Tolstoy

Chertkov had spent several weeks near Yasnaya Polyana in the summer of 1906, and he returned with his family for the whole of the summer in 1907. This time Sonya was not as thrilled by the prospect as her husband was, and showed it. She caused further friction by insisting on employing guards for Yasnaya Polyana after some peasants had raided the vegetable garden one night and stolen some cabbages.¹⁶⁷ The armed Circassian hired to provide security proved to be very unpopular with the villagers, and Tolstoy was greatly pained. The autumn of 1907 was thus no happier than the autumn of 1906, and Sonya’s estrangement from her husband increased still further when the businesslike Chertkov found an obliging twenty-five-year-old called Nikolay Gusev to become Tolstoy’s secretary. Chertkov paid Gusev fifty roubles a month to help Tolstoy deal with his enormous correspondence, but for Sonya that meant another non-family member at Yasnaya Polyana who was privy to her husband’s thoughts. Gusev arrived in September 1907, and took up residence in the upstairs room nicknamed the ‘Remingtonnaya’ for the Remington typewriter that had recently been installed there. A month later, he was arrested for spreading revolutionary propaganda, and spent two months in the Tula prison. The Russian government had resumed its previous tactics of targeting Tolstoy’s followers, despite the fact it was Tolstoy himself authoring the anti-tsarist tracts.¹⁶⁸

Another source of depression for Tolstoy that autumn was his son Andrey’s second marriage. Andrey’s first marriage, to Olga diterikhs, the sister of Chertkov’s wife, had broken down soon after the birth of their two children, but to his father’s horror, he had then taken up with the wife of the Tula governor. Ekaterina Artsimovich abandoned six children as well as her husband to pursue her passion with Andrey, and was six months pregnant with his child when they married in November. They had difficulty enough in finding a priest who was prepared to marry them when Andrey’s divorce finally came through, and then they had to rush through the night to an obscure rural parish so the ceremony could be conducted at the crack of dawn, before the start of the forty-day Christmas fast.¹⁶⁹ Andrey, who had not seen much of his father when he was growing up, was a serial philanderer, and was soon unfaithful to his second wife.

The cause of the greatest happiness in Tolstoy’s last years – the return of Chertkov – was also the cause of great unhappiness for his wife. Chertkov had worked indefatigably during his time in England. In 1900 he had moved from Essex to Christchurch in Hampshire (now dorset), a pleasant town on the River Stour. His mother owned a plush residence at nearby Southbourne (where she would die, penniless, in 1922, at the age of ninety),¹⁷⁰ and she now bought her son a spacious three-storey detached house with a large garden, together with a building on Iford Lane for his printing press. The Purleigh colony had fallen apart, partly due to Chertkov’s autocratic ways (he fell out with Kenworthy, Maude and Khilkov). A few Tolstoyans moved to the Cots-wolds to set up a new colony at Whiteway (which uniquely survives to this day),¹⁷¹ but the main centre for Tolstoyanism in Britain now became Tuckton House, Chertkov’s residence in Christchurch. Russian-language publication continued under the Free Word Press imprint, but Chertkov now also set up the Free Age Press to publish English translations of Tolstoy’s writings. In the first three years, before he fell out with his manager, Arthur Fifield (who had been secretary at the Brotherhood Church), the Press produced forty-three publications, with a combined print run of over 200,000.¹⁷² Russian-language productivity was also impressive: in 1902 Chertkov started publishing the first Russian edition of Tolstoy’s Complete Collected Works Banned in Russia under the imprint of the Free Word Press.

Chertkov also built a state-of-the-art, temperature-controlled vault to store all the manuscripts Tolstoy had been sending him, which now included his precious diaries. One of its custodians was Ludwig Perno, an exiled Estonian revolutionary who lived in nearby Boscombe, and he was made to promise that he would never to leave the house without a guard.¹⁷³ Unlike so many other political exiles who were followed by swarms of spies, Chertkov led a life which was remarkably untrammelled by interference from the Russian government. He kept up an intense correspondence with Tolstoy during his years of exile, and was able to travel round England unhindered, giving lectures on Tolstoy and attending weekly ‘Progress Meetings for the Consideration of the Problems of Life’ in Bournemouth. He even played football for local teams in Christchurch.¹⁷⁴