and regent. In 1890 she married Pyotr Vasilyevich Aprelev, a state official with whom she spent some 15 years first in Central Asia, first Samarkand and then Tashkent. In 1906 she witnessed her husband being murdered in his own Petrovskoye estate nearby Sochi by a group of Imereti revolutionaries. The traumatic effect of this horror was such that she all but lost her sight and stopped writing altogether. In 1920 Apreleva left Soviet Russia for Serbia via Novorossiysk. She died in Belgrade on 4 December 1923 and is interred in the Topčider Cemetery. Elena and Pyotr Aprelevs had two sons, the navy officer and writer Boris Aprelev and colonel Georgy Aprelev (1889—1964) the director of the Russian Cadet Corps in Versaille. Works Games and Pasttimes for Children, 1870 Guilty without Guilt, 1877 Vasiuta, 1881 Rufina Kazdoeva, 1892 Broken Shards, 1892 Sketches, 1893 An Outstanding Woman, 1894 Torments of an Editor, 1902 Two Worlds, 1909, a collection of short stories for children Central Asian Sketches, 1935, published post-mortem in Shanghai References 19th-century writers from the Russian Empire People from Orenburg 1846 births 1923 deaths Russian people of Greek descent 19th-century women writers from the Russian Empire