , and had two daughters.
Nicholas I, Tsar of Russia, m. Charlotte, Princess of Prussia , and had ten children.
Michael Pavlovich, Grand Duke of Russia, m. Charlotte, Princess of Württemberg , and had five children.
As a child, she was not considered pretty: her features were disfigured as a result of a pioneering application of the Smallpox vaccine. Her grandmother, Catherine II of Russia, admired her precocious talent as a pianist but declared that she would have been better to have been born a boy. Her music instructor was Giuseppe Sarti, an Italian composer and Kapellmeister at the Russian court. From 1798, she was taught music by Ludwig-Wilhelm Tepper de Ferguson. In 1796 her grandmother died, making her father the new Emperor of Russia as Paul I.
Marriage
On 3 August 1804, she married Charles Frederick, Hereditary Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach . The couple stayed in St. Petersburg for nine months, before departing for Weimar. There Maria was greeted with a bout of festivities, as described by Christoph Martin Wieland: "The most festive part of all the magnificence of balls, fireworks, promenades, comedies, illuminations was the widespread and genuine joy at the arrival of our new princess".
Children
Maria and Carl had four children:
Paul Alexander Karl Constantin Frederick August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach
Marie Luise Alexandrine of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, married Karl of Prussia
Augusta Louisa Katherine of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, married Wilhelm I and became German Empress.
Karl Alexander August Johann of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach
Maria Pavlovna was interested in arts as well as in sciences. She was a patroness of art, science and social welfare in the poor Grand-Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. She maintained a lifelong correspondence with Vasily Zhukovsky and it was to her that Schiller dedicated one of his last poems. She attended ten courses at the University of Jena, some delivered by Alexander von Humboldt, and was instrumental in establishing the Falk Institute in Weimar. She selected, as tutor to her son Charles Alexander, the Genevan Frédéric Soret, who became well acquainted with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In her later years, Maria Pavlovna invited Franz Liszt to her court, restoring a measure of artistic excellence previously associated with Weimar. He was appointed Kapellmeister Extraordinaire in 1842, and settled there from 1848 until after her death. However, the Duchess's growing deafness prevented her from enjoying the premiere of Wagner's opera Lohengrin under Liszt's direction in Weimar on 28 August 1850. Most famous were the "Literary Evenings " where scholars from the neighboring Jena University and others from outside the Grand-Dukedom were invited to give lectures on various topics. This circle was a focus in post-classical Weimar. Several collections of the Jena University benefitted by her patronage, among them the Grandducal Oriental Coin Cabinet founded in 1840 by Johann Gustav Stickel, orientalist at the University. Schiller praised her "talents in music and painting and genuine love of reading", while Goethe hailed her as one of the worthiest women of his time.
Her Traces in Jena and Weimar
She owned a small chalet close to Jena, owned formerly by the Protestant theologist of Enlightenment Griesbach, where she used to spend the summer with her children. Maria Pavlovna is buried in Weimar, in a Russian-style chapel next to the Weimarer Fürstengruft.
