Dmitry Grigorovich
Dmitry Vasilyevich Grigorovich was a Russian writer, best known for his first two novels, The Village and Anton Goremyka, and lauded as the first author to have realistically portrayed the life of the Russian rural community and openly condemn the system of serfdom.
Dmitry Grigorovich was born in Simbirsk to a family of the landed gentry. His Russian father was a retired hussar officer, his French mother, Cydonia de Varmont, was a daughter of a royalist who perished on guillotine in the times of the Reign of Terror. Having lost his father early in his life, Dmitry was brought up by his mother and grandmother, the two women who hardly spoke anything but French. Up until the age of eight the boy had serious difficulties with his Russian. I was taking my lessons of Russian from servants, local peasants but mostly from my fathers old kammerdiener Nikolai... For hours on end was he waiting for the moment Id be let out to play and then hed grab me by the hand and walk me through fields and groves, telling fairytales and all kinds of adventure stories. Cast in coldness of my lonely childhood, I was thawing only when having these walks with Nikolai, Grigorovich remembered later.
Source: Wikipedia