Tolstoy

Tolstoy worked on Resurrection throughout 1898, even on 28 August, his seventieth birthday. The government had forbidden the press from publishing any celebratory articles, but he received over a hundred congratulatory telegrams, and his picture appeared in shop windows in cities and towns all over Russia.⁹⁰ By autumn, Tolstoy was ready to negotiate a contract for the publication of Resurrection, and in October he signed a record-breaking deal with Adolf Marx, a publishing magnate based in Petersburg. Marx was proprietor of the weekly illustrated family magazine The Cornfield, which was enormously popular. Tolstoy had been paid 500 roubles per printer’s sheet for his last novel, Anna Karenina, which appeared in an elite literary journal with a readership of a few thousand. For Resurrection, published in instalments in The Cornfield, which had 200,000 subscribers, Tolstoy received twice that, and a 12,000-rouble advance. The novel appeared throughout 1899, illustrated by Leonid Pasternak, and was a runaway success, being the first novel by Russia’s most famous writer in over twenty years. It was an exhausting year for Tolstoy, since it entailed checking weekly sets of proofs, dealing with savage cuts made by the censor and being in constant communication with Chertkov in England.

Since arriving in England in the spring of 1897, Chertkov’s main interest had been in propagandising Tolstoy’s works throughout the world. He had begun by collaborating with John Kenworthy’s Brotherhood Publishing Company, but very soon had set up his own Russian-language publishing operation which took up most of his time. The goal of the Free Word Press, which was established near to the house with the apple orchard he had rented for his family near Purleigh, was to publish everything by Tolstoy that was banned in Russia, as well as articles he and other Tolstoyans had written. Everything was primarily destined for readers in Russia.⁹¹ There were nine publications in 1897 alone, one of which was Tolstoy’s afterword to the earlier Tolstoyan brochure ‘Help! A Public Appeal Regarding the Caucasian dukhobors’.⁹² Chertkov now expanded his activities to act as Tolstoy’s literary agent by orchestrating the publication of Resurrection abroad, both in Russian and in translation. His authorised edition of the novel for the Free Word Press was also the only unexpurgated Russian version printed, and it was published in book form at the end of 1899 at the same time as the first separate edition issued by Adolf Marx in St Petersburg. The novel was reprinted five times in 1900,⁹³ and was smuggled into Russia in enormous quantities. Chertkov also coordinated the British and American publication of Louise Maude’s English translation by the Brotherhood Publishing Company in 1900. The success of Resurrection was phenomenal and unprecedented. Once it had appeared in The Cornfield, all rights were waived, and there were soon forty different editions in print in Russia, while fifteen different editions appeared in France in 1900.⁹⁴ The novel was read by literally hundreds of thousands of readers in the first few years of its publication. The Slovak translation was produced by Albert Škarvan, whom Chertkov had invited to Russia, and taken to Yasnaya Polyana to meet Tolstoy back in 1896.⁹⁵

Assisted by Tolstoy’s royalties, handsome contributions from wealthy Moscow merchants, unstinting donations from members of Kenworthy’s colony at Purleigh (which brought it to near bankruptcy)⁹⁶ and English Quakers, over 7,500 dukhobors made it to Canada on several specially chartered ships between december 1898 and May 1899. It was an enormous enterprise, involving Arthur St John, who travelled out to the Caucasus and was arrested and deported from Tiflis in February 1898, and dmitry Khilkov, who had now completed his term of exile and took one group of dukhobors initially to Cyprus, where conditions did not prove to be satisfactory. Then in March 1898, Chertkov happened to read an article by the exiled anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin, who was living in London but had just been to Canada in his capacity as a geographer to lecture on the glacial deposits in Finland. In his article, Kropotkin wrote about the Mennonites who had left Russia in the 1870s to avoid conscription. They had settled in Canada, where they were now farming prairie land with considerable success. Chertkov invited Kropotkin to come to Purleigh to meet with him and the two dukhobor representatives who had come to discuss their situation. After Kropotkin had convinced them that Canada was indeed the best place for the dukhobors to settle, Aylmer Maude and Khilkov went on ahead to make arrangements (as a Tolstoyan, the seasick Maude was embarrassed at having to travel in a first-class cabin).⁹⁷