![]() ![]() No sooner had they arrived than a diphtheria epidemic killed their second daughter, Sophia: the strain proved too much for Vassily, who abandoned his wife and children. ![]() Within a dozen years of her marriage, Lubov saw each of their estates sold off, one by one, until in 1881 the last estate (Oneg, where Sergei Rachmaninov had been born on April 2nd 1873) had to be sold, and the couple, with their five children, was obliged to move to an apartment in St Petersburg. In the Imperial Russian army, however, the life-style of officers encouraged hard drinking, gambling and almost all other forms of licentiousness, and on leaving the army and following his marriage Vassily began to squander his substantial financial resources on a series of madcap business ventures. Rachmaninov’s mother, Lubov, brought five estates as a dowry, and his father, Vassily, had served with distinction against the Caucasian rebels during the Dagestan campaign in the years 1857–9. ![]() When Rachmaninov’s parents married in the 1860s their status was that of a well-connected upper middle class family of comfortable means. ![]()
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