Aleksandra Nikolajewna Jakobi

Aleksandra Nikolayevna Susokolova (, 6 May 1841 - 1 December 1918), better known as Aleksandra Jacobi , was a Russian journalist, memoirist and publicist, translator and publisher who also used the pseudonym Toliverova and (after her third marriage) signed her work as Peshkova-Toliverova. Her portraits have been painted by her common-law husband Valery Jacobi, as well as Vasily Vereshchagin.

Biography Aleksandra Jacobi was born in Yegoryevsk, Ryazan Governorate, to a merchant family of Nikolai Ivanovich Susokolov and his wife Anna Ivanovna. Soon the family moved to Kazan where she attended the Jungwald boarding school for girls and later the city gymnasium. After her first marriage to Vasily Tyufyayev (a teacher at the Kazan institute for the Daughters of nobility) broke down, she moved to Saint Petersburg and in 1860 became close to a local circle of the Kazan community. She became romantically involved with Valery Jacobi, later a renowned painter, and for the next decade remained his common-law wife. Their marriage has never been registered, but she adopted Jacobi as her pen name and continued to use it long after the two parted.

Jacobi was best known in Russia as a publisher and editor of the children's magazine Igrushechka (Игрушечка, Little Toy, 1887–1910) which attracted a host of celebrities, among them Lev Tolstoy and Mamin-Sibiryak, as well as Nikolai Leskov, with whom Jacobi corresponded for many years. Although an active contributor, Leskov left some scathing remarks (albeit in private correspondence only) concerning this publication, once calling it "...stale old-fashion garbage, proved to be totally irrelevant... and full of hypocrisy." Maxim Gorky and Kornei Chukovsky were also among the detractors, but Anatoly Kony, a renowned Russian lawyer of the time, praised Igrushechka for good language, high-quality translations and brilliant biographical pieces (on Alfred Tennison, Robert Fulton, George Stephenson, James Watt, Carl Linnaeus and Niccolò Paganini among many others), praising it for being a fine source of knowledge for the young readership, filled with the spirit of love, humanism and enlightenment.

Jacobi edited three more publications, Na Pomoshch Materyam (На помощь матерям, Helping Mothers, 1894–1904), Zhenskoye Delo (Женское дело, Women's Cause, 1899–1900) and Krasnye Zori (Красные зори, Red Sunrise, 1911–1912). She died from the complications of pneumonia on 1 December 1918 in Petrograd, Soviet Russia, and was interred in the Nikolskoe Cemetery at Alexander Nevsky Lavra.