Tolstoy and his Disciples: The History of a Radical International Movement 9780755621187, 9781350159433

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For Gareth and Ifan

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am very grateful to the following research councils, academies and institutions, who provided financial support for this project. The British Academy funded research trips to archives in Moscow, New York, New Haven and Michigan through their small grants scheme. The Royal Irish Academy and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences awarded me a visiting fellowship under their exchange scheme, which enabled me to work in the Sze´che´nyi National Library in Budapest. The Arts and Humanities Research Council funded a period of research leave for the completion of this book. The University of Ulster and Northumbria University generously funded additional research trips to Moscow and Amsterdam. The convenors and audiences of the following seminars and conferences, at which I presented papers based on the research for this book, all gave me really excellent feedback and helped to shape my ideas: the seminar in Russian Cultural and Historical Studies at Durham University; the Anarchist Studies seminar at Loughborough University; the History Department seminar at the University of York; the Sites of Internationalism workshop at Northumbria University; the Study Group on the Russian Revolution (2007); the Anglo-American Conference of Historians (2008); the Institute of English Studies’ conference on ‘Russia in Britain’ (2009) and the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies annual conference (2010).

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Many colleagues, archivists, librarians and friends have helped me during the research and writing of this book. Peter Berg at Michigan State University Library, Richard Davies at the Leeds Russian Archive, Vlada Gaiduk at The Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI) and Svetlana Novikova at the State Museum of Leo Tolstoy in Moscow were all enormously helpful during research trips to their archives. Kaarina Noble and Rosemary MitchellSchuitevoerder helped me with the translation of materials from Finnish and Dutch. Alexander Christoyannopolous, Wim Coudenys, Stuart Eagles, Irina Gordeeva, Luke Kelly, Gary Muir and Nigel Todd all discussed their research with me and shared leads or materials. Bracken Gibson spoke to me about the history of the Brotherhood Church at Stapleton. Sasha Handley did some really vital last-minute research for me in Manchester. Sasha and Rachael Wiseman also helped me to write this book by working really industriously (or appearing to) on their own projects on our study days. Gareth Prosser encouraged me to start on this project when we first discussed it in 2006, and has listened to more Tolstoyan dilemmas than anyone outside this book would want to. He also read and commented on the manuscript. Daniel Laqua, David Saunders and Avram Taylor also kindly read chapters of this book and made really useful comments on them. I am very grateful to Lester Crook and Tomasz Hoskins at I.B.Tauris for commissioning the book and their patience while I delivered the manuscript. Any errors or deficiencies in this book are my responsibility entirely.

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

The Russian names for places and people used in this book are transliterated according to the Library of Congress system, without diacritical marks. The only exceptions are names which have a particularly well-known and accepted western equivalent; for example: Tolstoy, Yasnaya Polyana and Doukhobor. In general, I have sought to present names as they would appear in the individual’s home country – so, for example: Dusˇan Macovicky´, not Dushan Makovitskii; Jeno¨ Henrik Schmitt, not Eugene Heinrich Schmitt; and Frantisˇek Sedla´k, not Francis Sedlak.

INTRODUCTION

Between 1880 and his death in 1910, Tolstoy produced a body of work in which he outlined his philosophy of life. He had come to believe in a form of primitive Christianity, based on the principles of brotherhood, non-violence and non-resistance to evil by violence. He rejected the state (which could only exist on the basis of physical force) and all institutions that derived from it – the police, law courts, the army and the Russian Orthodox Church. He condemned private property and money, and advocated living by one’s own physical labour. He also came to believe in vegetarianism, complete chastity, and abstinence from tobacco and alcohol. Tolstoy’s attempts to put his beliefs into practice, his frustration at his inability to do so and his wife’s hostility to his extreme views and his followers, led to tension in his family life in his last years and his eventual departure from home days before his death in the autumn of 1910. Tolstoy’s fate attracted world-wide interest. His philosophy, however, had an impact of its own on groups and individuals who were disillusioned with modern industrial society and with the politics of the time. His most dedicated followers developed correspondence networks and set up newspapers, publishing houses and agricultural colonies devoted to living a Tolstoyan life. In Russia, Tolstoyan colonies were established during Tolstoy’s lifetime, and they developed a new lease of life in the years after the revolution. Centres of Tolstoyan activity emerged in Britain, the United States of

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America, the Netherlands, Finland, Hungary, Japan, South Africa and Chile. They were connected on a local level to a wide variety of reform movements, including: vegetarianism, animal rights, industrial cooperation, anarchism and communitarianism. This book explores the origin, activities and beliefs of some of the individuals and centres that made ‘Tolstoyism’ an international movement. Tolstoy himself strenuously denied the existence of a specifically ‘Tolstoyan’ movement. His emphasis on attacking rigid doctrine meant that the emergence of groups of people who attempted to live according to his blueprint for life was painfully at odds with what he was trying to achieve. ‘To speak of “Tolstoism”, to seek guidance, to inquire about my solution of questions, is a great and gross error’, he wrote. There has not been, nor is there, any ‘teaching’ of mine. There exists only the one eternal universal teaching of the truth, which, for me, for us, is especially clearly expressed in the Gospels. This teaching invites man to accept his sonship to God, and therefore his freedom or his subjection (call it as you like) – freedom from the influence of the world, and subjection to God, to his will; and as soon as man has understood this teaching he fully enters into direct communion with God and has no longer anything to ask of anyone . . . Men who submit to a leader, who believe and obey him, are undoubtedly straying in the dark together with their leader.1 Few of the people discussed in this book accepted the label ‘Tolstoyan’ without argument either. The teaching they followed and promoted, they asserted, was not Tolstoy’s, but Christ’s. The Tolstoyans’ anarchism, their emphasis on individual conscience and their inherent hostility to organization all make the idea of a ‘movement’ problematic. Vladimir Chertkov roundly rejected the idea that there were ‘followers’ of Tolstoy in England. He admitted: It is true there are people in England who share Tolstoy’s views, but one of the chief characteristics of these views consists in the

INTRODUCTION

3

conviction that each man should be guided, not by the mental or moral authority of another, but by his own reason and conscience; and thus one of the special features of those who have these views is independence of opinion and character. In their conceptions of life they are not followers, but companions of Tolstoy.2 Even the journal The Tolstoyan, which devoted its pages to extracts from and explanations of Tolstoy’s work, cautioned that their use of the term ‘Tolstoy’s teaching’ was for convenience only, and ‘must not be taken as implying any new doctrine’.3 For Lodewijk van Mierop, a Dutch Christian anarchist, the use of the name, Tolstoyan, was detrimental to their cause. ‘When I tell my friends I am not a Tolstoyan, or “we are not discussing Tolstoyan principles”, they reply, “it is only a name, but we both know pretty well what is meant.”’ But for van Mierop, dismissing the actions of a conscientious objector as ‘Tolstoyan’, allowed people to deceive themselves that it was possible to be a Christian and perform military service.4 Some Tolstoyans embraced the label: Ernest Howard Crosby, for example, the leading advocate of Tolstoy’s thought in the United States, described Tolstoyism as ‘my ism’.5 They were also defined by their contemporaries and their detractors. Tolstoy’s wife regarded her husband’s disciples as unsavoury fanatics. ‘What peculiar and disagreeable people they are . . .’ she wrote in her diary in the summer of 1890. ‘And what a lot of them there are!’6 W. T. Stead described the movement Tolstoy had founded as ‘something that is midway between a Church, a school, and a sociopolitical organisation’.7 When followers of Tolstoy were derided or critiqued, they were quick to respond, acknowledging that it was they who were under attack, even while disavowing the label ‘Tolstoyan’.8 A number of things united these people into something that can be regarded as a movement. One was the profound impact of their first reading of Tolstoy’s works, which in many cases completely changed the course of their lives. A second was their dedication to promoting Tolstoy’s thought, and a third was their sense that they were part of a growing international movement for which Tolstoy was a figurehead. Finally, they all accepted a number of Tolstoy’s key tenets, particularly the doctrine of non-resistance.

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Aylmer Maude maintained that Tolstoyans were ‘those who not only regard Tolstoy as the greatest of all modern teachers, but agree with him on all important points, including his view of nonresistance, with its consequent condemnation of governments, laws, law-courts, and private property’.9 William Edgerton gives a similarly broad definition of what it meant to be a Tolstoyan, defining Tolstoyism as ‘the whole complex of beliefs that coexisted from about 1880 on in the mind of Leo Tolstoj’, but acknowledging that Tolstoy himself saw the doctrine of non-resistance to evil through violence as the heart of his philosophy.10 Others, like Chertkov, placed more emphasis on the importance of following one’s own conscience regardless of the consequences. Arthur St John countered Maude by arguing that: Whatever problems Tolstoy may put before us, and however graphically, clearly, impetuously, honestly, and forcibly he may deal with them, no solution of them will help you, reader, or me, that is not our own. Each little cabbage must grow from its own root; however much it may owe to seed, manure, or water, or to the gardener’s care in preparing the ground.11 Charles Daniel argued that ‘If we seek for the hallmark of a genuine “Tolstoyan” (a man who accepts the teaching that Tolstoy accepts) we find it in the fact that he acknowledges no leader outside of his own reason and conscience.’ Tolstoy commanded ‘the veneration and love of men and women without the surrender of their intellects and wills’.12 This emphasis on reason and conscience meant that, while they shared the most important principles of Tolstoy’s understanding of life, the individuals that feature in this book also sought to rationalize them within their own contexts; to reach their own understanding of the points in question. Isabella Fyvie Mayo, a novelist and Tolstoyan based in Aberdeen, remarked that ‘until one has learned to retain his independence of mind, he is a disciple to be dreaded rather than to be desired’.13

INTRODUCTION

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While they acknowledged Tolstoy as a defining influence on their lives, few of them, however devoted, agreed with him on every point or were exclusively influenced by him.14 If they were reading Tolstoy, they were likely also to be reading other ‘prophets’ of the day: John Ruskin, Edward Carpenter, Thomas Carlyle, Walt Whitman or William Morris. One newcomer to the Tolstoyan community at Purleigh in Essex caricatured a colonist’s responsibilities as being to ‘diligently plant potatoes for eight hours, enjoy intellectual conversation and mutual reading of Ruskin for another eight hours, and then retire for eight hours to repeat the potatoes and Ruskin next day’. He insisted there was no suggestion ‘that potatoes and Ruskin would exclude Carlyle and cabbages, or even the occasional luxury of Emerson and green peas’.15 These thinkers shared some of the concerns of Tolstoy and the Tolstoyans (the importance of agricultural labour; remedies for the ills of industrial society; or an emphasis on personal religion) and they also inspired followings of their own. Ruskin’s worldview, like Tolstoy’s, was a ‘quasi-organic totality’ held together by his personality – ‘unique, unconventional and uncompromising’, and it attracted numerous devotees. Like Tolstoy, Ruskin disavowed the idea of discipleship, declaring that ‘no true disciple of mine will ever be a “Ruskinian”! he will follow, not me, but the instincts of his own soul, and the guidance of its creator’.16 There was also ‘a large, diverse, loosely affiliated international group’ of followers of Walt Whitman, who regarded him as a prophet rather than simply a poet.17 In addition to the complementary works of other ‘prophets’, individual Tolstoyans negotiated their understanding of Tolstoy’s message within their own local political and social environment. This book seeks to explore these differences, rather than obscuring them, by looking not only at Tolstoyans’ relations with Tolstoy and with each other, but in the interests they shared with other activist groups, from anarchists to anti-vivisectionists. It does not pretend to deal with Tolstoy’s artistic influence or search for traces of Tolstoyan influence in the work or thought of individuals who did not seriously engage with his religious, political and social views.18 It focuses instead on the experiences, activities and beliefs of those individuals

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who shared his views, who adopted him as a guide and who sought to put his principles into practice in their own lives. Tolstoy’s religious message was received with active enthusiasm in an astonishing range of countries. In Bulgaria, for example, William Edgerton has demonstrated that leading political as well as literary figures were open about the influence of Tolstoy on their lives and thought (Dimitaˆr Dragiev and Najcˆo Canov, founders of the Bulgarian Agrarian Party and the Bulgarian Radical Democratic Party, respectively, for example).19 Tolstoyan publishing houses proliferated (Novo Slovo, established by Sava Nicˆev, Stefan Andrejcˆin and Dimitaˆr Kacarov, and Zivot, run by Georgi Sopov, were two of the most important), as did newspapers (Novo Slovo from 1902, the journal Lev N. Tolstoj from 1903 to 1906 and Vazrazdane from 1906 until 1935, which had a circulation of around 2,000 copies20). Edgerton describes Tolstoyan meetings, ‘evangelist peddlers’ tramping the country with knapsacks full of reading material, and several abortive attempts to found Tolstoyan agricultural colonies.21 In Finland, a circle initiated by the provincial governor’s wife, Elisabeth Ja¨rnefelt, in Kuopio – and later led by the writer Minna Canth and journalists Pekka Brofeldt and A. B. Ma¨kela¨ – founded the short-lived periodical Vapaita Aatteita (Free Ideas), which was devoted to the promulgation of Tolstoy’s thought.22 Akseli and Eelo Isohiisi’s home near Lahti was well-known as a centre for Tolstoyism, and Akseli Isohiisi was a regular lecturer on Tolstoy. But the most prominent Finnish publicist of Tolstoy was Arvid Ja¨rnefelt, whose own works – Hera¨a¨miseni (My Awakening), Ateisti (The Atheist) and Maa kuukuu kaikille (The Land Belongs to All), for example – were infused with Tolstoyan philosophy. Armo Nokkala paints Ja¨rnefelt as a true disciple of Tolstoy, rarely expressing any difference in opinion from the writer in their long correspondence. In Japan, intellectuals like Tokutomi Roka, Soma Masaharu, Eto Kozaburo and Mushakoji Saneatsu retreated to the countryside to live the rural life or spread Tolstoyan ideas through lectures and literature.23 In some countries, on the other hand, Tolstoy’s philosophy, while it was read and digested and doubtless had an influence, did not inspire a strong Tolstoyan movement. Both F. W. J. Hemmings and Thaı¨s Lindstrom

INTRODUCTION

7

conclude, for example, that the Tolstoyan philosophy was not widely accepted, at least not in its entirety, in France.24 In England, leading Tolstoyan John Kenworthy estimated that adherents of Tolstoy were ‘more numerous . . . than in any other country outside Russia’ in the 1890s.25 Michael Holman also tells us that ‘Nowhere outside Russia, was Tolstoy’s popularity greater in the last twenty years of his life than in England.’26 This was in part because Tolstoy’s Christian anarchist tracts directly addressed social, religious and political questions that were being earnestly discussed by the country’s numerous reform-minded movements at the turn of the century. It was also a result of the arrival in England of a number of exiled Russian Tolstoyans, including Tolstoy’s closest co-worker Vladimir Chertkov, which made the country even more of a centre for Tolstoyism internationally. British Tolstoyans cooperated, corresponded and exchanged literature with a network of sympathizers – which included groups in The Hague, Geneva, Budapest, Johannesburg and Georgia in the United States. This study uses the British movement and the network with which it interacted to explore both the connections between Tolstoyan sympathizers and the relationships they developed with sympathetic reform movements locally. In these two respects, this study takes different approaches to existing studies of Tolstoyism – by treating Tolstoyism as an international movement that was connected not only by Tolstoy but also under its own steam, and by exploring the ways that Tolstoyans operated in their own domestic contexts. It draws on examples from a broad geographical range of enterprises, but it does not attempt to deal in depth with Tolstoyism and followers of Tolstoy in every location in which they took root. Its aim is instead to follow the connections between Tolstoyan groups internationally, and their relationships with sympathetic reform movements locally, in order to demonstrate exactly how they operated as an international network and to explore the core activity and outer limits of the movement. My research on this project faced both geographical and linguistic limits, but so too did the networks this book discusses. The internationalism of Tolstoyan groups and individuals was defined by their ability to know about and communicate with each other.

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There are two short studies that deal with the international scope of Tolstoyism. The first is a recent chapter by Stephen Marks – in his How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism – on the transmission of Tolstoy’s non-violent message to twentieth-century activists.27 The second is a 1968 contribution to the Sixth International Congress of Slavists by William Edgerton. In this piece, Edgerton set the agenda for a broader ‘world-wide’ study of Tolstoyism, which was regrettably never written.28 Edgerton contributed a great deal to our understanding of the Tolstoyan movement through his work on Bulgaria’s Tolstoyans and his English language edition of the collected memoirs of Russian Tolstoyans of the 1920s and 30s.29 The other major contribution to the subject has come from pacifist historian Peter Brock, who wrote numerous chapters and articles on Tolstoyans in Russia and in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.30 Tolstoy’s influence as a thinker rather than an artist was not acknowledged during the life of the Soviet Union, and so studies of Tolstoyism in Russia date from either the early or very late twentieth century. A. S. Prugavin’s 1911 volume O L’ve Tolstom i o tolstovtsakh (Of Leo Tolstoy and Tolstoyans) brings together materials relating to the Tolstoyan movement during Tolstoy’s lifetime; Mark Popovskii’s 1983 book Russkie muzhiki rasskazyvaiut: posledovateli L. N. Tolstogo v Sovetskom Soiuze (Russian peasants remember: followers of L. N. Tolstoy in the Soviet Union) is based on the accounts of postrevolutionary Tolstoyans which were later published in A. B. Roginskii’s Vospominaniia krest’ian-tolstovtsev (Memoirs of peasantTolstoyans) the volume translated by Edgerton.31 There are many studies of Tolstoy’s influence in specific national contexts. Michael Holman has written a number of articles on the Tolstoyan movement in Britain, which proved exceptionally useful for this study. These include an account of the Tolstoyan colony at Purleigh in Essex and a discussion of the work of Vladimir Chertkov’s Free Age Press.32 A master’s dissertation written by S. M. Price in the 1930s also details the principal groups that followed Tolstoy in England; this is a largely narrative study but it includes some excellent firsthand accounts of the movement given to the author by

INTRODUCTION

9

its participants.33 Rudolf Jans’s Tolstoj in Nederland gives an account of the rise and fall of the Tolstoyan movement in the Netherlands, Antonella Salomoni’s Il pensiero religioso i politico di Tolstoj in Italia documents the influence of Tolstoy’s thought in Italy, and Armo Nokkala’s Tolstoilaisuus Suomessa deals with Tolstoy’s influence in Finland.34 A 2010 exhibition at the Gallen-Kallela Museum in Helsinki, which focused on the reception of Tolstoy in Finland, also generated a collection of essays on the author’s influence in that country.35 A recent documentary collection brought together Tolstoy’s letters to a range of American correspondents.36 There are studies of Tolstoy’s influence in almost every country in which his works were published, although many of these are literary rather than political studies.37 There are also accounts of individual Tolstoyan colonies: in the Netherlands, in Chile and in South Africa, for example, and of course biographies of individuals who were influenced by Tolstoy’s thought.38 The memoirs, novels and accounts of the movement, written by those involved and those who left it have also been of particular value for this study.39 One of the most important archival sources for this project has been the correspondence that Tolstoy received from his followers, held in the manuscripts department of the State Museum of Leo Tolstoy in Moscow. While almost every letter written by Tolstoy is available in published form in the author’s collected works (and in many cases the content of the letters received is summarized), the letters in which enthusiastic Tolstoyans detailed their activities and posed theoretical or practical problems are only available in this archive. Another enormously useful source of archival material was the papers of Vladimir Chertkov, held at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow. As Tolstoy’s closest co-worker, Chertkov corresponded with Tolstoyans internationally, and during his time in England members of the British movement wrote to him – as Tolstoy’s representative and an interpreter of his thought – with their dilemmas. Some manuscript collections relating to Tolstoyan enterprises survive, such as the papers of Tuckton House (home of Chertkov’s Free Age Press) at the Brotherton Library in Leeds, and the collection

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relating to the Whiteway colony at the Gloucestershire Archives. Where extant I have also used some collections of private papers, those of: Ernest Howard Crosby at Michigan State University Library; Aylmer Maude at the Brotherton Library in Leeds and the Butler Library at Columbia University; Percy Redfern in Manchester; Harold Bing at Nottingham University; and Ralph Albertson at Yale University, for example. Tolstoyan periodicals, such as The New Order, The Candlestick, The Crank, Ohne Staat and Vrede, proved enormously useful as they contain both practical details of the activities of Tolstoyan groups and expositions on all kinds of issues relating to Tolstoy’s Christian anarchist philosophy as understood by his adherents. Such expositions also made their way into periodicals relating to social movements that overlapped in some way with Tolstoyism. This book begins, in its first chapter, with a discussion of the development of Tolstoy’s ideas, the key texts that would be central to Tolstoyans, the Russian context for Tolstoy’s beliefs and the Russian Tolstoyan movement as it developed from the 1880s until the 1930s. The second chapter focuses on the publication, translation and reception of Tolstoy’s later works abroad. It also brings together a collection of accounts of ‘conversion experiences’ written by followers of Tolstoy after reading his works. In the third chapter, a picture is built up of the connections between a number of international Tolstoyan groups and the common causes they promoted together – beginning with the British movement. The fourth chapter examines some key Tolstoyan enterprises – colonies, lecture societies and publishing houses – the work they did and the purpose they served for their members or readers. The fifth chapter focuses specifically on the British Tolstoyan movement (with examples from their international counterparts, where they are comparable) and explores some key Tolstoyan beliefs and relationships with wider movements that shared these concerns. The final chapter deals not only with the decline of the movement but with ways in which Tolstoyans carried their beliefs into new areas of interest, their representations of their own movement and the ideological and physical legacies that remain.

CHAPTER 1 THE RUSSIAN CONTEXT

Tolstoy’s spiritual crisis began in earnest in the late 1870s, whilst he was completing the writing of Anna Karenina. Tolstoy’s biographers and critics routinely acknowledge that elements of this struggle inhabited his writing and his character throughout his career. The search for the secret of happiness, a commitment not only to mastering new fields of enquiry but to reconfiguring them entirely, dissatisfaction with the behaviour and morals of his class, and the idealization of a simple, peasant life – these themes occur in his recollections of childhood and youth, in his experiences as an officer in the imperial army and in the development of characters in his novels. In The Cossacks, published in 1861, the character Olenin undergoes a moral awakening in which he realizes that happiness consists not in ‘seeking wealth, fame, comforts of life, and love’, but in living for others.1 In War and Peace, the simple and unquestioning peasant Platon Karataev inspires Pierre Bezukhov with calm and certainty in place of his misery and confusion.2 And in Anna Karenina, the reader follows Konstantin Levin’s spiritual development as he searches for happiness not in high society but through his family and on the land, and as he concludes that such happiness can only be achieved by living for others and not for one’s own selfish desires.3 As a child, Tolstoy was captivated by his brother Nikolai’s tales of the green stick buried in the grounds of Yasnaya Polyana, on which

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had been written the secret of happiness.4 His interest in popular education and experiments at the school at Yasnaya Polyana, from the 1860s onwards, in some ways foreshadowed his philosophical thought – in the absence of coercion or punishment, and his insistence on treating children as ‘reasoning and reasonable human beings’.5 During his career in the army he was preoccupied with religion and the meaning of life, and in an uncanny presentiment, in 1855, he confessed to his diary that he had that day been: inspired with a great idea, a stupendous idea, to the realization of which I feel capable of devoting my life. This idea is the founding of a new religion appropriate to the stage of development of mankind – the religion of Christ, but purged of beliefs and mysticism, a practical religion, not promising future bliss but giving bliss on earth.6 Tolstoy’s struggles with questions of life and faith were lifelong, and only intensified in the later part of his career. In the 1870s, he entered a period of soul-searching and preoccupation with the Orthodox faith. This was outwardly characterized by renewed church attendance and prayer, the scrutiny of theological texts and of the gospels and conversations with church elders, including a visit to the Optina Pustyn monastery in 1878. It coincided also with the deaths of his two youngest children, Petya and Nikolai (November 1873 and February 1875, respectively), and the death of his aunt Tatiana (June 1874). Tolstoy’s was a gradual conversion, both in the sense that it had deep roots and that once seriously begun it developed over the course of a decade – there was no sudden moment of conversion or enlightenment. The transformation in Tolstoy’s thought, once undertaken, was total and uncompromising. Rosamund Bartlett comments that it was perhaps inevitable that such a man as Tolstoy, ‘who did nothing by half measures would experience something beyond the typical midlife crisis’.7 By the end of 1879, Tolstoy was at work on a critique of Orthodox theology, his own translation of the gospels and an account of his own spiritual transformation. These were the first of the

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religious and philosophical works to which he would devote the final 30 years of his career.

The Tolstoyan Canon At the time, Tolstoy regarded his translation and harmonization of the gospels as the most important project of his life. Cutting out anything he regarded as irrelevant or incredible (including all references to the miracles), he reduced the gospels to a clearly comprehensible moral tale – a code of conduct. Ivan Ivakin, at that time employed as a tutor at Yasnaya Polyana, was drafted in to help Tolstoy with the translation from Greek. He was unimpressed with Tolstoy’s selective and not particularly rigorous approach and with his desire to have his own view of the meaning of one passage or another confirmed. ‘“Why do I need to know that he was resurrected?”’ Tolstoy apparently commented. ‘“Good for him if he was. For me what is important is knowing what to do, and how I should live.”’8 Neither Tolstoy’s Four Gospels Harmonised nor his Gospel in Brief were published in Russia and their reception abroad was muted. Sales of the full version in England were dismal and the critics were silent.9 Even ardent enthusiasts for Tolstoy’s ideas struggled with his gospel translations. Arthur Baker, a member of the British Tolstoyan movement in the 1890s, admitted that ‘from the standpoint of a man who both knew Greek and admired Tolstoy, the whole business was very painful . . . Tolstoy as a Greek scholar is rather like your amateur physicist who maintains that the earth is flat and so forth; one does not argue but passes by’.10 The impact of Tolstoy’s Confession, written as an introduction to his Criticism of Dogmatic Theology, was altogether more substantial. The Confession was not, as numerous Tolstoy scholars have pointed out, a faithful account of the changes that took place in Tolstoy’s thinking and behaviour. He exaggerated for dramatic effect the difference in his outlook on life before and after his ‘crisis’, overemphasizing his belief in progress and science and his commitment to the extravagant life of a Russian aristocrat.11 Tolstoy adopts a simple, reiterative

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style and uses fables and extended similes to draw his reader into the story. Tolstoy’s narrative may have been artificial, but it was also sincere,12 and for this study his own explanation of his predicament is important – it tells us how he wanted others to understand his conversion to a new faith, and it takes his reader on a journey that he hopes they will follow. This text was the inspiration for a number of converts to Tolstoyism and Tolstoy’s followers took his lead when they penned their own accounts of their awakening upon reading the author’s works. In his Confession, Tolstoy tells us that although he was brought up in the Orthodox Church, as an adult he did not take its teachings seriously. Like most others he knew, he regarded those who publicly professed their faith as typically dull, self-important and worthy of mockery. Honesty, ability, good nature and good conduct were characteristics he associated with non-believers.13 He replaced religious belief with a belief in perfecting himself – morally, mentally and physically – and with a need to become richer, more famous and more important than others. He killed men in war, gambled, lied and profited from the labour of others. Along with other members of the St Petersburg writers’ set he believed that through his work he was educating people and furthering cultural development, and that it was necessary ‘for us to speak, write, and print as quickly as possible and as much as possible, and that it was all wanted for the good of humanity’.14 After his marriage, his principal concern was securing the best possible conditions for himself and his family. Tolstoy recalled experiencing his first ‘moments of perplexity’ about the purpose of his life around 1874. What was the point, he wondered, of acquiring more land, writing more books or being more famous? Was his life anything more than a spiteful and pointless joke? He could find nothing in either science or philosophy to explain the real meaning of life. Amongst people of his own class he struggled to find an example he could follow: he could not ignore the question; he could not enjoy life while acknowledging the question; but neither could he commit suicide. The only people who appeared to have an answer were ‘the masses of simple, unlearned and poor

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15

people’, and their answer stemmed not from reason but from irrational faith.15 This was the conundrum then: reasonable knowledge made life senseless; faith made life possible, but required a denial of reason. Whenever he began to believe in God, he was filled with joy. When he again recognized the irrationality of this belief, he was filled with misery. Only once he accepted that he could only be happy in the hope of finding God, did he feel more at ease. Tolstoy’s turn to the gospels and his desire to translate and reinterpret them himself, stemmed both from his search for a faith which would not ask him to suspend rational thought and from his desire to strip away what he saw as the hypocrisy of established church rituals, dogma and practice, to expose a simpler Christian faith. The Confession ‘ends not with the discovery of a belief system, but rather a will to believe’.16 The accompanying belief system would be developed over the following 30 years. These were years in which Tolstoy, as Aylmer Maude put it: wrestled with life’s great problems one after the other, and flung down before the world his opinions (right, wrong or motley) on dogmatic theology, Christ’s Christianity, religion in general, economic and social problems, the famine, the employment of violence, war, conscription, Government, patriotism, the sexproblem, art, science, food-reform, and the use of stimulants and narcotics.17 Of the religious and philosophical tracts to which Tolstoy now devoted his time, the most important in defining his new worldview were What I Believe (1884), What Then Must We Do? (1886), On Life (1887) and The Kingdom of God is Within You (1893). Although all these texts were submitted for publication in Russia, either in journals or in book form, none passed the scrutiny of the censor. What I Believe (or My Religion) was the counterpart to Tolstoy’s Confession. The latter narrated his rejection of his old life and the former explained his new understanding of the Christian faith. This he based on his reading of the Sermon on the Mount and particularly

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his literal understanding of the instruction to ‘resist not evil’, which seemed to him to be the ‘master-key’ which unlocked the whole of the gospel teaching. If one took this instruction seriously, not as an aphorism but as a vital rule, Christ’s teaching and its application to the state, to courts of justice, the law, and punishment, to private property, and to personal conduct became clear. One must ‘never employ force, never do what is contrary to love; and if men still offend you, put up with the offence; never employ force against force’.18 What Then Must We Do? was the product of Tolstoy’s experiences working for the census in Moscow in 1882. In 1881 when the Tolstoy family moved to Moscow, Tolstoy embarked on an investigation of the city’s slum areas, and in an extended newspaper article he exhorted the students responsible for collecting census data to recognize their obligations as Christians and to sit down with these people and talk about their lives, rather than quizzing the respondents or indulging in philanthropy.19 The same year he began writing What Then Must We Do?, a polemic which dealt with the injustice of modern society and economy. It recounted Tolstoy’s horror at the poverty and deprivation of the Moscow slums – the conditions in which people lived and worked and the way they were treated by the authorities. In the countryside it had always seemed to Tolstoy that acts of charity had an impact, and at least they assuaged one’s conscience at the inequality of circumstance between rich and poor. His experiences in Moscow made it clear that philanthropy was pointless – the whole structure of society was at fault. If one wanted to help the poor, there was a simple answer: one ought not to keep them in a state of poverty by relying on their labour and denying them the necessities of life. The drive to accumulate money and private property, and the pretence that administrative and artistic work was of as much use to one’s fellow man as manual labour – all these misconceptions were at fault. The only real solution was to ‘get off men’s backs’ and to work to provide for one’s own needs and for the needs of others.20 In On Life, Tolstoy examined the conception of life, asking not why or how we exist (which he argued was much discussed already by

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scientists of various specialisms), but what we live for. What is the aim of life? Tolstoy argued that life should be seen as something that had a longer span than simply the period from birth to death – living for a future life was indeed a possibility. Acknowledging this helped to move the focus away from a desire to satisfy personal aims and physical needs, towards a life of love; a renunciation of personal welfare in favour of love for, and service to, one’s fellow man.21 In The Kingdom of God is Within You, Tolstoy elaborated his understanding of the principle of non-resistance to evil by violence. Since the publication of What I Believe, he had received information from all kinds of sources about recent and long past efforts to elucidate this principle. What puzzled him was the conspiracy of silence that seemed to exist around the subject; the ‘consciously hostile reaction’ to true Christianity on the part of the ruling classes.22 He believed, however, that humanity was in transition from a Pagan to a Christian conception of life – people knew the doctrine that should be made the basis of life in this period, but through inertia they clung to the old forms of life.23 He expanded on this with reference to peace and war. Humanity lived a common life and had a shared social existence which gave meaning to life. ‘Yet tomorrow some crazy ruler will utter some stupidity, another will answer in the same spirit, and then I, exposing myself to be murdered, must go to kill other people who have done me no harm . . .’24 Everyone knew this was wrong and it was impossible to cease to regard wrong as wrong. Lobbying governments and propagandizing in favour of peace would have no effect. The question was ‘solely one of the personal relation of each man to the moral and religious question now facing us all – the question of the rightness or wrongness of taking part in military service’.25 Men often think that the question of resistance or nonresistance to evil by violence is an invented question which can be avoided. But it is a question life presents to all men, and it demands an answer from every thinking man. From the time the Christian doctrine was preached, that question has stood for men in their social life as the question stands for a traveler when

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he reaches a fork in the road he has been following. He must go on. But he cannot say: ‘I will not think about it but will go on just as I did before’. There was only one road formerly, and now there are two, and it is impossible to go on as before. He must choose one over the other. In just the same way, since Christ’s teaching has become known to me it is impossible to say: ‘I will live as I did before, without deciding the question of resistance or non-resistance to evil by violence’.26 The first and most important thing was to acknowledge responsibility for one’s actions and for the position in society one occupies – to perceive the truth of the situation and to profess it. These four texts set out the principal tenets of Tolstoy’s new-found faith. The foundations of his philosophy were the principles of nonresistance to evil and brotherhood – from these stemmed his rejection of violence, private property, the Church, the state and the law. A host of essays addressed corollary aspects of his worldview. His Christianity and Patriotism (1894) condemned the elaborate manifestations of patriotism at that time associated with the FrancoRussian rapprochement, and characterized patriotism as a form of slavery – a sentiment inculcated by the upper classes to commit working men to obedience to the government and to war. In Thou Shalt Not Kill (1900), Tolstoy maintained that the assassination of kings and heads of state should not come as a surprise, when these individuals coordinated wholesale murder themselves. At the same time, these assassinations would solve nothing. What was required was not the death of one or other individual, but an awakening of all those who supported those kings and heads of state in their present positions. Why do Men Stupefy Themselves? (1890) argued that vodka, wine, tobacco, hashish and opium were used so widely in society not for the sake of pleasure, as was often argued, but in order to hide from oneself the demands of conscience. One could either bring one’s actions into accord with one’s conscience, or one could disguise those demands using external means. Tolstoy’s manifesto for vegetarianism – and indeed for abstinence more generally – The First Step (1892), gave an in-depth description

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of a visit to a slaughterhouse in Tula and condemned the eating of ‘flesh food’ as unnatural and immoral. In the Kreutzer Sonata (1889), Tolstoy delivered an attack on marriage and sex, which he believed hindered relations between the sexes and obstructed worthwhile pursuits. In an epilogue to this work, completed in 1890, he advocated complete chastity as the ideal and declared that marriage was not a Christian institution. An ‘honest marriage’, he later conceded, was a step towards, if short of, the ideal of chastity.27 In What is Art? (1897), he argued that ‘good art’ ought not only to be able to communicate to its reader, viewer or listener the feelings experienced by the creator, but ought to communicate a ‘good’ message – of brotherly love, rather than patriotism, pessimism, sentimentality or sexual passion. In addition, the ‘morally engaged’ short stories that Tolstoy produced in these years delivered some of these key messages in an accessible form. What Men Live By (1881) tells the story of the shoemaker, Simon, who takes in a stranger, a fallen angel, who reveals to Simon and his wife a series of truths from God. In How Much Land Does a Man Need? (1886), a peasant smallholder seeks to accumulate land and to make a profit, but when his greed for land causes his untimely death, it becomes apparent that ‘six feet from his head to his heels’ is all he needs. Ivan the Fool (1886) is a story of three brothers: Simeon, who is interested only in commanding armies and fighting wars; Tarras, who is greedy and profligate; and Ivan, who works the family farm. Industrious Ivan tirelessly supports his brothers and they profit from his ability (gifted to him by devils, who fail to control him) to create both soldiers and money. When the three brothers end up running three separate kingdoms, Ivan’s is full of fools, who have no interest in money or wars, but welcome all comers and live peacefully together. Walk in the Light While there is Light (1893) is set in the Roman Empire, a century after Christ’s birth, and follows the fortunes of Julius, a man who makes several attempts to join his friend, Pamphilius, in a Christian community, but on each occasion is dissuaded and continues his family and business life. When he finally finds the resolve to join the community as an old man he fears he

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has wasted his life, but he is nevertheless welcomed, shown the value of labour and enjoys 20 more years of life. These are just a few examples amongst many short stories. Tolstoy also wrote plays that performed a similar function, including The Fruits of Enlightenment, first performed professionally in Moscow in the 1890s, and The Power of Darkness, performances of which were banned until 1902.

Russian and International Contexts for Tolstoy’s Thought Tolstoy’s moral philosophy was not without a context in late nineteenth-century Russia. There were a number of dissenting sects that promoted simple, personal forms of Christianity, were pacifist and defied the Church and the state. Tolstoy was aware of many of these before his own conversion experience, though he undoubtedly took more of an interest in them after it. In Orel, Aleksandr Malikov (1839– 1904) had converted a group of Russians to non-resistance in the 1870s. Tolstoy came into contact with Malikov in 1878, during his own crisis; contemporaries called Malikov a Tolstoyan before Tolstoy. German Mennonites had emigrated to Russia in the eighteenth century with the promise of perpetual exemption from military service. Mennonites were committed pacifists who emphasized close reading of the scriptures, simplicity, community and the importance of service to others. When Alexander II introduced universal conscription in 1874, Mennonite leaders lobbied hard for continued exemption, and members of the sect were eventually permitted to serve in forestry units, cutting timber.28 Nevertheless, as the attitude of the tsarist authorities to sectarian groups became increasingly intolerant, approximately 18,000 Mennonites emigrated to new settlements in the United States and Canada. Native Russian sects like the Molokans and Doukhobors were not exempt from military service. The Molokans (Milk Drinkers), who earned their name from their failure to observe Orthodox fast days, insisted on the proximity of their beliefs to the teaching of Christ. They relied solely on God and on the bible for guidance, rejecting the mediatory role of priests, the sanctity of church buildings and the

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worshipping of icons, and denying the authority of the state. In line with their strict observation of Christ’s commandments, they rejected divorce and the swearing of oaths, and denied the right of any man to kill another. They lived communally, without hierarchy, condemning luxury and elaborate food, entertainments and dress. The Molokan faith in this form originated in villages in Tambov and Voronezh, where Semen Uklein – a tailor who was regarded as the founder of the sect – propagated his beliefs.29 In the decades following Nicholas I’s edict on the relocation of religious dissenters, many Molokans migrated to the Caucasus and during the course of the century a number of Molokan sub-sects also developed.30 From the late 1880s, Tolstoy kept up a regular correspondence with the Molokan Fedor Zheltov, in which the two men discussed both their religious beliefs and social problems.31 In 1897, Tolstoy and his daughter Tanya intervened on behalf of a group of Molokans from Samara whose children had been removed by the authorities to an Orthodox orphanage.32 The Doukhobors, with whom Tolstoy would become much more intimately involved, were close to the Molokans in many ways, but some of their beliefs and characteristics were distinct. They believed that every man contained a divine spark, which acted as a guiding voice. This was the grounds for their rejection of the mediatory priesthood and also the basis for their pacifism – as every man contains this divine spark, killing another man is sinful. The Doukhobors recorded their beliefs in their Zhivotnaya Kniga (Living Book), which acted as a kind of bible. The Doukhobors are first recorded in the late eighteenth century as predominantly free peasants, concentrated in the provinces of Tambov and Ekaterinoslav. The name ‘Doukhobor’ (meaning spirit-wrestler) was pejorative, coined in the 1780s by the sect’s detractors to indicate a wrestling against the Holy Spirit, but adopted by the sect in the alternate sense that they were fighting for the Holy Spirit within them.33 For the Doukhobors, relocation to the Caucasus in the midnineteenth century inaugurated a period of relative prosperity, during which they carried weapons for defence, supplied produce to the imperial army and transported equipment, supplies and

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ammunition for the war with Turkey as an alternative to conscription.34 However, in the 1890s, Doukhobor leader Petr Verigin inaugurated a return to the principles of non-resistance amongst the ‘large party’ of Doukhobors. Eating meat, drinking alcohol and smoking were all forbidden; unmarried Doukhobors were to remain celibate and married couples should aim at celibacy; and Doukhobors should operate their villages on a communal basis, should swear no oaths and should withdraw from all involvement in the waging of war. In the spring of 1895, Doukhobor conscripts handed back their weapons to the military authorities, an act of insubordination which was punished by hard labour in a penal battalion. In July 1895, a mass burning of privately held arms took place in the Doukhobor villages.35 The relationship between Tolstoy, Verigin and the revival of Doukhobor non-resistance is a complicated one. In exile from the mid-1880s, Verigin had occupied himself by reading a range of religious works, including Tolstoy’s. His reform programme built on Doukhobor traditions, but was also explicitly Tolstoyan – it represented not only as Tolstoy hoped ‘the spontaneous and living presence of [non-resistant] ideas amongst the peasant masses’, but also Tolstoy’s own influence.36 Between the arms burning and the emigration of 7,500 members of the sect in 1898 – 99, Tolstoy conducted a ‘public relations blitz’ on behalf of the Doukhobors, publicizing their cause in the international press and petitioning wealthy Russians of his acquaintance for funds for their relief. The proceeds of his final novel, Resurrection (1899) were contributed to the emigration fund. Resurrection tells the story of the seduction and subsequent hardships of Katyusha Maslova, which culminate in her being sentenced to hard labour in Siberia and the spiritual awakening of her seducer, Dmitri Nekhlyudov, when he realizes his responsibility for her predicament. It condemns the judicial system, the Church, the government and the class system. Tolstoy’s followers in Russia and abroad played an important role in the coordination of the Doukhobor emigration to Canada (this is explained in Chapter Three). Tolstoyan links with sympathetic Russian sectarians were generally strong. Leading Tolstoyan Dmitri

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Khilkov cooperated with Baptist activist Ivan Prokhanov in the production of a journal (Beseda, or ‘Conversation’) intended to unite sectarian groups who shared a belief in New Testament principles. The Russian branch of Chertkov’s Free Age Press devoted space to the affairs of Russian sectarians, unpublishable in Russia, in its series of ‘Materials for the History and Study of Russian Sectarianism’, edited by Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich in Geneva.37 In Russia, commitment to the cause of peace was principally a religious concern. The majority of conscientious objectors came from the dissenting sects: Molokans, Doukhobors, Mennonites, Baptists and Evangelical Christians. Russian Seventh-day Adventists also took a firm pacifist stance – in contrast to their European and American counterparts – perhaps because many of their ancestors had converted from other pacifist sects.38 These draft refusers committed a double sin, because by their refusal to serve they demonstrated their opposition not only to the state but to the Orthodox Church.39 By contrast, the secular pacifist movement was relatively undeveloped. There were a couple of prominent examples: Ivan Blokh, a Polish magnate who argued in his six-volume The War of the Future in its Technical, Economic and Political Relations (1898) that no modern statesman would contemplate a long war of attrition which would ruin the economy and in all likelihood lead to revolution; and Iakov Novikov, who argued that humanity was evolving away from militarism and chauvinism, and towards altruism, cooperation and peace.40 Despite Nicholas II’s initiative for an international peace conference in 1898– 99, interest in the secular peace movement was not widespread and organized peace societies did not exist in Russia until 1909.41 Other planks of Tolstoy’s philosophy were also deepened or developed as a result of his reading of Russian thinkers. William Frey, for example – a non-resister who had been involved with Malikov in a failed communitarian experiment in Kansas – visited Tolstoy in 1885 and it was he who seriously convinced Tolstoy to become a vegetarian – Frey himself seems to have been a vegan or fruitarian.42 However, two peasant thinkers were particularly key: Timofei Bondarev and Vasily Sutayev. Sutayev had become notorious as the

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leader of a small sect in Tver which practised a practical, personal Christianity, embracing communal life and eschewing church services, including baptism.43 Tolstoy encountered Sutayev in Moscow, around the time he was formulating the thoughts he would set down in What Then Must We Do?. Sutayev helped Tolstoy to crystallize his views on the futility of charity by emphasizing the need to teach and demonstrate the right way of living, rather than trying to ameliorate existing social ills with money. Bondarev was a former serf who had been conscripted into the army and was later exiled for his renunciation of the Orthodox Church. He was also the author of The Triumph of the Farmer or Industry and Parasitism, which Tolstoy first read in 1885. In this text, Bondarev elaborated the theory of ‘bread-labour’ – that each man had an obligation to earn, through physical labour, the food they needed for sustenance.44 This principle was adopted wholeheartedly by Tolstoy and indeed by many of his international followers over the coming decades. Tolstoy and Bondarev entered into an extensive correspondence and Tolstoy had Bondarev’s book published (with his own introduction) by the Tolstoyan publishing house, Posrednik. Both Bondarev and Sutayev were credited by Tolstoy in What Then Must We Do? as having had ‘a great moral influence on me, enriched my thought, and cleared up my outlook on life’.45 Tolstoy’s ideas were not developed solely in a Russian context. The next chapter will explore the impact of Tolstoy’s religious writings on an international readership from the 1890s onwards. He was nevertheless also engaged in a dialogue with international writers and thinkers, from the outset of his work. When Tolstoy’s first religious works began to circulate abroad, they brought him into contact with people who shared his convictions and who provided information on other works written on the subject.46 In 1886, Wendell and Francis Garrison – the sons of William Lloyd Garrison – wrote to Tolstoy to tell him about their father’s work for non-resistance.47 Tolstoy was also brought into contact with Adin Ballou – the founder of the Hopedale community, which had operated in Massachusetts between 1842 and 1856 – on the principles of nonresistance and practical Christianity. Tolstoy was impressed with

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Ballou’s defence of non-resistance, in which he found ‘all the objections that are generally made . . . victoriously answered’.48 It seems this enthusiasm was not mutual however – Ballou found Tolstoy disappointing and the conclusions he reached in My Religion ‘untrue, visionary, chaotic, and pitiably puerile’.49 In their brief correspondence before Ballou’s death, they discussed the application of non-resistance in depth, but disagreed on the extreme extent to which Tolstoy took his interpretation of Christ’s teachings on nonresistance, property and government. Ballou could not concede that doctrines or precepts were always unattainable – he felt that if they were sound, then they could be attained. On Tolstoy’s views on immortality and resurrection he commented: ‘I have diligently studied the gospels for myself more than 75 years, and these assertions are . . . utterly contrary to the sense in which I have understood [them].’50 Tolstoy was deeply interested in Henry George’s theory of the single tax on land, and discussed this with and advocated it to many of his American visitors and correspondents. Although initially ambivalent, he also came to admire John Ruskin as ‘one of those rare men who think with their hearts’. Where he disagreed with Ruskin, it is clear that these disagreements helped him to sharpen his own understanding of the issues at hand.51 In 1891, Tolstoy read Howard Williams’s The Ethics of Diet, with which he was much impressed. He had it translated into Russian and contributed his ‘The First Step’ as the introduction. Tolstoy’s views on marriage and sex were reinforced by Alice Stockham’s Tokology, which advocated male continence as a prescription for a happy marriage.52 Perhaps more than these western thinkers, however, Tolstoy drew inspiration from his study of eastern religions and philosophers. He became convinced that the truths he had found in Christ’s teaching were not restricted to Christianity, but could be found in many religions if one stripped away the dogma, ritual and mysticism. He was interested in Buddhism and Islam, Brahmanism and the Baha’i faith. He read Chinese philosophy with great enthusiasm, and included many of the sayings of Lao-Tzu in his compendia For Every Day and Circle of Reading.53

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The Russian Tolstoyan Movement The circulation of Tolstoy’s tracts within Russia influenced individuals who already held sympathetic views, and inspired converts. One such was Maria Schmidt, a former schoolteacher and Orthodox Christian, whose reading of Tolstoy’s edition of the gospels converted her to his faith. She lived for a while in a Tolstoyan settlement near the Black Sea, but in the 1890s settled in close proximity to Yasnaya Polyana. Another was Nikolai Ge, who painted Tolstoy’s portrait in 1884. He gave up his property to his family, became a strict vegetarian and sought to engage in manual labour – he was apparently a skilled stove-maker.54 Enthusiasts in the emerging Russian Tolstoyan movement got in touch with Tolstoy, organized the spread of his works and encouraged the reception of his views in the Russian countryside. Several would also travel abroad in the 1890s and make contact with centres in the international movement. Among the most important sympathizers and activists were Vladimir Chertkov, Pavel Biriukov, Ivan Tregubov and Dmitri Khilkov. Tolstoy and Vladimir Chertkov were introduced in 1883. Chertkov was at that time a Cavalry Guards officer and his elaborate uniform fascinated Tolstoy’s family on his first visit to Yasnaya Polyana.55 Chertkov was an aristocrat – a childhood playmate of the future tsar Alexander III – but he also had a curiously nonconformist streak in his background, as his mother was a devotee of Lord Radstock’s evangelist Christianity and had been instrumental in bringing Radstock to Russia. Although Chertkov characterized himself as an officer who (rather like Tolstoy) indulged in the classic vices – wine, cards and women – he was, already in the 1870s, deeply concerned with questions of life and religion, and was tormented by his position in the army, feeling it to be incompatible with Christianity.56 Chertkov recalls that he had heard from friends that Tolstoy was expounding a similar view. On their first meeting they discussed their shared opposition to military service and Tolstoy read to Chertkov from the recently completed manuscript of What I Believe. It was as though they were

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old friends – Chertkov believed that Tolstoy had found in him his first really like-minded thinker.57 This was not entirely correct – Tolstoy had already established friendships with both Sutayev and Malikov – but Alexander Fodor argues that their common aristocratic background put Tolstoy and Chertkov at ease in each other’s company.58 From the mid-80s until 1897 (when Chertkov was exiled to England), and in the last years of Tolstoy’s life (he returned to Russia in 1908), Chertkov was Tolstoy’s closest confidant and co-worker. Throughout this period, during his exile and after Tolstoy’s death, Chertkov remained the most significant coordinator and disseminator of all things Tolstoyan. He also contributed to the Tolstoyan literature himself – in 1890, for example, he published a pamphlet on hunting: An Evil Pastime: Thoughts on Hunting. Dmitri Khilkov and Pavel Biriukov were likewise aristocrats with military backgrounds. Biriukov, whose grandfather and father were both military men and had fought in the Napoleonic wars and the Russo-Turkish war, respectively, studied at the Corps of Pages and the School of Imperial Marine before taking up service in the Russian Navy.59 His growing antipathy to military service prompted him to transfer back to the Naval Academy in St Petersburg in 1882. Biriukov met Chertkov through his involvement in Orthodox philanthropic efforts directed by Chertkov’s friend Dmitri Trepov (later governor of St Petersburg and Minister of the Interior). Encouraged by Biriukov’s attitude to the military, Chertkov introduced him to Tolstoy’s works, and in November 1884 they travelled together to Yasnaya Polyana. Biriukov’s first meeting with Tolstoy made a profound impression on him, particularly the writer’s emphasis on acting in accordance with one’s conscience and his assertion that it was possible to be a Christian in any profession – with the exception of the judiciary and the military.60 In the late 1880s and early 1890s, Biriukov built up a small commune on land he had inherited from his mother and was a regular visitor at Yasnaya Polyana. He was also involved with Chertkov in the establishment of the Tolstoyan publishing house, Posrednik. In exile from 1896, Biriukov joined Chertkov in England and then relocated

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to Switzerland, where he lived for much of the rest of his life, punctuated by periods in Russia (1904– 11) and Canada (1926–9).61 In Switzerland he published the Tolstoyan journal Svobodnaya mysl’, assisted remotely with the work of Chertkov’s Free Age Press, lectured on Tolstoy, cultivated an orchard and vegetable garden and took in guests, as long as they were vegetarian.62 Khilkov had served in a Cossack division in the Russo-Turkish war, and his experiences there (both the horrors of the war and the treatment of troops by their senior officers) profoundly influenced his outlook on life. He spent time after the war quartered in a Doukhobor village and renounced Orthodoxy in favour of ‘spiritual Christianity’ and non-violence. When he left the army in 1884 he returned to his family estate at Pavlovka, in the Kharkov province, and redistributed much of his land to local peasants. Pavlovka became a centre for Tolstoyans and other sectarians – Khilkov conducted lectures and meetings at the house, and encouraged his followers (who have been estimated to number as many as 200) to evangelize in nearby villages.63 Khilkov’s activities rapidly made him a target of the tsarist authorities. He was exiled to Bashkichet in Georgia in 1892, where he renewed his contact with the Doukhobors and brought their predicament to Tolstoy’s attention. Increasing Doukhobor militancy was attributed to the actions of Khilkov and other Tolstoyans in the area. In 1893, the seizure of Khilkov’s children by the authorities caused an outcry. A full account of the affair was later published by Chertkov’s Russian language press in England.64 As a result of his involvement in the campaign on the Doukhobors’ behalf, Khilkov was exiled to the province of Estland where he spent a year under police supervision. When he was eventually allowed to leave the Russian Empire in 1898 he joined Chertkov in England, spent time in Canada with the Doukhobor emigration and eventually moved to Switzerland. Initially he maintained his links with the Tolstoyan movement there, but he eventually dropped his allegiance to nonviolence and became associated with the radical revolutionary cause.65 One of the principal tasks undertaken by Russia’s Tolstoyans was the active dissemination of Tolstoy’s works. Tolstoy frequently

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expressed his dissatisfaction with the quality of the ‘popular literature’ produced by Russia’s publishing industry for dissemination amongst the people; a combination, according to Biriukov, of ‘booklets on saints’ lives, patriotic military tales, and strange romantic adventures’.66 After discussions with Tolstoy, during the course of 1884, about ways of making ‘good’ books (i.e. literature according with their views) accessible, Vladimir Chertkov and Pavel Biriukov took the first steps in the establishment of a Tolstoyan publishing firm, Posrednik (The Intermediary). Posrednik’s earliest publications were short stories by Tolstoy: What Men Live By, God Sees the Truth But Waits and A Prisoner in the Caucasus, and another by Nikolai Leskov: Christ visits a Muzhik.67 While their list of publications would always be dominated by the stories Tolstoy wrote for popular dissemination, the range of texts Posrednik published expanded exponentially as the business became a success. They included anti-militarist works like Vsevelod Garshin’s Four Days on the Field of Battle and Ivan Shcheglov’s First Battle; stories dealing with the evils of power, property and money – for example, P. V. Zasodimskii’s Black Crows; texts dealing with agronomy and agricultural method; books on vegetarianism, including Beketov’s Man’s Diet in its Present and Future, Henry Salt’s The Humanities of Diet and Anna Kingsford’s The Scientific Bases of Vegetarianism; and a number of vegetarian cookbooks. Emphasis was placed on the proximity of the message to Tolstoyan beliefs, but also on simplicity of style. Most of these works were issued in editions of 10,000, and Pavel Biriukov recalls the pamphlet works by Tolstoy being issued in editions of 24,000. By the end of 1889, Posrednik had sold 12,000,000 copies of the publications they had produced so far, and in the mid-nineties were still selling copies of their books at a rate of around 3,000,000 per year.68 Besides writing for Posrednik, Tolstoy himself was not closely involved, but this was a work very close to his heart. He regarded the publishing house’s operations not only as a great success, but as a religious work – the best books, after all, represented ‘the revelation of reason to the mind of man’.69

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Figure 1.1 The Posrednik bookshop in Moscow. [Photograph courtesy of William Nickell]

Posrednik benefitted enormously from the involvement of Ivan Sytin, already a successful publisher with extensive trade connections and access to a network of salesmen who distributed books in the countryside. Like many of the Tolstoyan publishers we will encounter in later chapters, Sytin welcomed the opportunity to apply his business expertise to a project that he considered had moral worth. He was delighted to be approached by Chertkov, and to see intelligent men so devoted to the enlightenment of the people. He regarded the work he did for Posrednik as ‘not simply work, but sacred service’.70

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Sytin never distanced himself completely from his commercial operations, some of which involved the publication of precisely the kind of material the Tolstoyans sought to combat.71 The content of the publications issued by Posrednik was firmly controlled by Chertkov, however, and later by Ivan Gorbunov-Posadov, who took charge in 1893 when Chertkov resigned in frustration at his dealings with the Russian censor. Tolstoy, Chertkov told Sytin, knew best what the Russian people ought to read; the work they put into this enterprise was dedicated to improving the quality of popular literature, not satisfying the tastes of the publishers they used to print the books.72 Gorbunov-Posadov was very hostile to Sytin’s commercial operations and broke with him entirely in 1904.73 In the early nineties, when Posrednik’s difficulties with the censor became acute, Chertkov and Biriukov considered moving their publishing enterprise abroad, but they worried that they did not have sufficient connections in Western Europe.74 In any case by the 1890s, Posrednik sales seemed to be declining. Book vendors in the provinces reported that their readers wanted novels not ‘fairy tales’, or that they would hang on to the publications and save them for Lent.75 When they were both exiled from Russia in 1897, as a result of their active support for the Doukhobor emigration, they sought to re-establish themselves. One of the major functions of Chertkov’s Russian language Free Word Press was the publication of complete editions of all the works that had been censored in Russia. These found their way back into the country where they could be read and disseminated more easily than the handwritten or hectographed copies that had previously circulated. In 1905, individuals involved in circulating Free Word publications in Russia were convicted of distributing illegal publications and ‘inciting insubordination to the existing social order’.76 The Moscow Vegetarian Society, established in February 1909 at 12 Gazetnyi pereulok, was also a centre for much Tolstoyan activity. It was chaired by Gorbunov-Posadov and its objectives stretched somewhat beyond dietary matters, its intention being ‘the establishment of love and peace among all living creatures’.77 The vegetarian movement in Russia developed largely in response to

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Tolstoy’s teachings on the subject. In 1893, a projected vegetarian journal was to be entitled ‘The First Step’. Early issues of Iosif Perper’s Vegetarianskoe obozrenie (Vegetarian Review), published in Kiev between 1909 and 1915, claimed Tolstoy as a figurehead and included articles on Tolstoy as a vegetarian, the accounts of individuals who had changed their diet after reading Tolstoy, correspondence with and accounts of visits to Tolstoy and eulogistic articles on his death.78 Vegetarian societies were formed and vegetarian congresses were held in the years following Tolstoy’s death, and by the 1917 revolution there were vegetarian restaurants not only in Moscow and St Petersburg but in Kiev, Odessa, Kharkov, Saratov and Ekaterinoslav. In Bezuboinoe pitanie (Slaughter-free Food) in Tashkent, diners could read from an album of statements on vegetarianism by Tolstoy, Chertkov, Nikolai Ge and Ilya Repin.79 The influence of Tolstoyan ethics on this movement is perhaps most patent in the resolution passed by the first All-Russian Vegetarian Congress in 1913, that vegetarianism had a higher value ‘only when it pursues the moral ideal of realizing a kingdom of harmony and justice on earth’.80 This resolution was also indicative, however, of the rise of a more scientific branch within the Russian vegetarian movement. Ronald Le Blanc argues that Chertkov, Gorbunov-Posadov and others sought to present Tolstoy to the vegetarian movement as a humanitarian rather than an ascetic interested in self-perfection.81 In fact, Tolstoyans used both moral and scientific arguments for their vegetarianism, but they ultimately sought to demonstrate to the vegetarian movement that refraining from eating meat was only one part of a wider religious and humanitarian imperative (see Chapter 4). In the 1880s and 1890s, one apparent manifestation of the advance of Tolstoyism in Russia were cases of conscientious objection to compulsory military service. These occurred not only amongst the non-resistant sects – the most famous case was the mass burning of arms by the Doukhobors in 1895 – but also in the case of individual Russians, often peasants, sometimes men of a middling or higher rank. In 1885, 21-year-old Aleksei Zaliubovskii was called up for military service, but refused to handle a weapon. He had already read

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several of Tolstoy’s works.82 In 1895, Petr Olkhovik, a young peasant from Kharkov, reached the age of 21 and refused to enlist. He had been in touch with the Tolstoyans in that region, led by Dmitri Khilkov, for several years.83 Most dramatically, Evdokim Drozhzhin, a schoolteacher and another of Khilkov’s converts, died of consumption in prison in January 1894. Drozhzhin had already served 12 months in solitary confinement and a period in a disciplinary battalion in Voronezh.84 Until the end of his life, Tolstoy received information on and correspondence from potential conscientious objectors, including, in 1908, a letter from a group of 32 soldiers and sailors who had come to the realization that military service was incompatible with Christianity.85 Military service was the ultimate civic duty; it represented obedience to the state and a willingness to kill for one’s country and to die for one’s country. Refusal to serve was a hugely important part of Tolstoy’s vision of the coming age, as outlined in The Kingdom of God is Within You – it was a manifestation of the individual putting the dictates of their conscience into practice, regardless of the consequences. Peter Brock describes these individuals, for Tolstoy, as ‘standardbearers pointing the way to a warless world’.86 Conscientious objectors in Russia therefore occupied a special status amongst Tolstoyans, just as continental draft resisters would in the international movement that developed from the 1890s. In 1908, Tolstoy listed the names of all those Russian conscientious objectors with whom he had been in contact over the years – 43 in total – as evidence of the growing movement towards ‘observing the civil law rather than the religious one’.87 He knew of others, he said, in Austria, Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Holland, France, Switzerland, Sweden and Belgium. Tolstoy encouraged these individuals to follow their conscience, but as Peter Brock demonstrates, only if they felt they had the strength – Tolstoy was interested in the welfare of these individuals, as well as the publicity value of their cases.88 Agricultural colonies established on Tolstoyan principles also proliferated in the late 1880s and early 1890s. The majority of these were established ‘on landed estates made available by owners who had

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accepted the commune idea’.89 The earliest such settlement was founded in the summer of 1886, near Sochi, on the Black Sea. This was the community in which Maria Schmidt lived for a time. It was led by Nikolai Ozmidov and included amongst its members Schmidt’s friend Olga Barsheva and Sergei Sytin, the younger brother of the Posrednik publisher. The colony was located on fairly poor land and, in Schmidt’s opinion, the continual struggle against nature, along with the nervous and despotic character of Ozmidov, eventually drove colonists away.90 In Samara, a Tolstoyan community (along with an agricultural school) was established on the estate of Konstantin Sibiriakov, the son of a Siberian gold-miner. V. F. Orlov, another friend of Tolstoy’s, mobilized a number of young people in support of this project.91 In Tver, the Dugino community was established by M. A. Novoselov, whose father knew Tolstoy, and included amongst its members Evgenii Popov, an enthusiast for hand-farming (farming without the use of animals), who would become an important figure in Russian Tolstoyism during the First World War.92 At Shevelevo, on the estate of Arkadii Alexin in Smolensk, a police report counted no fewer than 30 colonists.93 Both Dugino and Shevelevo had satellite communities – sympathetic groups and individuals which formed nearby. But perhaps the community with the widest local influence was that at Pavlovka, in Kharkov, where Dmitri Khilkov and his followers are estimated to have inspired as many as a dozen small Tolstoyan settlements.94 The tsarist authorities, who kept a close eye on the spread of Tolstoyan activity and thought, seem to have had a good idea of the range of enterprises operating in the 1890s. By 1895, it was reckoned that there were two or three Tolstoyan colonies in Smolensk province, one each in Khar’kov, Chernigov, Samara, Kursk, Perm and Kiev, ‘one in the northern Caucasus, two on the shores of the Black Sea, five in Tver’ Province, and rumours of plans for three new ones in the provinces of Kherson, Ekaterinoslav, and Kamenec-Podol’sk’.95 In 1901, the Orthodox authorities identified the principal centres of Tolstoyism as being in Kharkov, Kursk, Voronezh, Poltava, Kiev and the Caucasus.96 In 1897, Orthodox authorities classified

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Tolstoyism as a ‘fully-formed sect’, and one that conformed to the definition of sects which were ‘particularly dangerous to the Church and State’.97 By 1900, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod, was describing ‘rationalist sectarianism’, as practised by Stundists and Tolstoyans, as one of the most dangerous enemies the Russian Orthodox Church had ever faced.98 While a list compiled by Vladimir Chertkov in 1891 of ‘people who are erroneously called Tolstoyans’, named only about sixty individuals; by the turn of the century, Mark Popovskii estimates that it was possible to speak about hundreds of followers of Tolstoy.99

The Official Response to Tolstoyism Pobedonostsev regarded Tolstoyism not as a religion but rather as an atheistic and anti-authoritarian movement. The excerpts from the Ober-Procurator’s annual reports, reproduced by Prugavin, make clear his fear of the influence of Tolstoyan ideology on the Orthodox population, and particularly on other sectarians – a charge perhaps borne out by the return to strict non-resistance of the large party of the Doukhobors.100 One Orthodox author expressed their fear of the exponential rise of Tolstoyism as early as 1886: ‘Look how fast Stundism is growing! How many of the children of the Orthodox Church it has torn away from their Mother over the last two or three years! And Stundism did not start with such an arresting authority as our highly praised writer, Count L. N. Tolstoi.’101 Pa˚l Kolstø identifies two key strategies adopted by the Orthodox Church to counteract Tolstoyism: censorship, and polemics. An enormous number of the latter were written – Kolstø estimates 85 books and 260 articles in total.102 Orthodox clergy were not universally hostile to Tolstoy; some radical low-level clergy drew positive messages from his teaching. Grigory Petrov, a young priest in St Petersburg, published a sympathetic interpretation of Tolstoy’s message in his The Gospel as the Foundation of Life, published in 1898. Others emphasized the influence of Orthodoxy on Tolstoy’s early thought. More common, though, were representations of Tolstoy as a heretic, or even an anti-Christ, disguising his true intentions behind

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a mask of piety.103 The Orthodox priest Father Ioann of Kronstadt delivered enough denunciations of Tolstoy’s blasphemous beliefs to fill a book, which was published in 1902.104 State and Church authorities kept a close eye on the activities of Posrednik, which they regarded as intended to ‘subvert gradually the orthodox foundations of the popular consciousness’ by the dissemination of sectarian ideas. While the censor’s office and the Ministry of the Interior put pressure on Sytin to sever his connection with the Tolstoyans, senior clergymen urged their colleagues to disrupt the distribution of Posrednik editions.105 When Tolstoy fell ill in 1899, the Holy Synod, anticipating his death, banned all prayers in his memory. In 1901, the Church issued an edict to the effect that Tolstoy could no longer be regarded as a member of the Orthodox Church, unless he repented his preaching against Orthodox teachings.106 From his excommunication in 1901 to his death in 1910, Tolstoy’s celebrity in Russia was at its height. The number of people committed to putting Tolstoy’s philosophy into practice remained limited, but the author was nevertheless revered by peasantry and intelligentsia alike. From the 1905 revolution onwards, uncensored publication of his works was allowed for the first time. He continued to pen diatribes against Church, State and war – The Law of Love and the Law of Violence, for example, written in 1908 – and he worked on an almanac, Circle of Reading, of the sayings of great writers and thinkers which best exemplified his world view. Vladimir Chertkov returned from England to Russia for good in 1908, and in Tolstoy’s last years a number of Tolstoyan sympathizers gathered around him. Dusˇan Makovicky´, a Czech doctor and Tolstoyan, was his personal physician from 1904;107 Valentin Bulgakov acted as his private secretary. Tolstoy’s flight from home and his death in the autumn of 1910 captured the attention of Russia’s media and revived sympathy for Tolstoy’s ideas amongst former sympathizers. ‘For a whole week, from the day of Tolstoy’s departure to the day of his death’, Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams recalled, ‘people talked, and many thought of nothing else . . . The same wave of emotion swept from Vladivostok to Warsaw.’108 Upon

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the announcement of Tolstoy’s death all the major newspapers appeared with black borders, theatres were closed and lectures at St Petersburg University were suspended.109

Russian Tolstoyans and the First World War During the First World War, existing Tolstoyans struggled against conscription. Others sought to open the eyes of their brothers to the folly of war and their personal ability to prevent it. Curiously it was Valentin Bulgakov who took the lead in Tolstoyan anti-war activism, not Vladimir Chertkov. Chertkov’s biographer Alexander Fodor suggests that his loyalty to Imperial Russia, and to England, undermined his Tolstoyan principles on the outbreak of war. In September 1914, Bulgakov circulated an appeal ‘On War’ in which he urged Russians not to participate in the conflict, and he also orchestrated a collective Tolstoyan appeal, ‘Come to Your Senses, Brothers!’, which was signed by 40 individuals. Chertkov refused to sign on the grounds that he considered it contrary to Tolstoy’s teaching to propagandize against state activity and to take part in collective rather than individual appeals.110 In October 1914, Sergei Popov posted 19 copies of an appeal against militarism around the town of Tula – the home of Russia’s munitions industry and of the 76th Infantry Reserve Battalion. This appeal was signed by Popov, Vassily Bespalov and Leo Pulner, and it reminded the people of Tula that all of the peoples of the world, including the Germans, were brothers and sisters and should love one another, not kill one another.111 When Popov posted a copy on the gates of the town’s steel rolling mill, he was pursued by a group of angry workers who were convinced that he was a spy. When apprehended by a policeman and troops from the Infantry Reserve, Popov reiterated his appeal that these troops need not go to war and fight: ‘we are all identical brothers and everyone’s soul is the same, both for Germans and for us’.112 A number of Tolstoyans, including Popov, Bulgakov and Dusˇan Makovicky´, were imprisoned for their anti-war activity, but the sentences they received were relatively light – perhaps because of intervention by Chertkov.113

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The war also brought more converts to the Tolstoyan cause. Dmitri Morgachev, for example, a peasant from Orel province, knew something of Tolstoy’s teaching before the war, and heard a clearer exposition from one of his fellow soldiers, but he recalled that it ‘went right past my ears without even grazing my conscience’.114 It was not until he had experienced the horror of 12 months of war on the Galician front that, whilst in a military hospital – with a smashed ribcage and hand grenade fragments in his head and an eye – he asked to read some works of Tolstoy. He read nothing but Tolstoy for about two months: I don’t remember the name of a single one of the books, but I read about war, religion, the state, property, and not a single contradiction arose in my mind about what I had read. I took a liking to Tolstoy, and I believed him and his plain-spoken truth and justice.115 Likewise, Yakov Dragunovsky had read War and Peace, Resurrection and other works of Tolstoy in 1910– 14, but had not ‘taken in the truth’. He felt quite consciously that his service on the German front had brutalized him. But it was not until 1918 or 1919, when he got in touch with local Tolstoyans Yelizar, Nikolai and Ivan Pyrikov, that he embraced Tolstoyism, gave up his military profession, and stopped eating meat. In 1920, he refused military service in the Civil War.116 The number of individuals (Tolstoyan or otherwise) sentenced by military tribunals for refusal to serve rose from tens in the early years of the war to over 800 by 1917.117 After the February revolution, Chertkov was active in a campaign to give conscientious objection legal status. He worked on this with Konstantin Shokhor-Trotskii through the summer of 1917. Several liberal politicians were sympathetic to this project, but as with so many initiatives launched under the Provisional Government, no firm position was reached. Under the Bolsheviks, Chertkov was drafted onto a committee which would draw up a law on conscientious objection, and during much of 1918 he personally certified the exemption of sectarians from service in the Red Army.118

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The decree on conscientious objection, eventually passed in January 1919, gave the United Council of Religious Communities and Groups (UCRCG) – established in late 1918 and headed by Chertkov – the authority to certify individuals who refused to serve on religious grounds.119 In the early years of the Bolshevik regime, the Tolstoyans had friends in high places. Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, an ethnographer who had been involved in the Doukhobor emigration and had collaborated with Biriukov in Geneva, managed the administration of the Council of People’s Commissars. Although he had often been at odds with the Tolstoyans over his politics and revolutionary approach, he was willing to hear their concerns. Chertkov, for his part, wrote an appeal to English friends asking them not to support intervention in the Russian Civil War. The working people, he assured them, were ‘utterly disgusted’ at the party enmity that existed between the educated elements. Foreign intervention could only extend this ‘fratricidal slaughter’; people of all nations should join together to prevent governments of all kinds impeding the spiritual advance of the people.120 Nevertheless, from the beginning of its work, the UCRCG’s authority was undermined by the government officials and courts in the provinces. In early 1920, Chertkov and Biriukov told Ethel Snowden (a Christian socialist and a member of the joint TUCLabour party delegation to Russia) of the deaths of 15 individuals who, despite their certification by the UCRCG, had been put to death for their refusal to serve.121 Yakov Dragunovsky reported details of the death of a further ten Tolstoyans, shot as deserters in December 1920.122 A report issued by the UCRCG in August 1920 listed a total of 72 men who had been shot as a result of declaring themselves to be conscientious objectors.123

Tolstoyism from the Revolution to Collectivization In the years of the revolution and civil war, Tolstoyan agricultural enterprises and Tolstoyan publications proliferated. The principal periodicals published in this period were: Golos Tolstogo i edinenie (The

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Voice of Tolstoy and Unity), managed by Chertkov; Obnovlenie zhizni (The Renewal of Life); and Istinnaya Svonoda (True Freedom). Istinnaya Svoboda, a ‘religious-philosophical, social and literary journal’ edited by Valentin Bulgakov and Aleksei Sergeenko, was first published in April 1920. Amongst the articles in the first edition were a celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the Posrednik publishing house and a history and statistics of refusal to serve on religious grounds during the war.124 Posrednik became a cooperative after the revolution, with Ivan Gorbunov-Posadov’s wife, Yelena, acting as chair of the board of governors. The Gorbunovs’ son, Mikhail, recalled translating, binding and delivering books for the firm in his youth and typesetting and distributing the monthly publication ‘Bulletin of the Moscow Vegetarian Society’ from the family’s apartment in the 1920s.125 Boris Mazurin remembered lectures and discussions taking place at the vegetarian society almost daily during the 1920s, with the principal events scheduled for Saturday evenings – one could meet Tolstoyan sympathizers from all over the country there.126 Posrednik published 63 editions of Tolstoy’s writings in 1917– 18, and another publishing house, Zadruga, also set to work publishing previously censored materials.127 The Society of True Freedom in the Name of Leo Tolstoy, formed in Moscow in the summer of 1917, quickly established regional branches across Russia – Yakov Dragunovsky founded one in Draguny in Smolensk province.128 In the revolutionary years, communal experiments of all kinds proliferated. Some were motivated by economic need, others by religious principles or political ideology. In 1918, there were between 500 and 600 communes in operation, with over 13,000 members; this had risen to 3,000 by 1921. Clothing, food and land or housing were pooled, and in one commune the words ‘my’ and ‘mine’ were abolished.129 For sectarians, the toleration and even encouragement by the Soviet government of these enterprises seemed to augur well. A considerable amount more is known about the character, membership and operation of Tolstoyan agricultural communities in the 1920s than about their earlier counterparts in the tsarist era, as a result of the work of Mark Popovskii, a dissident

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Figure 1.2 The first number of Istinnaya Svoboda, a copy belonging to Florence Holah. [q British Library Board PP.7615.AB]

Soviet journalist who collected correspondence and autobiographical accounts from surviving Tolstoyans in the 1970s.130 A selection of these accounts were edited and published by Arsenii Roginskii in 1989, and an abridged English translation produced by William Edgerton in 1993.131 In the 1920s, there were a handful of Tolstoyan agricultural communities in the vicinity of Moscow (the New Jerusalem commune, the Life and Labour commune, Beryozki (‘the Birches’), the Taynino agricultural cooperative at Perlovka and the Tolstoy agricultural commune at Voskresensk). There were communities in Kaluga (‘Cheerful Life’), Poltava (‘Brotherly Life’), the Crimea (‘The Shore’), Alma-Ata, Tsaritsyn – later Stalingrad – (‘World Brotherhood’), Samara, Smolensk, Vladimir, Ivanov, Bryansk, Saratov, Kharkov, Tula (‘Unity’), Bashkiria, Orel (The ‘Renaissance’ commune), Klin, Gelendzhik on the Black Sea, and in Ukraine (‘Kingdom of Light’).132

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At the New Jerusalem commune, founded in 1923 about 30 miles north-west of Moscow, the members made hay, kept cows, horses and bees and managed an orchard and a vegetable garden. The commune also hosted a children’s home in the summer, organized by the Moscow Vegetarian Society. Yelena Shershenyova estimates that by the late 1920s there were at least 30– 35 members, and in her account of commune life she names as many as 47 adults (and many children) who lived there at one time or another. Each sought to put their principles into practice in a variety of ways. Vanya Zuyev tempered his body by sleeping in winter on the balcony, eating raw vegetables and seeds, and using absolutely no cooked food. He thought that was more healthful and convenient. Seryozha Alekseyev did not cut his hair; and once he suddenly decided to go around completely without clothes, believing the natural state would strengthen chastity and cultivate a healthy view of sexual difference. A few of us – Kostya Blagoveshchensky, Seryozha Alekseyev and Vanya Zuyev, Petya Shershenyov, Zhenya Antonovich, and for a while I, too – did not use milk, wishing to have no part in cattle raising, and consequently in the killing of young bulls and old cows that were good for nothing but their meat. Except for me, all the others just mentioned would not wear leather boots for the same reason, that is, because they wanted to be consistent vegetarians all the way. Nobody made fun of anybody else; we respected each other’s views.133 This kind of divergence in views and practices would be characteristic of Tolstoyan enterprises in Western Europe too. The equitable distribution of work was not managed without complications – as the commune expanded its numbers, some members demanded time to pursue their particular talents or responsibilities, whether painting or motherhood; others resented the lack of contributive agricultural labour undertaken by the mothers or the painters. They strove, nevertheless, to observe the principle ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’.134 For entertainment they

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danced, improvised comedy sketches and performed Tolstoy’s plays; for enlightenment they read from Tolstoy’s Circle of Reading and For Every Day and they held discussions on life and morality long into the evening.135 At Shestakovka, six or eight miles outside Moscow, the Life and Labour commune occupied 135 acres of fields, meadows, orchard and woodland. The commune was established in the winter of 1921– 22, in the midst of famine and the aftermath of the civil war, and the colonists struggled hard to get their first harvest. All meals at the Life and Labour commune were free, communal and vegetarian. Accommodation, light and heat were provided for all members and a 25 ruble a month allowance was given to every colonist for clothes and shoes. As in the New Jerusalem commune, and indeed as in the Tolstoyan communal experiments we will encounter in later chapters, there were arguments about how much work each member should do and about the purpose of communal life – were they there simply for labour or for a life of brotherhood? Like the New Jerusalem commune, Life and Labour embraced members with a variety of sympathetic views, including two ‘extragovermentarians’ who sought fairness and expediency in everything, including language. They insisted that words should be connected in the most rational way – a nose should surely not be a nose, but a smeller. It was unjust that some people were ugly and some beautiful, and therefore everyone should wear masks. Nevertheless, these men were hard-working farmers, anti-militarists and vegetarians, who rejected the state and revered Tolstoy. Mazurin remembered organizing a discussion on Tolstoy and his world outlook for peasants in the nearby village of Troparyovo.136 Members of a commune, in Mazurin’s opinion, should not withdraw from life and isolate themselves; they should place themselves right in the midst of life, and strive for unity with all people.137 The members of these communes were truly a second generation of Tolstoyans, but the elders of the Tolstoyan movement circulated around these enterprises too. Chertkov remained in Moscow, but was in close correspondence with the leading colonists. Evgenii Popov was involved with the New Jerusalem commune in the twenties,

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where he taught grammar and arithmetic among other things. He later lived at Shestakovka, and in the thirties he lived at the Life and Labour commune in Siberia.138 In 1924, Vasya Shershenyov took part in a delegation of antimilitarists who were received by Stalin, and who were apparently assured that they were appreciated as honest and hard-working agriculturalists, even if they were no use in military matters.139 As the collectivization drive rolled out, however, it became apparent that this degree of toleration would not be extended much longer. In the late 1920s, the New Jerusalem commune was instructed to accommodate people in the surrounding population, and any additional members who would be sent by the authorities. The commune’s members were opposed to expansion and particularly to the incorporation of people whose convictions were not consistent with their own. Vasya Shershenyov’s argument that disturbing the commune’s ideological and social harmony would affect their labour productivity had little impact – the commune was to be reorganized and renamed ‘Red October’.140 Following a fire in 1929, the commune was liquidated completely. Around 20 members of New Jerusalem were accommodated by the Life and Labour commune at Shestakovka, but not long afterwards similar overtures were made there – the local authorities pressed Mazurin, as chairman of the commune, to lead the effort to organize all the neighbouring villages into a collective farm. He refused, stating that he was interested in voluntary collective labour, not coercion. After some wrangling with the district executive over their attempts to disband the commune and hand its land over to peasants from Troparyovo, the colonists began to seriously consider a suggestion made by Chertkov that they should petition for all followers of Tolstoy to be given land on which they could collectively resettle.141 Chertkov submitted an application to this effect to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and, when permission was granted, Vanya Zuyev, Boris Mazurin and Ioann Dobrotolyubov (of the ‘World Brotherhood’ colony in Stalingrad province) were sent as land scouts to find a suitable settlement. In March 1931, members of the Life and Labour commune – which would form the core of the

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new settlement and give its name to it – moved to their new home near Novokuznetsk in Siberia.142 In the summer of 1931, Mazurin estimates there were a thousand people in this new settlement in total. Tolstoyans from each of the larger groups that joined – the Life and Labour commune, the Stalingrad ‘World Brotherhood’ colonists, and a large group of Ural mountaineers – initially retained their own structures and life, in the interests of harmony and gradually getting to understand one another’s ways.143 Tolstoyans from smaller groups across Russia also made their way to Novokuznetsk, or, like Dmitri Morgachev from Orel and Dmitri Kiselyov from Tula, joined the Life and Labour commune near Moscow first, in order to move with them.144 There was much discussion and argument about farming methods and about what to grow, as techniques used in the different regions of Russia were adapted to the colonists’ new Siberian environment. They experimented with different kinds of grain, established greenhouses and sent away for seeds; within a couple of years they were supplying fruit and vegetables to local markets and to the dining halls of the Kuznetskstroy metallurgical combine, under construction 25 kilometres away. They acquired an oil press, established an apiary and constructed a small water mill.145 As in its precursor communes, a variety of beliefs and practices were represented, including a group of hand-farmers, who would not use animals (or machinery) at all in farming, as Yakov Dragunovsky explained: ‘We don’t eat meat because of our sympathy and love for animals; we consider them our friends. And then at work we cruelly beat our friends with sticks and torment them to death. Handfarming sets us free from that cruelty, that sin.’146 The colonists had some international links – they were sometimes in touch with the Doukhobor communities (now in Canada), with a community of Tolstoyans in Bulgaria and received the bulletins of War Resisters International from England.147 The productive life of the commune was, however, punctuated from the very start by friction with the local authorities and the retrenchment of promises made regarding the conditions on which the Tolstoyans resettled. They faced constant battles against

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excessively high quotas for the delivery of crops to the local authorities; the unauthorized removal of hard-won crops, to which they turned the other cheek despite internal struggles; the calling for military service of members of the commune; the repeated arrest on spurious grounds of members of the commune; and the trial of their schoolteachers for teaching religious subjects. In 1936, the arrest and trial of leading members of the commune for counter-revolutionary activity began. Between 1936 and 1940, Dmitri Morgachev records that 65 commune members were arrested and sentenced. Many were deported to labour camps and lost their lives there. Between 1941 and 1945, a further 40 men from the Life and Labour commune and from other Tolstoyan groups were arrested and sentenced for refusing to fight in the Great Patriotic War.148 Yakov Dragunovsky was shot in a labour camp for his incessant lectures about the uselessness of violence.149 The commune, left without many of its members, was turned into an agricultural cooperative. Tolstoyans who survived the war and Stalin’s regime remained in touch with one another, but could scarcely be regarded as part of a movement. In 1976, Dmitri Morgachev petitioned the Procurator of the USSR for rehabilitation. The Supreme Court confirmed his rehabilitation, along with that of Boris Mazurin and Dmitri Pashchenko, in 1977.150 Of the Tolstoyan movement in Russia, Mazurin wrote: It is a young movement and has no ancient traditions. Into it came a former “lord and master” who began to understand the shame and immorality of his position and turned his back on his former life; and a downtrodden muzhik, oppressed by the church, enslaved by the government, then suddenly becoming aware of his own human dignity and thankfully turning his eyes and his heart towards Tolstoy, who had opened them to the truth; and a student approaching graduation, which would have assured him of respected employment, but who abruptly abandoned it all and took up the most important and essential work, agriculture; and a soldier, louse-ridden and perishing in the trenches of the First World War for the sake of powerful

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rulers and emperors, who suddenly recognized in himself a man who was born not for unquestioning military slavery but for his own and the general welfare; and who thrust his bayonet once and for all into the ground and returned to a peaceful, laboring, human existence; and a worker in an armaments factory; and a Socialist Revolutionary; and an anarchist who had made bombs; and the commander of an armored train; and a Red partisan; and an investigator in the Cheka . . . all of whom gave up their political activity under the influence of Tolstoy’s ideas and took up the plow; and religious sectarians of various sorts who had come to understand the free and reasonable spirit of Tolstoyan teachings and given up their enslavement to primitive Biblical literalism; and a teacher in a state-run school who recoiled from the ruinous mass remolding and warping of children’s souls by the state and joyfully accepted Tolstoy’s ideas about a free and moral childhood education . . . Their common aspirations brought them together and preserved their unity.151 Did those who gathered together in the commune do justice to the name of Leo Tolstoy, with whose noble ideas we united our lives? Did we achieve in our lives the heights and fullness of the teaching we had accepted? No! Of course not. The evils of past centuries still weighed too heavy in our consciousness; we had too many human weaknesses. And a second question. Did we strive to achieve it? Yes we did! Our aspirations were ardent, powerful, sincere, honest, and bold to the point of risking our lives.152 The following chapters will explore the reception and impact of Tolstoy’s moral philosophy amongst a similarly diverse range of individuals in Britain, Europe and America, and the efforts these people made to put his ideas into practice in their own lives, however far short they might fall of their aspirations and of the ideal.

CHAPTER 2 TRANSLATIONS AND CONVERSIONS

‘Some books are to us not so much books as they are vital experiences.’ When Jane Addams described the impact upon her of Tolstoy’s What Then Must We Do?, some 40 years after first reading the book, she attributed it not only to the book itself, but also to the ‘sum of influences and of social trends under which it is read’.1 As the co-founder of Chicago’s Hull House settlement and an activist in the peace and social reform movements, Addams was at the centre of the reformist ‘influences and trends’ of America in the 1880s and 1890s. What Then Must We Do? had a particular resonance for her because it spoke to her interest in eliminating poverty and social inequality. What Then Must We Do? was not the only text of Tolstoy’s which drove Tolstoyan ‘conversions’. Tolstoy’s treatise on non-resistance, The Kingdom of God is Within You, was a defining moment in the lives of many continental draft resisters and conscientious objectors. There are accounts of Tolstoyan enlightenment based on The Spirit of Christ’s Teaching, On Life, and even What is Art? As Addams points out, there were many readers who: without defying well-established custom . . . lived through miserable days and sleepless nights tormented by the simple

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question of “what to do?”. Most of these, whether they finally worked through the problem to their own satisfaction or whether they gave it up and lived on as best they could without having solved it, found their lives in greater or lesser degree modified.2 For a number of conscience-stricken readers, however, nothing but a break with their existing way of life would suffice. These individuals formed the activist core of the Tolstoyan movement – whether in Croydon or Derby, The Hague or Budapest, running publishing houses or newspapers, cooperative projects or colonies. This chapter explores the process by which Tolstoy’s moral and philosophical works were translated and introduced to western audiences, and the impact of these works on a readership who found themselves gripped by the questions Tolstoy raised and the conclusions he reached. It brings together accounts by devotees of Tolstoy about their experience of ‘enlightenment’ or ‘conversion’, and it asks what precisely led individuals to give up their careers and devote themselves to living a Tolstoyan lifestyle or promoting Tolstoy’s beliefs – and what led others to toy with and reject this idea.

The International Dissemination of Tolstoy’s Later Works The international dissemination of Tolstoy’s later works followed complex and not always predictable patterns – driven as it was by a combination of literary and religious interest and by ideological and commercial objectives. In Western Europe, the introduction of Tolstoy’s moral philosophy was caught up in a wider late-nineteenthcentury enthusiasm for Russian literature. Literary critics impatient for the arrival of Tolstoy’s next great novel could not ignore the work he was currently engaged upon. Translators and publishers responded keenly to the boom in Russian literature, capitalizing both on the increased demand and the availability of texts for translation. As the turn of the century approached, the task of translating and producing these works was steadily appropriated by individuals and enterprises committed to Tolstoy’s ideals. But initially at least they were introduced to a western readership either as a by-product of interest

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in Tolstoy’s novels, or as a result of attempts to consider Tolstoy’s oeuvre as a whole. In the mid-1880s, the French literary world (still the model for literary circles in the rest of Europe) experienced what F. W. J. Hemmings has described as a ‘peaceful Russian invasion’. Critical disillusionment with native realist novelists like Zola, Stendhal and Flaubert, who were regarded as impassive, pitiless and graphic, generated a new admiration for the perceived simplicity and charm of their Russian realist counterparts.3 The diplomatic rapprochement between France and Russia in the decades preceding the alliance of 1894 assisted this process. Concerted attempts were made in the 1870s and 1880s to counteract traditional French Russophobia by improving knowledge of Russian culture: the Russian language was taught, plays with Russian themes were performed and Russian histories were published.4 Both these literary and political imperatives were captured in Eugene Melchoir de Vogu¨e´’s Le Roman Russe, which was serialized in the Revue des Deux Mondes from 1883 onwards and published in book form in 1886. De Vogu¨e´ (who had been secretary to the French Embassy in St Petersburg, and knew and corresponded with some of Russia’s leading writers) aimed to bring France and Russia closer to one another through cultural exchange and mutual understanding.5 His book provided an introduction to Russian literature for those readers, ‘daily increasing in number’, who were now interested in the subject. De Vogu¨e´ dealt with Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and his chapter on the latter described the author as ‘one of the greatest of the masters who bear witness to this century’.6 De Vogu¨e´’s advocacy had a clear impact on the take-up of Tolstoy’s works by a literary readership in France. Although a ‘perfectly satisfactory’ translation of War and Peace by Irene Paskevitch was available in Paris as early as 1879, few copies were sold. Turgenev, who lived in Paris and actively promoted the work of Russian authors abroad, sent this translation to Flaubert, Zola and others, but complained that it was not much discussed.7 When Hachette published a new edition of War and Peace a few months after the appearance of de Vogu¨e´’s Tolstoy article, sales rocketed into the tens of thousands.8

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This enthusiasm for Tolstoy’s literature (and for the Russian novel in general) extended beyond France. War and Peace was introduced to Italian readers by an article in La rassegna nazionale in 1886, and Anna Karenina was published in translation (from the French) the same year. War and Peace first appeared in Italian translation in 1891, with an introduction by De Vogu¨e´.9 In Germany, there were two literary schools – one based in Munich, which remained loyal to the French realists, and one in Berlin, which embraced the new enthusiasm for all things Russian, but particularly Tolstoy.10 In Britain, where George Sampson commented ‘there is a certain type of Englishman who never knows anything till it is told him in a foreign language’,11 Matthew Arnold introduced Tolstoy to the literary world in 1887 with an essay in the Fortnightly Review, which he based on his reading of Tolstoy’s works in French translation. He described the author as ‘one of the most marking, interesting, and sympathy-inspiring men of our time’, and contrasted the ‘pitiless truth’ of contemporary French literature (taking Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as an example) with the idealism and charm of the Russian novel.12 In the United States, William Dean Howells, who was broadly contemptuous of French realists but developed ‘an allegiance that verges on extravagance to the Russian’,13 gave an account of Tolstoy’s works in Harper’s Weekly in April 1887. By 1888, the Westminster Review reported that Tolstoy was being read in England ‘by all who read French, and in cultivated America . . . by all who read anything; for the States have been quicker than we to focus this Eastern light, and rival translations of his works are competing for sale in Boston as they compete in Paris’.14 De Vogu¨e´ and Arnold focused their attention principally on War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Arnold regarded the latter as the novel most likely to appeal to the average English reader. They based their discussion of his current work on the three tracts that they had access to, as they had ‘within the last two or three years been published in Paris’: My Confession, What I Believe (My Religion), and What Then Must We Do?. Neither critic had much time for Tolstoy as a philosopher. De Vogu¨e´ summarized the message of What Then Must We Do? as follows: ‘. . . leave the city, disband the factories, return to

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the countryside and work with one’s hands. Everyone ideally to be able to meet their own needs’.15 Arnold doubted that Tolstoy’s desire to be a manual labourer would be welcomed by many carpenters, gardeners or smiths in England, and thought that the ‘provisional solution’ reached by Tolstoy’s character Konstantin Levin in Anna Karenina was perhaps nearer to the rule of God than ‘the more trenchant solution that Count Tolstoy has adopted for himself since’. Tolstoy would do best, he thought, to return to writing the literature he had abandoned.16 Likewise, De Vogu¨e´ lamented that ‘I know he would prefer me to praise his gospel and disparage his novels, but I cannot. A passionate reader of the latter, I dislike his doctrines all the more because they deprive me of his masterpieces’.17 Howells, also reading these French editions, was a different case. He was captivated by Tolstoy’s philosophy as well as his literature, and sought to pass on this enthusiasm to his readers.18 In their discussion of these tracts, literary critics performed two functions. They introduced Tolstoy as a polymath, a philosopher as well as a novelist; and they gave an early account to a western readership of Tolstoy’s moral and religious works. Jane Holah, later a committed Tolstoyan, was prompted by Matthew Arnold’s account to read every Tolstoy text she could get hold of.19 This new-found interest in Russian literature was a boon for Russian e´migre´ translators and native specialists in Russian literature alike. Translators like Isabel Hapgood and Constance Garnett worked on Gogol and Turgenev, as well as on Tolstoy. In Paris, the 1880s were a ‘golden age’ for Russian e´migre´ translators – Elie Halperine-Kaminsky, Euge`ne Se´me´nov and J. W. Bienstock, all born within the Russian Empire, made their names in this way. Vladimir Boutchik tells us that ‘three or four translations were underway at the same time. We divided the pages between the students, who translated them, and presented them piece by piece to the editor, who sent them to the printer without waiting for the rest.’20 There had been some early publications of Tolstoy before the 1880s, often in volumes of foreign literature: Scenes de la vie aristocratique en Angleterre et en Russie (1866), for example, which besides Tolstoy included contributions from Kingsley and Shakespeare;

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or Novellenschatz des Auslandes (1875), which included Claire von Glu¨ber’s translation of Family Happiness (Eheglu¨ck).21 In the 1880s and 1890s, just as literary critics introduced Tolstoy’s works as a package, his philosophical tracts appeared alongside his literary works in publishers’ catalogues. T. Y. Crowell of New York produced a slew of Tolstoy editions, including Anna Karenina and Childhood, Boyhood, Youth in 1886; My Confession and What to Do? in 1887; and extracts from War and Peace and On Life in 1888. In Britain, the most prominent publisher of Tolstoy’s works in the late 1880s and early 1890s was Walter Scott. In 1899 alone Scott put out editions of Anna Karenina; War and Peace; Childhood, Boyhood, Youth; If You Neglect The Fire, You Don’t Put It Out; The Two Pilgrims; On Life; What I Believe; What Men Live By; and What to Do? [What Then Must We Do? ] – a real mixture of Tolstoy’s novels, stories and philosophical tracts.22 Both Walter Scott and Crowell were interested in publishing European ‘classics’ that would sell to a broad market. They benefitted from the relatively low cost of Russian translations, as Russia did not subscribe to the 1887 Berne convention on copyright. This rush of Tolstoy editions underscores William Edgerton’s point that ‘the simultaneous introduction to Western European and American audiences of both Tolstoj the artist and Tolstoj the prophet had the effect of telescoping more than 30 years of literary development’.23 German and English language translations of What I Believe preceded the translation in the same languages of Anna Karenina: What I Believe was published in German in 1884 and Anna Karenina in 1885; What I Believe was published in English (in New York) in 1885 and Anna Karenina in 1886. They came out in the same year, 1885, in France. It also led, by the 1890s, to the publication of his later works with very little gap between Russia and abroad. Indeed in many cases, as a result of censorship, his tracts were published earlier or more fully abroad. The Kingdom of God is Within You, for example, was published in 1894 in a Russian edition in Berlin, a German language edition – as Das Reich Gottes ist in euch – in Stuttgart, in two English versions by William Heinemann (translation by Constance Garnett) and Walter Scott (translation by

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A. Delano) and in Italian – as Il regno di Dio e` in voi – by Bocca (translation by S. Behr). By the late 1890s and early 1900s, the translation and dissemination of Tolstoy’s philosophical works had been adopted by individuals and organizations sympathetic to the Tolstoyan cause. Arvid Ja¨rnefelt, Finland’s leading Tolstoyan, translated a range of important Tolstoy texts into Finnish.24 In Switzerland, Pavel Biriukov helped French translators of Tolstoy and also answered all kinds of translation queries for the Free Age Press.25 Slovak Tolstoyan Albert Sˇkarvan produced a number of translations into German.26 Tolstoyans seized on anything Tolstoy wrote for their newspaper and pamphlet publications, and helped to get his work published via established publishing houses. Alternatively they published them themselves through their own enterprises – the Brotherhood Publishing Company, the Free Age Press, C. W. Daniel’s publishing house in England and the Vrede publishing house in The Hague, for example. These enterprises are discussed in more depth in the following chapters. Internationally, the trajectory of literary and Tolstoyan influences identified here was sometimes replicated, but sometimes turned on its head. In Japan, for example, translations of Tolstoy also began in the 1880s, with extracts from War and Peace, a full-length translation of The Cossacks and the serialization of Childhood in a women’s magazine. Matthew Arnold’s writings on Tolstoy reached Japan and had some influence in literary circles. Accounts of Tolstoy’s religious outlook were published in the 1890s, including a long exposition by Marayama Michikazu in the magazine Shinri (Truth). Free Age Press editions of Tolstoy also reached Japan via the Maruzen bookstore in Yokohama – a vendor that specialized in importing western books. It stocked Free Age Press pamphlets in 1901 and sold them in their thousands.27 In China, however, the first book by Tolstoy to be translated was Resurrection, in 1914.28 In India, Mohandas Gandhi summarized Tolstoy’s teachings in an article for Indian Opinion in 1905, and undertook translations of some of Tolstoy’s stories. Translation of Tolstoy’s works in India began slowly in the 1900s and 1910s. The peak in the 1950s coincided with

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the early period of Indian independence. Although they were not the most translated over the course of the twentieth century, Tolstoy’s moral and philosophical works led the way amongst the early translations. The Slavery of Our Times was translated into Hindi and Bengali, A Confession into Urdu and Resurrection into Punjabi, several decades before the translation of Anna Karenina or War and Peace into any of those languages.29 These examples demonstrate the reach and influence of European literary and Tolstoyan individuals and enterprises, but also the importance of domestic sympathizers and advocates, whether literary or political.

Translating Tolstoy Tolstoy’s readership outside Russia had almost always to read his works in translation. This makes the extraordinary impact of his religious writings on many of his readers even more striking. The translation process for these texts was by no means a smooth one. Even in the 1880s and 1890s, translations were frequently from texts in an intermediary language (often the French). W. S. Gottsberger’s 1886 edition of War and Peace, for example, carried the title ‘War and peace: a historical novel; tr. into French by a Russian lady, and from the French by Clara Bell; revised and corrected in the United States’.30 In other cases translators worked collaboratively, with a Russian translator preparing a loose translation and a native speaker of the target language converting this into readable prose. John Kenworthy and Sid Rapoport prepared several translations by this method. These strategies, along with simple misunderstandings of vocabulary, grammar or turns of phrase, progressively degraded many translations. Details were altered. Aylmer Maude cites an example from Nathan Dole’s translation of War and Peace in which Dole has a soldier punching his superior officer between the eyes, rather than staring him directly in the face: ‘instead of the young officer being court-martialed and shot, nothing happens, because it was all invented by Mr. Dole and does not occur in the original at all’.31 In other instances, the message was obscured. Ernest Crosby

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read the French translation of On Life because he found the English translation to be so poor – he complained that ‘in many places it does not make sense. It would be impossible for anyone to understand the argument from the English version’.32 Likewise, Aylmer Maude considered that this version ‘made such rubbish of it as ought never to have been attributed to any sane man’.33 Translations were designed to make texts comprehensible to a new readership and a new culture, and before the turn of the twentieth century those translations that read most fluently were generally regarded as the best.34 For disciples of Tolstoy, the accurate transmission of the message was more important. It mattered not only that the translator be competent, but that they be in sympathy with Tolstoy’s ideas and capable of conveying them accurately. This meant endeavouring not to stray too far from the author’s original words, for fear of altering the author’s voice. Vladimir Chertkov’s advice to his manager at Tuckton House was that ‘translation should be as literal as possible, preserving the style, the repetitions, and all the peculiarities of Tolstoy’s composition, as long as the English version be quite correct as to grammar, and of course, the sense be quite clear’. He also suggested a hierarchy of competent and sympathetic individuals who might translate or approve the translation.35 Approval of the translation by Tolstoy or proximity of relationship to Tolstoy were both used as markers of the definitive nature of a translation. Free Age Press pamphlets proudly displayed a statement by Tolstoy praising the company’s publications from 1901 onwards.36 At the other end of the spectrum, some considered their own understanding and mediation of the message more important than the literal translation – they could clarify the message by their understanding and their interpretation in their native tongue. Bolton Hall, who came to Tolstoy through his enthusiasm for Henry George’s Single Tax theory, published several ‘simplified’ versions of Tolstoy’s works; interpretations in his own words which Aylmer Maude described as ‘free paraphrase’. Hall was directed to On Life by Ernest Crosby, who warned him that ‘as much as he admired it, he had ceased to call general attention to it, because he found that people would not and could not read it; and even the French version wearied

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those who might be expected to enjoy the elegant French for its own sake’. Hall commented that: unlike his novels, all his religious books are, I regret to say, quite unreadable. The style is involved, the matter is lacking in order, filled with tedious repetition and written for those only who want to understand; but when the ideas are combed out of his tangle of words, they prove to be sharp-cut and to fit one another.37 In his own interpretations, Hall tried to ‘put into simple language, which our “man on the street” would find interesting, the life philosophy of Tolstoy’.38 His Life and Love and Peace (1909) contained the essentials of On Life; Even as You and I (1903) expressed ‘in simple and clear form the doctrines of the world’s great teachers’ – or at least those who were in agreement with Tolstoy; and Hall’s What Tolstoy Taught (1913) was a series of interpretations in his own words. Later he also produced his own version of the bible in the fewest words possible. Aylmer Maude, who frowned upon translators of Tolstoy’s literature taking liberties with the text, praised Hall’s understanding of Tolstoy’s texts; they also met with Tolstoy’s own approval.39

Tolstoy’s Literary and Moral Impact Despite these difficulties in translation, responses to reading both Tolstoy’s literary and moral works were profound. The ‘telescoping’ of Tolstoy’s career identified by Edgerton, and the reception all at once of Tolstoy’s oeuvre, almost certainly magnified this impact. Some readers and writers exhibited genuine distaste for Tolstoy’s philosophy. Ernest Hemingway, for example, admitted being profoundly influenced by War and Peace, but he did not care for what he described as Tolstoy’s ‘ponderous and Messianic thinking’.40 Other readers were absorbed by the range of his work and by the idea of Tolstoy as a polymath and a prophet. Romain Rolland, who would go on to become a famous pacifist author in his own right, recalled the influence of Tolstoy on his social circle as follows: ‘My fellow students and I were all very different from one another’, he wrote.

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In our little group . . . there frequently arose discussions, there were many disagreements; but for several months the love of Tolstoy united us practically all. Each one undoubtedly loved him for different reasons: because each rediscovered themselves; and for all, it was a door that opened on to the immense universe, a revelation of life.41 This combined literary and moral impact should not detract, however, from the genuine contemporary appeal of Tolstoy’s philosophical works. Individuals as diverse as Alfred Tennyson, Robert Louis Stevenson and Vincent van Gogh were momentarily captured by Tolstoy’s worldview.42 William D. Howells read everything of Tolstoy’s that he could get his hands on. ‘As I read his different ethical books, What to Do, My Confession and My Religion’, he recalled, ‘I recognized their truth with a rapture such as I have known in no other reading, and I rendered them allegiance, heart and soul, with whatever sickness of the one and despair of the other’.43 Howells came from a non-conformist background, and he also counted William Morris, Edward Bellamy and socialist writer Laurence Gronlund as influences on his writing, but Tolstoy ‘reactivated’ his religious radicalism and ‘revitalized his moral courage’.44 Likewise, Gandhi was heavily influenced by Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You. A member of the London Vegetarian Society and acquainted with many theosophists, while he was studying in London in the 1880s, Gandhi moved in circles that would be precursor contexts for the Tolstoyans, but it was not until he was in Pretoria in the 1890s that he devoted himself to reading Tolstoy’s works.45 ‘Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You overwhelmed me’, he recalled. ‘It left an abiding impression on me. Before the independent thinking, profound morality, and the truthfulness of this book, all the books given me by [his Quaker friend] Mr. Coates seemed to pale into insignificance.’ He went on to make ‘an intensive study’ of Tolstoy’s books: The Gospels in Brief, What to Do? and others, which made a ‘deep impression on me. I began to realize more and more the infinite possibilities of universal love’.46 Gandhi’s understanding of passive resistance – and his implementation of

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it – represented a development of, rather than an adherence to, Tolstoy’s philosophy of non-resistance to evil by violence. His relationship with ‘Tolstoy Farm’ in South Africa and his own development of Tolstoy’s philosophy are discussed in Chapters Four and Six. Jane Addams, whose response to Tolstoy introduced this chapter, is another good example of someone who was profoundly affected by Tolstoy, but did not wholeheartedly accept his ideas or change the course of their lives as a result. Her first introduction to Tolstoy was through My Religion, which she read in the mid-1880s,47 but her most profound response was to What Then Must We Do?. Her experiences visiting the Chicago poor in the winter of 1893 chimed closely with Tolstoy’s description of his ‘futile attempts to relieve the unspeakable distress and want in the Moscow winter of 1881’ and she was struck by the truth of his conviction that ‘only he who literally shares his own shelter and food with the needy can claim to have served them’. ‘I was constantly shadowed by a certain sense of shame that I should be comfortable in the midst of such distress’, she recalled. Over the following two years, she began to feel that the efforts of the Hull House settlement were ‘a mere pretense and travesty of the simple impulse “to live with the poor,” so long as the residents did not share the common lot of hard labor and scant fare’.48 When Addams visited Europe in 1896, she made the pilgrimage to Yasnaya Polyana. She kept in touch with members of the Tolstoyan movement and kept a picture of Tolstoy in her bedroom at Hull House. Although her reform interests were too wide, her conception of life was too practical and democratic to make her a Tolstoyan, she exemplifies the impact that Tolstoy’s works were capable of having on those who read them.

Tolstoyan Conversion Narratives But what of those conscience-stricken individuals that Addams mentioned, whose reading of Tolstoy transformed their lives completely? One thing that most devotees of Tolstoy had in common

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was that they experienced a moment of ‘conversion’, in the sense that they gave up one ‘perspective or ordered view of the world’ for another, or experienced ‘a profound, self-conscious, existential change from one set of beliefs, habits, and orientation, to a new structure of belief and action’.49 Narrative accounts of these experiences occupied an important place within the movement. They were published in Tolstoyan newspapers and debated in the wider socialist press. Fledgling Tolstoyans came from a variety of backgrounds, religions and professions. There were lawyers like Ernest Howard Crosby in the United States or Arvid Ja¨rnefelt in Finland, who found they could no longer sit in judgement on others; government employees like Felix Ortt in the Netherlands or Jeno¨ Henrik Schmitt in Hungary, who found serving any government incompatible with their Tolstoyan beliefs; bank clerks like Hubert Hammond in England, whose conscience did not permit them to work with money and debts; and activists already involved in socialist or reform movements, like Percy Redfern or John Kenworthy, who were looking for something broader, deeper or more unified than the numerous causes with which they were already involved. The following discussion brings together a collection of conversion stories and highlights some of their key characteristics.

Two Lawyers: Ernest Howard Crosby and Arvid Ja¨rnefelt One of the best accounts we have of the ‘conversion’ of a core Tolstoyan is that of Ernest Howard Crosby, who read On Life in the spring of 1891. Crosby was a lawyer, the son of a presbyterian pastor, and at that time living in Ramleh, Egypt, where he held a position as a judge in the International Court.50 The edition he read was the French translation by Sofia Tolstoy, published in Paris in 1889; he bought it in a bookshop in Alexandria. When he sat down to read the book, Crosby was in a vulnerable state – he had received a telegram ten days before informing him of his sister’s sudden and unexpected death. Although brought up in a Christian family, Crosby felt he had no real religion ‘to comfort me for my miserable mortal condition’.51 He read the book in one sitting and said ‘as I read a new world dawned on me’.

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Without suggesting any dogma, without mentioning even the name of God, the author simply taught that it was man’s higher nature to love, that if he would only let himself love and renounce his selfish aims, he would enter a wider sphere, that he would find his immortal soul and in very fact he [would be] born again. I leaned back in my study chair, I tried to love, and – could I believe my own sensations? I did actually feel that I had risen to a loftier plane and that there was something immortal within me. I went out into the garden – perhaps it was the next day – and finding nothing better to do, in my desire to give some proof of my new love, I gave a half-piastre to the little son of our Sudanese washerwoman. It seemed to me that no act of mine had ever given me so much pleasure, and for weeks after the novelty of the sensation of loving was a continual delight. As I sat on the bench in court, I felt a strong desire to hug the lawyers in their gowns and their clients behind them. In bed at night I would imagine myself going into Arab huts and giving my very self away to the poor occupants and the idea seemed to lift me up to the seventh heaven.52 From that Easter Sunday onwards, Crosby remarked that his view of life was entirely changed. ‘My political ambitions fell away, my money began to burn my fingers, and finally all that had appeared to be most worth while in life became detestable.’ Crosby could think of several prior instances where he had doubted his career or doubted his right to the profit from the increase in value of property, and one instance in which he had found himself in conversation with a socialist whose arguments he was unable to refute. Nevertheless, he recalled that he had ‘hushed up’ these incidents and deferred to the judgment of his elders and betters. He characterized himself as fundamentally ‘ultra-conservative’, and an aristocrat.53 Here he (consciously or unconsciously) mimicked Tolstoy’s Confession, overstating the case for dramatic effect. Although the Crosbys were a conservative ‘society’ family, they took an un-dogmatic approach to religion. Crosby’s father had a strong social conscience, evident in a sermon he delivered in the

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1880s on ‘the dangerous classes’, in which he argued that the greatest danger to American society was from the privileged classes failing to realize their responsibilities.54 During his time in the state legislature, Ernest Crosby was regarded by his colleagues as ‘to a large extent our conscience’. His ‘fiery indignation at base methods and motives’ were a ‘moral tonic’.55 Crosby’s first step was to write to Tolstoy to explain the extraordinary impact of his book: Altho’ brought up in Christian surroundings, I never saw and felt the real secret of Christ’s teaching and the real grounds of our faith and hope. All that you say finds an echo in my own heart, and it is all beautifully simple and self-evident. How far I may have the strength to “renoncer a` mon bon individual” in my own life, as I see is my clear duty, I do not know, but I am sure that I can never be as skeptical, as hopeless, and as useless again, as I was before I read the book.56 And in a later letter, he wrote: The reading of your book ‘De la Vie’ was a turning point in my life. Your idea that love for man gives an immediate sense of immortality seemed to me to unlock the secret of life. But in feeling that sensation I felt that there was something distinctly sexual in it, and yet indescribably pure.57 Crosby was unable to reconcile his professional position with his adherence to Tolstoy’s teachings. In an exploration of his views on the law, punishment and his position as a judge, he later wrote: I judge you? Who made me to be a judge over you? What do I know about you? What do I know about myself? I sometimes think that I condemn myself on inadequate evidence.

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Is not the fact of being born a man or a woman an all-sufficient extenuating circumstance? Do not think that I am judging you; I am judging myself. I know you only as a reflection of myself. All your worst faults are flourishing in my soul, and it is only there that I can know them and grapple with them. I am merely using you as a lay-figure to represent myself. I cannot effectively invade your country. I can only invite you to inaugurate a campaign there on your own account.58 Crosby resigned his post in Alexandria, and when offered a post as a professor in the Law Department at the City University of New York (an offer at least in part solicited by his father), he turned this down too.59 Instead, he travelled to Moscow in 1894, to visit Tolstoy. His conversion to the ascetic Tolstoyan lifestyle was hardly complete on this trip. His letters home to his wife were full of the restaurants he had eaten in and the food (including meat) and wine he had consumed. His meeting with Tolstoy, however, confirmed his commitment to a break with his old way of life. Tolstoy put Crosby’s struggle into a local context, impressing upon him his respect for the work of American non-resister and anti-slavery campaigner William Lloyd Garrison, and for political economist Henry George’s plan for a single tax on land. He also gave it an international context, introducing Crosby to the writings of Lao-Tzu on one hand, and on the other to the work of John Kenworthy, another emerging leader in the Tolstoyan movement who Crosby would visit in London on his way back to Connecticut.60 Arvid Ja¨rnefelt was, like Crosby, an aspiring young lawyer when he was first properly introduced to Tolstoy’s works. In the 1880s, Ja¨rnefelt’s father was the governor of the province of Kuopio and his mother, a convinced Tolstoyan herself, introduced Tolstoy’s literary and philosophical works to her social circle in that region.61 Ja¨rnefelt recalled that his mother’s table was always covered in Tolstoy’s books, particularly his later works. She repeatedly tried to get her children to read them and when they were reluctant she talked about the books

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Figure 2.1 Ernest Howard Crosby in Alexandria. [Photograph courtesy of Special Collections, Michigan State University Libraries]

and explained the ideas in them, so that quite early in their lives her children had an awareness of the contents of Tolstoy’s books.62 When he was a young man, his mother introduced her belief in non-resistance to violence into discussions at every opportunity, and

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as a self-confident and aspiring lawyer Ja¨rnefelt recalled that he took pleasure in setting out arguments that proved this theory unworkable in practice. Nevertheless, he experienced nagging doubts. He was proud of the outward image that he presented to the world – his clothes, his speech and his manners. But at times another inner self told him that all his achievements were an outward show, with no deeper meaning. The turning point came in 1891, when he returned one evening from hearing a trial in the city and sat down in his mother’s room. As usual, the books on the table were all Tolstoy’s. There was one thin pamphlet there that he had not seen before, a Swedish translation of Tolstoy’s The Spirit of Christ’s Teaching. He sat down to read it and was particularly struck by a couple of passages, which seemed to him to express the same opinions about the established Church that he and many of his acquaintances shared. Following Tolstoy’s narrative of the misappropriation of Christ’s teachings and his explanation of his own understanding of them, Ja¨rnefelt recalled that he found himself filled with a great spiritual light, which took away all other thoughts – it filled his soul and could not be extinguished. Despite his later career as a novelist, and unlike many other Tolstoyans, Ja¨rnefelt found literary means inadequate to describe this experience and instead gave his reader the passages from Tolstoy’s tract that had created this profound impact for him.63 Like Crosby, Ja¨rnefelt struggled particularly with his own profession. If he embraced Christ’s teachings, the Sermon on the Mount and the instructions ‘judge not that ye be not judged’ and ‘he that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone’, how could he sit in judgment on his fellow men? He now considered himself equally as guilty as those who had committed the crimes he was to judge – he had not sought to provide them with education, given them a share of his plenty or done anything to better their lives. He decided not to take the judicial oath and abandoned his career as a lawyer altogether. In subsequent years, Ja¨rnefelt became first a shoemaker’s apprentice, then a smith and finally a farmer, in attempts to support his family while staying true to his new-found ideals.

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Ja¨rnefelt’s first correspondence with Tolstoy was in 1895, when he sent the author a copy of his confessional text Hera¨a¨miseni, published in Helsinki in 1894. Confident that the book would be censored if any attempt were made to publish the text in Russia, Tolstoy offered to circulate it himself.64 Ja¨rnefelt became an important contact for Tolstoy. In 1906 he asked him to help prevent the Nobel judges awarding him the peace prize and in 1909 asked him if he would deliver his speech at the planned Stockholm peace congress. Ja¨rnefelt’s Hera¨a¨miseni was eventually published in Moscow as Moe probuzhdenie in 1921, at the height of the proliferation of Tolstoyan publications.65 While many Tolstoyans acknowledged the influence of the work of their peers in the movement on their thinking, both Crosby and Ja¨rnefelt inspired conversion experiences through their own writings. In 1905, a correspondent wrote to Crosby from Madras, having read his Plain Talk in Psalm and Parable, to tell him of what he explicitly described as his ‘conversion’: I sat with it till mid-night. It has taken hold of me with that ‘strange power’ which drew you to Tolstoy in Alexandria. Your ‘Plain Talk’ is now my companion. I have read it three times over, will read it as many times again, and will continue to do so till all my writings become saturated with the eternal truth of the ‘Plain Talk’.66 In Finland, Yrjo¨ Sirola accredited his Tolstoyan conversion to his reading of Ja¨rnefelt’s Hera¨a¨miseni – in this case Ja¨rnefelt’s book was particularly important since censorship prevented the most important of Tolstoy’s religious works being published in Finland until 1906.67

Businessmen, Clerks and other Professionals Law was not the only profession that proved incompatible with the Tolstoyan worldview. The accrual of money, the administration of debts and the exploitation of labour were all problematic. Sudbury

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Protheroe was a junior partner in his father’s auctioneers firm when he read Tolstoy’s Work While Ye Have The Light and The Kingdom of God is Within You. These books led him to a study of the New Testament, which became his guide-book, ‘confirming all my beliefs and experiences’. He explained the relationship between his new beliefs and his former career as follows: Jesus commanded us to love all men, to love one another, even as He loved us. This, therefore, must I do . . . I have considered for a long time whether it is possible for me to do this in my business, and I am driven to a firm conclusion that it is utterly impossible. The following are reasons showing why I thus believe: 1. Because I must do nothing that is not perfectly truthful and straightforward; therefore, puffing, bidding oneself or doing any act which I could not tell the purchaser I was doing would be against this principle . . . 2. . . . I must forgive my debtors, therefore if a man owes me money and will not or cannot pay it, I must not summon him. If a clerk is disobedient and lazy I cannot discharge him; that is not forgiveness. If men trespass or steal goods I must forgive them. 3. ‘Do unto others as ye would that they should do unto you.’ I should not like to work till between 10 and 12 o’ clock, night after night all through the autumn, as our men do in the salerooms, with hardly time enough to tend to their bodily needs, much less their spiritual ones . . . 4. I believe the holding of private property to be contrary to the teaching of Jesus. For how can one man keep more than is needful when his brother is in want of the necessaries of life? . . . believing this, how can I support a business which directly sanctions and takes part in the present system of individual ownership? 5. There should be no law but that of God. Man has made a law which is upheld by force (police and army), viz.: the Law of

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Private Property; our business is directly connected with this law. 6. ‘Judge not that ye be not judged’ . . . I cannot at any time take part in any suit at law, because I believe it to be wrong for one man to sit in judgment on another. 7. I am convinced that the evils of the existing system can only be remedied by each one, who has received the light, acting according to the dictates of his conscience. 8. Any existing evil that is in the business I follow might be overcome; but beyond these malpractices there is the abominable system under which the whole affair is conducted, the self-love and self-seeking, regardless of those who are not so successful as ourselves. Although I may not yet be a responsible member of the firm, yet I am, by remaining in the firm, a parasite under the general system against which my whole soul revolts.68 When he heard about the Tolstoyan colony at Purleigh in Essex, Protheroe went straight there, taking only bedding and clothes, ‘to live by digging as a beginning, and thus to find his way into the “newness of life”’.69 Hubert Hammond worked for a London bank. Through reading the works of Tolstoy, especially (like Protheroe) The Kingdom of God is Within You and Work While Ye Have the Light, he ‘came to understand that the teaching of Jesus is a very real and perfect plan of life and in fact the only real life’.70 In his letter of resignation to his employers, he explained the multitude of ways in which his work at the bank was incompatible with this conception of life. The bank was fundamentally an institution which made a few men rich but most poor, and this division was based in no way on the value of their service. Within the institution, competition, self-interest and a disregard for one’s colleagues were encouraged in order to ‘get on’. Working in a bank was unhealthy, like all sedentary occupations. It was useless, as it provided no help to the poor or needy. And it was degrading, ‘for banking is quite as dishonest and detestable as pawnbroking, and those taking part in it and knowing this must lose all self-respect’.71

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Although his friends attempted to persuade him otherwise, Hammond was insistent that it was quite impossible for him to remain in this ‘unmanly’ calling: My immediate duty seems to me to be to start a simple life, and to work with my hands to support myself; for I believe it to be the bounden duty of every man to do some useful work, work which will benefit society at large; and to remain in this present system of commerce would be to me, who have had my eyes fully opened to the misery and wickedness of it, a crime.72 Hammond later said that he ‘never rightly experienced happiness before my intelligence was awakened by the writings of Tolstoy and the study of the teaching of Jesus which these writings led to’. His sincere wish was that others should ‘wake up to the real meaning of life and follow their best perceptions of right in whatever direction these may lead’.73 Arnold Eiloart was a chemistry lecturer. He believed his discipline was the preserve of the elite, and that scientific discoveries were principally used to extend private wealth. ‘When I resigned, the head of my department told me that he would receive hundreds of applications for my post as soon as it was known to be vacant.’ It was only the rich who could get a scientific education; if you admit that there is a scramble for riches, then you must admit there is a scramble for science, and science is used ‘by the vast majority of those who study it as a means of increasing wealth’.74 Aylmer Maude later distanced himself from the Tolstoyan movement, but he was very much a part of it in the 1890s. He was working for a large carpet manufacturer in Moscow when he was introduced to Tolstoy. He found himself faced with opposing positions: the dominant Church and the abandonment of religious belief by the educated classes; the Czar’s claim to a divine right to govern versus the willingness of revolutionaries to sacrifice their own lives in order to destroy the government; and the ideal of ‘getting on’ and succeeding in business versus the teachings of Jesus.

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I looked for a philosophy of life that would enable me to solve my perplexities, and would furnish me with clear guidance. A philosophy of life which would stand all tests that I was able to apply experimentally or otherwise, I could not find until I came upon the religious and economic writings of Tolstoy.75

Activists, Socialists and Anarchists While for some a reading of Tolstoy highlighted the contradiction between their own profession and the Christian life they aspired to, for others it offered a more meaningful or complete solution than the causes with which they were already connected. Nellie Shaw, for example, was a member of the Fabian Society, the Independent Labour Party and the Croydon Socialist Society before her introduction to Tolstoy. But she was looking for ‘something warmer, more vital, more appealing to the idealistic side of our natures than mere economics’.76 Percy Redfern was a low-level activist in the socialist movement in the late 1890s. ‘Steward at slum concerts, Socialist writer, Labour Church worker, debater at the university settlement . . . like others of the time’, he later wrote, ‘I was all of these’.77 His introduction to Tolstoy’s works transformed his outlook on life. ‘Throughout a period of about five years’, he commented, ‘Tolstoy was my university and my church’.78 Redfern came to Tolstoy, rather unusually, through What is Art?. He was discontented with the inequities within the socialist movement. Some middle class socialists were self-sacrificing, accepting unpaid offices and donating time and money to the cause, while others lived for the artist’s joy in life, enjoying plays, pictures and books. How could the service these people offered be equal? What is Art? gave Redfern an answer to this question. Listening to a street piano concert in Salford, put on at no cost for ordinary and in many cases unemployed men and women, he became convinced on the basis of his reading of the book that ‘there is no greater servant of human brotherhood than the art which is both powerful and good’.79 From What is Art?, Redfern moved on to The Christian Teaching, which he read in paperback ‘during the early summer of 1899 [in] the

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bare, wide fields just south of Manchester’, and then to On Life. The first forced him to reconsider the questions of property and ownership, the second the nature of brotherly love and of faith. Redfern had been prepared for some of Tolstoy’s answers to these questions by his experience in the socialist movement. But up until his reading of Tolstoy, he had been a convinced atheist. On the style of Tolstoy’s polemics, he tells us that: If Tolstoy had sermonised I would have been little interested; but he neither preached nor imposed on daily life something from outside, separate and extra, as other Christian teachers had done. He laid hold of the life I knew and interpreted it.80 Redfern found Aylmer Maude’s address on his copy of What is Art?, and through him got in touch with the Tolstoyan colonists at Purleigh in Essex. In 1900, he founded Manchester’s Tolstoy Society. Many Tolstoyans crossed several categories. Jeno¨ Henrik Schmitt, whose activities will be discussed in more depth in Chapter Three, was a civil servant who resigned his position as a result of its incompatibility with his Christian anarchist beliefs. He was also an anarchist with a well-developed philosophy and a significant local following of his own. John Kenworthy, perhaps Tolstoy’s best-known English disciple, was a businessman but was also active in the socialist movement. He was brought up in the Wesleyan church in Liverpool, and ‘grew up with the gospels’. When he chose a commercial career, he ‘felt at once the enormous contrast between the teaching I found in the Gospels and heard at the church, and the practice of the world around me’. I remember for a year or two this thought was always in my mind: How is it that as I come through the town, about nine o’ clock in the morning, I see one man rolling down to his business in his carriage, while, if I had come through at six in the morning, I should have seen another man going to his work with bare feet and a crust in his pocket? I felt it was entirely opposed to all I had learned.81

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Kenworthy was already involved in the socialist movement. The Labour Annual dates his connection to 1882. He read Henry George and Ruskin, and agreed with their conception of the economic system. In 1889– 90, he was in Liverpool, where he was on the committee of the city’s Ruskin Society, a member of the Guild of St George and where he arranged on several occasions for William Morris to speak.82 Tolstoy’s works, he recalled, did not come into his hands until about 1890, when he read My Religion and part of What Then Must We Do?. At Christmas that year, business took him to the United States, and while there he read The Kreutzer Sonata, ‘and was wonderfully impressed with its powerful diagnosis of the baser side of the relation between man and woman. I knew myself to be at one with, and indebted to, the man who had understood the gospels as I also had done.’83 In all his accounts of his relations with Tolstoy, Kenworthy stresses that his exposure to Tolstoy’s works strengthened his existing views, rather than changing his worldview entirely. He was relieved that he was not ‘entirely alone in the views I expressed’,84 and was ‘surprised and glad to find a mind working on my own lines, but in advance’.85 Nevertheless, during his trip to America Kenworthy made the decision that he could no longer continue in the competitive system. He gave up his business, realized what property he had and returned to England. Kenworthy settled in Canning Town where he worked for several years on cooperative projects in association with the Mansfield House University Settlement, and published his book, The Anatomy of Misery, which he believed to be ‘a correct summation of the whole economic position of the present social system in relation to the idealism of the Gospels’.86 He was encouraged by Sid Rapoport, a Russian translator in London, to send a copy of the book to Tolstoy. His first contact with Tolstoy had a remarkable impact upon him. ‘An answer came by return, a first sentence in which was, “I recognize in you a kindred spirit”.’87 Kenworthy later told Ernest Crosby that the day he received this letter was ‘one of the happiest in his life’.88 As their correspondence developed, Kenworthy increasingly directed his activities to promoting an understanding of Tolstoy’s work and philosophy in England.

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Conscientious Objectors As in Russia, conscientious objectors acquired a great significance for the international movement, because they followed their conscience in opposition to their government and faced severe consequences. These were individuals like Edouard Sinet in France, Albert Sˇkarvan and Frantisˇek Sedla´k in Austria-Hungary and Johannes van der Veer in the Netherlands, whose reading of Tolstoy (almost without exception The Kingdom of God is Within You, his principal work on the application of the theory of non-resistance to war) prompted them to refuse military service.89 Sˇkarvan, a young Slovak doctor, read the book during his obligatory 12-month service in the Austro-Hungarian army. As a medical student, he was permitted to serve in two stints. He had already completed six months in the infantry and was within six weeks of completing an equivalent period in the military hospital at Kosˇice in eastern Slovakia. Sˇkarvan’s Czech father and Slovak mother kept a village shop. Sˇkarvan did not have a particularly religious upbringing, his parents apparently being of the opinion that ‘the best religion is to be an honest and good person’.90 Sˇkarvan was first acquainted with Tolstoy’s works while studying in Prague and later in Innsbruck, where he associated with a small group of Tolstoyans, the most prominent of whom was Dusˇan Makovicky´ (who later acted as Tolstoy’s personal physician). He was, therefore, already convinced that military service was unchristian and inhumane, and that to take part in it was a great evil, but he felt he ‘did not possess within myself the strength to stand up against such a hundred-headed dragon as military service was’.91 His reading of The Kingdom of God is Within You – along with Thomas a Kempis’s On the Imitation of Christ – was the tipping point. On 6 February 1895, he wrote to his commanding officer stating that he could no longer perform military service, wear military uniform or carry out hospital duties. He rejected these things, he wrote, ‘because they are contrary to my conscience, my convictions, and my religious feelings. I am a Christian and as such I cannot be a participant in military activity either by word or by deed’.92 Sˇkarvan was sent first to a psychiatric

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ward in the military hospital in Vienna and then kept in a military prison until the summer of 1896. Van der Veer also read The Kingdom of God is Within You in 1895, in its German translation, while serving a term of conscription in the Dutch army. Prior to his conversion to Tolstoyism, Van der Veer had been a ‘Free Socialist’ or anarchist, and certainly not a Christian. He wrote to the commander of the National Guard declaring that ‘he abhorred killing of any kind, either of his fellow men or of animals, but above all he detested murder committed at the word of command, such murder as he should be required to commit if he obeyed the orders of government. On this ground he refused to bear arms.’ The maximum punishment for refusal to serve was ordinarily 14 days imprisonment, but Van der Veer’s explicit opposition to the state meant that this was increased to three months. In the event, he served only four weeks in the military prison at Middelburg and by the summer of 1897 was in The Hague, at the centre of a circle of Tolstoyan activity.93 Sedla´k’s was a different case, in which cause and effect were reversed, his objection to military discipline ultimately leading him to Tolstoyism. He entered active service in Vienna in 1895, but from the beginning struggled with the concept of unquestioning obedience and the suspension of his own rational thought and decision-making. An incident of insubordination (when he entered a lavatory without permission on the way back from a shooting exercise) brought him in front of the ober-lieutenant in November, and he then declared his refusal to serve, laying down his bayonet because he ‘did not wish to carry it any longer’. ‘The only thing which distinguishes a human being from a beast is his reason. However, as a soldier I must deny my will; I must obey blindly, and, therefore, am practically a doll, a thing, an automaton . . .’.94 To the judge who subsequently assessed his case, Sedla´k declared that any oath of allegiance was absurd and superfluous.95 Between November 1895 and March 1896, Sedla´k spent time in military prison, but also in military hospital, where he was questioned about whether he had read any of Tolstoy’s works. He had not, but the doctors’ conviction that he must have been ‘seduced’ by

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Figure 2.2 Johannes van der Veer. [BG A14/463, International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam)]

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Tolstoy’s writings suggests the notoriety of cases of Tolstoyan nonresistance, if not their frequency.96 Although there was no conversion experience per se, the authorities expected one, and were ready to medicalize it or marginalize it as a matter of mental health or sectarian religion. Sedla´k was eventually sentenced to three months’ imprisonment, which he completed in June 1896. He resumed active service, but upon its conclusion he visited Tolstoy, and on his advice went to Britain to join the Tolstoyan movement there. In Bulgaria, there were at least 11 cases of Tolstoyan conscientious objection between 1900 and 1946. One of the most notorious was Georgi Sopov, who – after reading a Bulgarian translation of What Then Must We Do? – sent his uniform by post to his commanding officer, with a letter explaining his refusal to serve. He was sentenced to three years in prison as a result.97 Dimitaˆr Kacarov was another notable example. He abandoned his army career after reading Tolstoy in the early 1900s, only to be called up to serve in the Balkan war of 1912 and in the First World War in 1914. On both occasions he refused to serve. In the first instance, he was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to three years of solitary confinement and later to non-combatant service. In the second instance, he was sentenced to three years of solitary confinement, which was commuted to six months in the guardhouse.98 In Finland, the brothers Akseli and Eelo Isohiisi, well-known for their Christian anarchism, became Tolstoyan martyrs when they were shot by the Red Guards for their refusal to fight in the Finnish Civil War.99 Cases of refusal of military service were not restricted to the continent. Arthur St John, for example, was an officer in the British army (Inniskilling Fusiliers) when he read Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You on the way home from Burma on sick leave. The book had ‘so tremendous an effect’ on him that within a matter of months he had retired from his commission and found himself ‘launched out in the world with no job and no capabilities for any work other than soldiering. I was clear about very little’, he wrote, ‘but among that very little was Tolstoy’s dictum that if you want to work for peace there was no use in preparing for war’.100 Captain Jack White fought in the Boer War and then served in the territorial

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battalion in Aberdeen, until his reading of Tolstoy obliged him to leave the army.101 White worked as a labourer in England and Canada, before briefly joining the Whiteway colony at Stroud.102 Professions associated with the military were also problematic. Cecil John Cadoux worked in the Admiralty’s Victualing Department. There was a history of non-conformity in his family – both his grandfather and uncle had been Congregationalist preachers, and although his father was a merchant he had several times considered giving this up in favour of religious work. Cadoux’s position at the Admiralty always troubled him, because he longed for something more morally rewarding, but this was particularly the case after his reading of Tolstoy’s Resurrection in 1903 and The Kingdom of God is Within You in 1904. Resurrection had first been suggested to Cadoux by his brother, Herbert, who recommended that he read it ‘more or less in private’.103 Cadoux bought a copy the same day he received his brother’s letter and started on it at once. After reading The Kingdom of God is Within You, he wrote to his brother Arthur as follows: . . . modern civilized life is fairly besprinkled with abuses þ the Xtian must beware lest he find himself helping to perpetuate them, þ I reckon that if he do so find himself he ought to be prepared to wrench himself into some fresh position where he can occupy himself at work which is really useful, productive of something necessary þ good for man . . . I want my life to be in accord with the laws of life laid down by Christ. Christ forbade violence, even in self-defence – teaching that earthly injuries are not really injuries at all . . . Therefore war is forbidden by Christ and is wrong. Therefore the maintenance of armaments is wrong. I am spending my labour in maintaining an armament which I hold to be inconsistent with my conscience as a Xtian. Why don’t I chuck

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it up? Because to do so would provoke too much bitterness of feeling (and reasonable bitterness too from one pt of view) in those to whom I am under the greatest obligations for kindness towards me in the past. My question is – is this sufficient reason to warrant a compromise between my conscience and circumstances?104 Cadoux’s resolutions for 1905 included: renouncing a flesh diet, finding work that did not ‘grate upon conscience as the Admiralty does’ and learning and knowing more of Jesus, ‘so as to become a better son of God and a better citizen of his kingdom’. Cadoux did not resign his position at the Admiralty until 1911, but in the intervening years he seriously considered joining the Salvation Army, farming in Canada (to ‘throw up wealth and become a poor worker’) and on one occasion refused on the grounds of conscience to requisition some glassware for the prince and princess of Wales.105 In 1914, he was one of the early members of the Christian, anti-war Fellowship of Reconciliation.106 Stephen Hobhouse, who made his name for his absolutist pacifism during the First World War, was initially brought to this stance by his reading of Tolstoy. In fact, his exposure to Tolstoy’s works affected many spheres of his life. Hobhouse was a 20-year-old student at Oxford when he read his first of Tolstoy’s tracts – How I Came to Believe (My Confession), a sixpenny Free Age Press pamphlet that he bought at Oxford station. He was also a member of the Cyclist Company of the Oxford Rifle Volunteers. He explicitly refers to the experience of reading this pamphlet as an ‘enlightenment’, ‘conversion’ or ‘revolution’. In the confessional tradition, Hobhouse describes himself at that time as content with his life, ‘with a fairly comfortable form of religion; with some pleasant experiences of the world behind me and of comfortable, privileged life among the moneyed and cultured upper or upper middle class into which I had been born; and with anticipation of much more such life to come’. He anticipated a career in law or in the higher grades of the civil service, and imagined he would one day take his father’s place ‘as country squire and

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administrator’. He admitted his concerns about urban poverty and about the ‘inglorious prosecution’ of the Boer War, but maintained that these doubts ‘hardly at all spoiled my confident composure’. ‘Not for a moment’, Hobhouse tells us, when he picked up Tolstoy’s pamphlet ‘. . . did I guess what transforming forces were lying in wait to shake and change my whole outlook and life’.107 Re-reading the book 50 years later, Hobhouse was surprised at how little exposition of Tolstoy’s philosophy (as opposed to criticism of the current human condition) it contained, and wondered whether he might already have had some inkling of the ideas propounded in later works like What I Believe. Nevertheless, he was certain that this text was the ‘immediate instrument of my sudden conversion’. The effects were ‘inwardly catastrophic’. The whole of it was read through with eager interest the evening after it was bought, and its message, with some of the remembered words of Jesus, effected a sudden and dramatic conversion in my thinking, much of which remains permanent and valued to this day, nearly fifty years later. The influence of Tolstoy’s interpretation of the Gospel was felt almost at once in four different directions. Firstly, he abandoned the idea of killing or training to kill his fellow men, of supporting military preparations or the prosecution of war. This led him to resign from the Rifle Volunteers. Secondly, he resolved never to accept the position of a wealthy landlord, and that instead he should ‘try to live on an income and in conditions much nearer to that of the workers’. Thirdly, he gave up attendance at Church of England services, going instead to different nonconformist and Free Church services each Sunday. Finally, he accepted Tolstoy’s instruction that one should strive against sexual desire – something he found unproblematic, because his ‘Tolstoyan conversion’, in both its physical and spiritual effects, ‘killed almost entirely for about seven years . . . my capacity for sexual excitement’.108 Hobhouse was convinced that the acute neurasthenia he was diagnosed with at the end of the year was not simply a result of

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overwork, but also of ‘the violent shock administered to my whole being by the sudden discovery that I was living in an utterly false paradise, as a guilty sharer in the corporate sin of my class’.109 Hobhouse was aware of the presence of Tolstoyans in Britain, but believed them to be principally ‘refugees from Czarist Russia’, and he was ‘somehow not moved to make their acquaintance’. Instead he developed his connections with non-conformists, Congregationalists and particularly the Quakers, whom he joined later in his life.110

The Conversion Experience What can we learn from these conversion narratives about the kinds of people who were sufficiently moved by Tolstoy’s message that they felt it necessary to change their lives entirely? Conversion theorists tell us that the prime phases of life for conversion are adolescence and middle age.111 The individuals whose accounts are assembled here ranged between the ages of 20 years (Cadoux and Hobhouse) and the mid-thirties (Crosby and Maude) at the time of their introduction to Tolstoy. In terms of background, some of them came from nonconformist families (Quaker, Congregationalist or Wesleyan, for example), but by no means all – there were also mainstream Protestants, Catholics and atheists. Many fitted the stereotype of the educated, wealthy intellectual toying with the working life. Arnold Eiloart was a chemistry lecturer; Arthur Baker was a professional mathematician; and Arthur Voysey, who farmed at Fonthill in Sussex, had been an electrical engineer before his conversion to Tolstoyism.112 But besides professional men, army officers and intellectuals, there were ordinary soldiers, bank clerks and shopkeepers. It is common to associate religious conversion with a period of stress; the conversion acting as a solution to a crisis, spiritual or otherwise.113 Tolstoy’s own search for truth, as outlined in his Confession, certainly followed this pattern. His conversion was a process, with several stages, and not simply a moment or event.114 In the accounts presented above, this is strikingly not the case. Some individuals mention elements of personal crisis or vulnerability prior

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to their reading of Tolstoy (Crosby, for example), others make it clear that they were already engaged in some kind of spiritual quest (Kenworthy or Sˇkarvan). Some maintain that they had already reached the same conclusions as Tolstoy and that he simply confirmed them. John Morrison Davidson claimed that he felt more confidence in Tolstoy’s teaching because he had ‘gradually arrived at almost identical conclusions before I had ever made the truly apostolic Count’s literary acquaintance’.115 But also common are accounts in which the individual is sailing along quite happily in his or her life until a reading of Tolstoy reveals a new understanding of life. The emphasis in the majority of cases is firmly on the influence or impact of reading the text – on what Isabella Fyvie Mayo described as the ‘revelation’ that it brought about: ‘when one’s inner consciousness instantly affirms a new truth presented to one’.116 Tolstoyan narratives do not fit neatly into the models for conversion outlined by psychologists and sociologists who work in this field. They were often sudden, there was little or no social pressure to convert (in fact the opposite was often true) and the advocate of the new philosophy was only remotely involved in the process. The closest fits are perhaps to Loflund and Skonovd’s definition of an ‘intellectual’ conversion, in which it is possible for individuals to become acquainted with new ideologies and ways of life in isolation from actual interaction with devotees of the new religion;117 and to Walter Conn’s discussion of ‘moral conversions’, in which a move from purely self-interested concerns to the search for value in one’s life, for moral integrity and the desire to make one’s own moral judgements drive conversion.118 Certainly there are cases where interpersonal connections were important: attendance at meetings, the conviction with which a particular local leader spoke or simply an acquaintance with a convinced Tolstoyan. For example, Ronald Neeves, a resident of Christchurch in Hampshire, came to know Tolstoy’s work through his 60-year friendship with Tolstoyan Ludvig Perno, and claimed this influenced his outlook on life ‘more than any other experience’.119 There were elements of the mystical about the language used in some of the accounts – the individual being filled with an inner light

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(Ja¨rnefelt) or rising to a loftier plane (Crosby). Nevertheless, these were rational, active conversions based on the reading of one or more of Tolstoy’s texts. It seems that virtually any of Tolstoy’s philosophical tracts had the power to produce a ‘conversion experience’. The Kingdom of God is Within You acted as a prompt for individuals involved in the military (Van der Veer, Sˇkarvan and Cadoux) but also for some civilians (Protheroe and Hammond). My Confession, What Then Must We Do? and My Religion all feature as key texts in conversion narratives, but there are also accounts based on On Life, The Spirit of Christ’s Teaching, The Kreutzer Sonata and even What is Art?. A number of the commentaries make clear the importance of Tolstoy’s confessional style, the lack of dogma and preaching and the sense instead that the author was sharing an experience with his reader and inviting their participation. Ja¨rnefelt, for example, identified with the starting point Tolstoy outlined in his journey from scepticism to the discovery of true Christianity, and experienced his own awakening as he read on. Redfern emphasized the accessibility of Tolstoy’s message, and the fact that it offered a new solution to familiar problems. Anton Chekhov had reached similar conclusions about the impact of Tolstoy’s philosophy, which ‘took possession’ of him for six or seven years. It was not Tolstoy’s general ideas or propositions that affected him so profoundly, he concluded, but the author’s ‘manner of expressing it, his reasonableness, and probably a sort of hypnotism’.120 Tolstoy was after all a novelist and adept at moving or persuading his reader. The reader, Gareth Williams tells us, ‘is expected and encouraged by Tolstoy to participate actively in the creative process. Part of Tolstoy’s great strength as an artist is in his skill in activating the reader.’121 If the language was reasonable, however, the solutions Tolstoy offered were uncompromising. One unifying element of the Tolstoyan ‘conversion’ experience is that Tolstoy’s polemics seem to have answered the contradiction that readers like Kenworthy, Redfern, Sˇkarvan and Van der Veer felt in their lives. He did not allow for any compromise between their ideals and their actions – he resolved all doubts. Although Tolstoy explicitly asked his reader to

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believe in God and to follow his interpretation of the teaching of Jesus Christ, he also offered a model for a new and just social order. As a result, Tolstoyan conversions had much in common with the phenomenon of ‘conversions’ to socialism in the 1880s and 1890s, as documented by Stephen Yeo.122 The awakenings of would-be socialists to the inequality of the current social and economic system were often narrated in religious language. They might be prompted by attendance at meetings or by coming into contact with a particular socialist leader, but most often they were driven, like the experiences described above, by the reading of a seminal socialist text – Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, perhaps, or Edward Carpenter’s Towards Democracy. Frederik van Eeden confessed to a degree of embarrassment that it had not in his case been Tolstoy, or Kropotkin, or any of the ‘so-called “scientific” German theories’ that provided this shock, but Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. He regarded Looking Backward as a rather ‘superficial and unpoetical’ book to have served such a purpose in his life, but took some consolation from the fact that Alfred Russell Wallace ‘was also made a socialist by that same simple, silly little book’.123 This was not a rational process, Van Eeden concluded, but a moral event. We live, it seems more or less, in a state of somnambulism. We may be said to know but not yet to feel or to realize the injustice of our position. A slight shock to our mind is sometimes able to wake us up and open our eyes to the disagreement between our confessed morals and our actual mode of living . . . The pushing force comes from the men of faith and of force of character. The mind may be prepared intellectually, but it wants ethical incitement to change its potential energy into active movement.124 Arthur St John felt he had witnessed this same drama many times in Tolstoyan circles in Britain. Scene – the inner chamber of the soul; Ego discovered lounging. Conscience (the messenger of the spirit of rightdealing) knocks at the door from the outside. And now mark

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the variations as the scene is repeated in many chambers on the stage. Drowsy Ego rolls and chafes at the disturbance. Here he will not stir, there he starts and calls out, ‘Who’s there?’. ‘Your consciousness of what is right’, replies the knocker. ‘Nonsense’, says Ego here, ‘and I should like to let you in; but I have no room for you here’. Another will go to the door and even fumble with the handle. And so the multitude of varying tricks of by-play! Here is Ego holding the door a little open, but with his foot against it, lest he should be taken with a rush, parleying with the messenger. Was it this one, or another, who finally shut the door, but went to great trouble and expense to have the panels taken out and a glass pane put in, so that Conscience would look through and shout his welcome, but not come in? And so importunate was the shouting of the messenger, eager for order, that Ego did at first move about one or two pieces of furniture, to humour his criticism. In some chambers it seems that the lounger grows callous to the noise of knocking, and slumbers on. In such chambers it is very dark. But in the case of those who let in this messenger, and shut the door behind him, the room, which was before (as all others are still) disorderly and dark, become entirely rearranged and orderly and bright. I perceive now, that this is happening in one or two chambers here and there, and the rumour of it gets abroad. Other messengers are encouraged, and redouble their knockings and pleadings, and many Egos are becoming much disturbed and at their wits end what to do. For it seems it was one of their best excuses for keeping the knocker out that others had done the same. But now as each new door is opened the excuse seems to get more and more thing. The knockers seem to prevail, and the light on the stage is growing.125 This awakening of conscience prompted individuals not only to try to act according to their new beliefs and to get their own life on to what they perceived to be the right footing, but also in many cases (though not all) to seek out like-minded individuals in order to participate in what appeared to be a growing movement.

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Participation in a community of faith, Lewis Rambo tells us, connects the convert to rich past traditions, an ordered present and an inspiring future. ‘Affiliating with a group and subscribing to a philosophy may offer nurture, guidance, a focus for loyalty, and a framework for action.’126 In the meantime, the field looked promising for new and existing converts. In the 1890s and 1900s, Tolstoy’s philosophy of life seemed to be gaining ground rapidly. The endeavours of literary critics, translators, mainstream publishing houses and, later, Tolstoyan enterprises had made Tolstoy’s philosophy widely known and his writings freely available. Writing in 1895, the radical author and journalist John Morrison Davidson noted the extent of Tolstoy’s influence in Britain: I know not how it may be in Russia but here the light is spreading from mountain peak to valley with exhilarating speed. You have disciples everywhere. I have been lecturing a good deal recently on “Christ and Mammon” in the great provincial towns of England and Scotland and find your name a tower of strength among the choicest spirits of every class.127 Stephen Hobhouse picked up his first Tolstoy pamphlet on Oxford railway station, and Percy Redfern painted a similar picture of their availability: . . . the missionaries were in the field and active. Railway book stalls were distributing the great writer’s own pamphlets in the well-produced, threepenny editions of the Free Age Press founded by Tolstoy’s exiled friend, Vladimir Tchertkoff, and his competent English partner and publisher A. C. Fifield. And through that pioneer, spare-time compilation by the civil servant, Joseph Edwards, The Labour Annual, I heard of a Tolstoyan colony amongst the different, small settlements in Essex. To detach oneself from all this stir and work was impossible.128 The results of all this ‘stir and work’ will be the subject of the next chapter.

CHAPTER 3 INTERNATIONAL TOLSTOYISM: BRITAIN AND BEYOND

From the middle of the 1890s, groups and individuals who took Tolstoy’s worldview seriously sought to put it into practice across Europe and the United States, in their own lives and in association with others. Resigning from professional positions or from the army, or redirecting their efforts in the field of social reform, they looked for ways to set an example through their actions and to propagate the Tolstoyan vision more widely. The drive to associate with other like-minded individuals led to the growth of centres of Tolstoyan activity: reading groups, lecture societies, cooperative ventures, publishing houses and land colonies. Nellie Shaw, who joined the Croydon Brotherhood Church in the mid-1890s, was confident: ‘that which a man shrinks to do alone, a number together can accomplish. When are we going to give the world’, she asked her comrades, ‘or at any rate our nation, an object lesson of “brethren dwelling together in unity”?’1 They interacted with Christian anarchist or Christian socialist groups not only locally but internationally, and this increasing interest in and awareness of similar activity in other parts of the world helped to build connections between centres within an international movement. This chapter charts the development of centres of Tolstoyism in the 1890s, and explores some of their activities and characteristics. It examines their links to Tolstoy and to each other, and the ways in which these links were created and maintained. The rapid growth in

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interest in Tolstoy’s philosophy in the 1890s is reflected in the remarkable volume of correspondence Tolstoy received from overseas in that decade. Readers of Tolstoy across Europe and the United States wrote to the author to sympathize with, criticize or question his work, or to debate or seek clarification on particular points. Hamilton Campbell, of Glasgow’s Free Church College, asked in January 1891 whether Tolstoy accepted the miracles described in the gospels (Tolstoy did not).2 Charles Andersen, an engineer from Oregon, wondered whether Tolstoy was really recommending complete abstention from sexual intercourse (Tolstoy was).3 Jean Baptiste Coco, an Italian law student, sought Tolstoy’s endorsement of the idea of a plebiscite against war in August 1900.4 Many sent copies of their own books or pamphlets. The first step for many of the individuals whose profound responses to Tolstoy’s works were recounted in the last chapter was to write to Tolstoy to express their agreement, sympathy or gratitude; to explain their chosen course of action or to ask for advice. Despite his insistence that there was no such thing as a Tolstoyan movement, in the 1890s Tolstoy was delighted to discover individuals who believed in the same broad ideals and were working along the same lines. In March 1895, he wrote to his friend and colleague Dmitri Khilkov that: in recent times, to my great joy, groups of people have been springing up, not only in Russia but in various parts of Europe, who are in complete agreement with our views, and with one another, although they look at things from their own particular aspect. Such are Kenworthy and Morrison and their circle in England, Schmitt and the Religion des Geistes association in Budapest, Grunsky in Stuttgart, Jarnefelt in Finland, and a circle of doctors in Hungary . . .5 Tolstoy regularly put sympathizers in touch with their nearest local centres of activity, and these centres in touch with one another, supplying addresses and recommending newspapers and literature. Through the exchange of literature, correspondence, ideas and occasionally visits, these networks gradually came to operate under

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Figure 3.1 Cartoon depicting ‘Tolstoy at work’, reproduced from Yuri Bitovt, Graf L. N. Tolstoi v karrikaturakh i anekdotakh. [(Moscow: Tip. M. V. Balin i Ko., 1908)]

their own steam. Of course, not all devotees of Tolstoy’s thought were closely associated with these centres. Some were loosely so, some not at all. Not all centres of Tolstoyism were closely connected to an international network. Beginning with the Tolstoyan movement in Britain, the following discussion explores the activities of, and connections between, some key individuals and centres of activity.

The Tolstoyan Movement in Britain In Britain, the Croydon Brotherhood Church and its colony at Purleigh in Essex were the best-known Tolstoyan groups.6 This major centre for British Tolstoyism emerged from a venture established by former

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businessman John Kenworthy and Congregationalist preacher John Bruce Wallace. Wallace was the editor of Brotherhood, a cooperative journal which began publication in Limavady in Ireland in 1887 and continued for almost 50 years from a variety of locations.7 He was the first to set up a ‘Brotherhood Church’, in Southgate Road in North London, in 1891. Around the same time, Kenworthy’s introduction to the works of Henry George, John Ruskin and finally Tolstoy prompted him to give up his commercial career in America and return to London, where he worked on a series of cooperative ventures in Canning Town.8 In 1893, they jointly established the ‘Brotherhood Trust’, a cooperative enterprise aimed at setting an example of industry and production run by workers for workers.9 Kenworthy established his own ‘Brotherhood Church’ in Croydon in the spring of 1894 and his own newspaper, The New Order (initially The Croydon Brotherhood Intelligence), a year later. In the following years, Kenworthy’s Croydon group embraced the Tolstoyan non-resistant position, while Wallace’s programme remained focused on demonstrating what could be done within the existing industrial system. This gradual divergence began with Kenworthy’s first contact with Tolstoy in 1894 and Tolstoy’s warm reception of Kenworthy’s The Anatomy of Misery. The New Order printed letters from Tolstoy and reprints of his work; its readers were told that ‘those who have read, and who agree with, the teachings of Leo Tolstoy, will agree with us’.10 By November 1895, the paper was described as a special channel between English readers and Tolstoy – the author was ‘with us, both in sympathy and in actual cooperation’, and had arranged to send them new writings from time to time.11 In January 1896, Kenworthy travelled to Russia to visit Tolstoy. His intention, he said, was ‘to see Leo Tolstoy and friends of his; to arrange with them ways and means of carrying forward in England the work to which they in Russia give themselves’.12 If Tolstoy could only feel the earnestness and spirit of those involved in the Croydon Brotherhood, Kenworthy was sure he would know that his work was not in vain.13 Kenworthy’s return, and his report of his visit to Tolstoy, generated enormous excitement in Croydon.14 The Croydon Brotherhood Church was a ‘not a “church” in the usual sense’, according to Kenworthy, ‘but in the sense that we aim at realising

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Christian fraternity’.15 The group’s activities centred on their two Sunday meetings – a ‘Social Questions Conference’ at 3 p.m. and an evening service that began at 7 p.m. Kenworthy reckoned that ‘four or five score’ people attended these meetings in 1896.16 In their early years, they ran weekly youth meetings, but these were subsumed in 1896 in the activities of a school. There was a discussion group on the Sermon on the Mount, there were physical education classes and in the summer of 1896 a rambling club operated. The Brotherhood sought to engage with the local community, by lecturing, writing for the local press and using their own newspaper to detail local injustices. Expansion within the immediate area had already begun: in the summer of 1895, they established small local groups that held their own meetings at Thornton Heath, Addiscombe, Norwood, Penge and Sydenham, amongst other places.17 During 1895, the newly established Croydon Brotherhood Store had developed its range of services, selling ‘Labour Socialist and Vegetarian and other advanced periodicals and literature’, and ‘honestly produced’ tea, stationery, sugar, dried fruit and soup sourced from cooperative production societies. Members could call at the store (No. 2 Hollycombe, Pitlake Bridge) between 7 and 10 p.m., where they would be served, depending on the day of the week, by Fred Muggeridge, David Fraser, Frank Henderson and others.18 Gilbert Tarry undertook to supply members with made-to-measure clothing from materials produced by the cooperative Scotch Tweed Manufacturing Society, as well as natural un-dyed wool hosiery. Until March 1895, the store also stocked several kinds of tobacco, cigars and cigarettes, but by April’s edition of The Croydon Brotherhood Intelligence these items (which would hardly have met with Tolstoy’s approval) had disappeared from the list of available produce. The store hosted a ‘rendezvous’ where it was possible to ‘meet friends who can talk to you about our principles and work’,19 and ‘thoughtful people who desire to understand life’ could find or order the writings of ‘great prophets and teachers, from Moses to Tolstoy’.20 After 15 months of trading, with the initial capital investment and fixtures and fittings having been repaid, the store had made a £25 surplus.21

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A communal home, ‘Brotherhood House’, was established in the former Waddon Hotel, opposite Waddon station, with Walter Older as secretary. One resident described the house as ‘quite a palace, newly built, with spacious rooms and heaps of light’; board, lodgings and washing could be had at 13 shillings a week. With a number of brotherhood enterprises operating from the premises, the house was ‘a regular hive of industry’.22 There was a dressmaking business run by Nellie Shaw and Mrs Older, which produced clothing ‘with an idea to both utility and beauty, on rational and hygienic lines’,23 and later a tailoring and boot-making department, run by A. Drover and William MacDonald. In the summer of 1896, the Brotherhood Store moved into Brotherhood House, and Arthur St John – who joined the Croydon movement on leaving the army and became an influential figure within it – took over as storekeeper. Under his system, regular grocery deliveries were made within the local area.24 Cooperative industries and enterprises were a central part of the Brotherhood vision, and they remained so after the turn towards Tolstoy. While in Russia, Kenworthy told the Tolstoyans he met that

Figure 3.2 The Waddon Hotel (Brotherhood House) in 1909. [Photograph licensed from Croydon Local Studies Library and Archives Service]

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only exceptionally able or fortunate people were able to make a living on the land in England. we are compelled to organise ourselves to carry on shopkeeping and such industries as become convenient to us, hoping thus to build up a round of industries in which we can, some day, work for one another, freeing ourselves, and all who choose to come with us, from the present wrong conditions of work and commerce.25 Nevertheless, in the months following his visit the Croydon group’s focus gradually shifted from their earlier industrial projects towards the need to establish a basis for agricultural work, on the land. The split with Bruce Wallace’s Brotherhood was complete by the autumn of 1897, when the Croydon group dropped the name ‘Brotherhood Church’ in order to ‘dispense with names as we do with creeds’ – in doing so they were acting on advice given to Kenworthy by Tolstoy a year earlier.26 Bruce Wallace despaired at what he regarded as a gross parody of Tolstoy’s teachings, which were in his view hardly appropriate in England. ‘Although tilling the ground is an essential form of industry, it doesn’t follow that we best serve the cause of humanity by undertaking this’, he insisted. ‘The great need of to-day is not more potatoes, or more shoes, but a fraternal organization in which the potatoes and the shoes, and everything else, shall be abundantly available for all the workers.’27 Neither could he understand the desire of Tolstoy’s English followers to abstain from the political process – by doing so they were wasting talent and energy that might reform the system from within, and were handing over power to reactionary forces. Kenworthy, St John, Vladimir Chertkov and Eliza Pickard were all drawn into this debate and responded with a vigorous defence of the non-resistant Tolstoyan position – for them involvement in any political process, or in an unjust capitalist society, was an impossibility.28 Kenworthy’s Brotherhood Church was the leading centre for British Tolstoyism, but it was not the only one. The Croydon and

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Purleigh groups had close links with other groups established on similar lines, and fostered splinter and successor groups. One of the most important was the Whiteway colony near Stroud, which was funded by Samuel Veale Bracher and attracted an international membership over its long lifetime.29 In Leeds, George Gibson and D. B. Foster collaborated in the establishment of an engineering workshop at Victoria Road, Holbeck, which was ‘owned and run by the workers . . . [and] where no capitalist employer could interfere’.30 Besides electrical work (Tom Ferris), mechanics (George Gibson), carpentry (Comrades Thompson and Brown), bicycle repairs (Comrade Marsland) shoe-mending (Comrade Allworthy) and tailoring (Lizzie Whitley), they offered workspace and accommodation for sympathizers and a meeting space for a new Brotherhood Church. A class met in their reading room on Thursdays to study ‘the teachings of Jesus’, and on Sundays a church meeting was held which took ‘a general oversight of the movement, including the workshop’. The group organized larger Sunday lectures in St James’s Hall in Leeds and during the summer of 1898 took these to the city’s parks, with Foster and Kenworthy (visiting from London) addressing the assembled crowd.31 Attendance tapered off in 1898 and the meetings returned to the workshop. Eliza Pickard insisted that ‘We are more desirous of seeing new advances on the lines of action, than to draw a large congregation of people who, like so many around us, stop short with theory’.32 Foster also published a monthly journal, Forward, which reprinted Tolstoy material.33 In Blackburn, the Christian Communist Friends circulated Tolstoy’s literature ‘because his conception of life is nearest to ours’, and displayed his works in the window of their workshop at 35 Victoria Street.34 The central members of this group were J. Hopwood, W. Hopwood and William Murray. They met every Sunday evening, first at the St John’s Clubroom in Kendal Street and later at Victoria Street, ‘for the purpose of helping each other to right thinking and right living; to free ourselves from the bondage of the world to the free life that Jesus taught’.35 R. F. Morse, a member of the Blackburn group, recalled these meetings being of a devotional

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character and rather like Quaker meetings – in contrast to other centres there was no invited speaker and there was ‘a good deal of silence’.36 Ernest Ames and Tom Ferris, of the Leeds group, met with the Blackburn Friends in the autumn of 1898 and were confident that their cooperation would have good results.37 A group including Jack Goring and Charles Daniel met regularly at the Central Vegetarian Restaurant, and they initiated a colony at Wickford – Goring stated that although ‘no confession of faith was demanded or expected from intending members . . . the group was essentially, so far as their mutual relationship was concerned, a group of non-resisters, in the Tolstoyan sense of that term’.38 William Hare, who had been a contributor to the New Order, established his own Tolstoyan newspaper, The Candlestick, in Derby in 1900, and Brotherhood meetings took place at the city’s Temperance Hall. In the same year, Percy Redfern’s Manchester Tolstoy Society was established, and a London Tolstoyan Society operated in 1898 –99 (the activities of both these organizations are discussed in Chapter Four).39 The Manchester Tolstoyans arranged joint meetings with both the Derby and Blackburn groups in 1901.40 Charles Daniel and Florence Worland, who were key players in the London society, directed a series of periodicals in the 1900s which addressed the broad range of Tolstoyan concerns – The Tolstoyan (1903– 4), The Crank (until 1907) and The Open Road (until 1913).41 The Crank and The Open Road provided a home for Tolstoyans in the 1900s – Arthur St John, the Daniels and Isabella Fyvie Mayo all contributed to its pages. Mayo, based in Aberdeen, undertook translation work for Vladimir Chertkov’s Free Age Press, and provided a link with Hermann Kallenbach, the founder of South Africa’s Tolstoy Farm. In discussions of the ‘movement’ in the 1900s and 1910s, Mayo still mentioned ‘Tolstoyan friends’ in Manchester and Sheffield, the enthusiastic Mr Lawrie, a retired railway official in Carlisle, Arthur Voysey in Sussex, and young Jack White.42 In Croydon, Florence Holah and Fred Bing were still running meetings of a Tolstoyan character (and including occasional lectures from Vladimir Chertkov) in 1904– 6 under the aegis of the ‘Croydon Social Union’, though

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they felt increasingly crowded out by ‘state socialists and materialist reformers’.43 At the height of their activity in the 1890s, Kenworthy and his Croydon group were among those Tolstoy was most likely to recommend contact with to sympathizers. To Baptist pastor Kenneth Bond, he wrote: ‘Do you know John Kenworthy and his church and his paper? His address is Croydon. I think you will find spiritual help by putting yourself in communications with him and his people.’44 And to Alexander MacDonald in Glasgow: ‘Are you acquainted with the activity of John Kenworthy? He is one of the most near to me in his views and has written excellent articles about questions, which probably will interest you.’45 The British Tolstoyans were also soon in touch with a number of other major centres internationally that ranked alongside their own in Tolstoy’s esteem.

Jeno¨ Henrik Schmitt and the Religion des Geistes Group One such group existed in Budapest and was centred on the philosopher Jeno¨ Henrik Schmitt. Schmitt’s early scholarly work had been on Schopenhauer, Hegel and Fichte, but in the 1890s he turned to the development of a gnostic philosophy, in which he argued that God was not an extraordinary being, but a knowable possibility within everyone, and that each individual should regard themselves as a ‘ray of God’s love’. Self-knowledge was the key to Schmitt’s religion and he railed against the established Church and against materialism within society, as factors that stood in the way of this.46 By the middle of the decade, Schmitt’s publications and activities had already earned him a reputation for opposition to the Church and the state – despite the fact that he worked as a librarian in the Hungarian Ministry of Justice. His following in Budapest also steadily grew, particularly after the publication of his The Divinity of Christ in the Mind of Modern Man in 1892. This tract also initiated Schmitt’s first correspondence with Tolstoy, as he sent him a copy of it in the spring of that year.47 Schmitt would become one of Tolstoy’s most regular overseas correspondents, but the extent to which he or his circle can be

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regarded as Tolstoyans has been a matter for debate. While Jo´zsef Migray, an acquaintance and later biographer of Schmitt, described Schmitt’s influence as a turning point in Tolstoy’s career, Andra´s Bozoki and Miklo´s Su¨ko¨sd argue rather that the ‘influence was mutual but on neither side fundamental’.48 Peter Brock on the other hand portrays Schmitt as a devoted Tolstoyan, whose life was ‘literally changed’ after reading the Kingdom of God is Within You in 1894.49 This argument rests on the assumption that Schmitt’s correspondence with Tolstoy began in 1894 – in fact, in 1892 Schmitt was already writing appreciatively of Tolstoy’s ideas and their relationship with his own work.50 Certainly Schmitt’s philosophy was very close to Tolstoy’s. Bozoki and Su¨ko¨sd cite a letter by Schmitt in which he says: In practical terms I stand very close to Leo Tolstoy, except that L. T.’s worldview is primitive Christian and he regards the individual only as part of the divine or the universe, while I proclaim the doctrine of the divine majesty and universality of the individual, and I see salvation not in humility and penitence but in the awakening of self-knowledge.51 He also drew on Tolstoy as a figurehead and a legitimizing figure for his movement in ways that will be described below. By 1894, Schmitt was exchanging news and ideas with Tolstoy and reporting that their cause was making rapid progress in Hungary.52 Schmitt published two newspapers during the course of the 1890s, which provided a focus for his views and those of his followers. Die Religion des Geistes began publication in 1894 and closed in 1896. In January 1897, he established Ohne Staat, which also appeared in Hungarian as A´llam Ne´lku¨l. Through the paper, the group sold books and pamphlets (mostly by Schmitt, but also by Johannes Guttzeit and other authors). Schmitt wrote most of the leading articles for the paper, but there were other prominent contributors, including: Margot Kuhn, Albert Kohout, Matthias Malaschitz and Karolyi Krauz.

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Schmitt’s circle was large enough to support two weekly meetings – one at the Cafe´ Continental on Tuesday evenings for an informal get-together and discussion and one on Sunday afternoons at a guesthouse run by the Mu¨llers, in Almassy Platz, for lectures and debates.53 From October 1897, after police intervention at their meetings, the Tuesday meetings took place at Cafe Holzer in Andrassystrasse (and they moved to Wednesdays from the following month) and the Sunday meetings were at 9 Almassy ter.54 Schmitt and his circle experienced significant state pressure, with intervention at times from the Hungarian, Austrian and even German governments. After publication of an article on ‘The Religion of Anarchism’ in Der Sozialist, a socialist paper based in Berlin, Schmitt had received a warning from the minister of justice, prompted by a request from the German government, about his activities. In response he published a letter of resignation in the Hungarian press, explaining that his conscience no longer allowed him to work for the government. Tolstoy praised the move – although it would make his life more difficult in practical terms, it was unavoidable.55 Schmitt printed this letter in Die Religion Des Geistes. In 1897, a leading article by Schmitt on ‘The Feasibility of Anarchy’ proved too much for both the Austrian and Hungarian authorities. In this article, Schmitt argued that the law of the state was no better than the code of honour of common thieves, and that legal force was equivalent to the force employed by a robber or murderer. The following month, the paper reported that it had been banned by the Austrian minister of the interior, and a week later, that the authorities in Budapest had ordered the confiscation of all copies of the issue in which the article appeared.56 ‘Difficulties with the post’ – perhaps the risk of interception – and other, presumably financial, difficulties obliged Schmitt to reduce the paper to a smaller format.57 He also called the attention of subscribers who had not been able to receive the incriminating issue, to an article, ‘Paralelle’ in Issue 9, which expressed the same basic idea. They would not be shaken in their struggle for the cause.58 Again, Schmitt printed a letter from Tolstoy which praised the article

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and said that he was convinced that whatever setbacks they faced, their message would find a means of expression.59 In May 1897, Schmitt was called before the public prosecutor in Budapest to defend himself against charges of an assault on the law and incitement against the state institutions of Hungary. After an impassioned speech in his defence, outlining his beliefs, Schmitt was acquitted – much to his own surprise and also to Tolstoy’s, whose reaction was again printed in Ohne Staat.60 The Budapest group were initially more introspective than other centres of Tolstoyism. Dusˇan Makovicky´, reporting on Schmitt’s activities to Tolstoy, told him that ‘He is little known. If you had not told me about him, neither I nor my friend [Albert Sˇkarvan] would ever have heard of him.’61 As early as 1895, Tolstoy had sought to put Schmitt in touch with other centres in the movement – Kenworthy and Morrison Davidson in England and Arvid Ja¨rnefelt in Finland, for example.62 He recommended Schmitt and his newspaper to Louis Bahler in The Hague and to Morrison Davidson in England, advising both of them to get in touch with him.63 He recommended both The New Order and The Social Gospel to Schmitt, and put him in touch with Arthur St John, Ralph Albertson and George Gibson.64 In May 1897, The New Order reported on the work of Schmitt’s circle, and in September the same year printed a report of Schmitt’s trial (written by Albert Sˇkarvan).65 The first report in Ohne Staat from elsewhere in the movement was printed in November 1897, when Sˇkarvan contributed an article on Tolstoyism in Holland.66 In January 1898, the Dutch Tolstoyans reciprocated, printing a report on Schmitt’s trial and an account of his activities in Budapest.67 In a regional sense, Schmitt’s circle did reach out – to likeminded groups and individuals in Vienna, Berlin and Graz. And Peter Brock has demonstrated that the Religion des Geistes group had possibly the widest influence of any in the Tolstoyan orbit on their local population at large, through their interaction with the Hungarian agrarian socialist movement. Hungary’s Independent Labour Party – a breakaway group from the Marxist Hungarian Social Democratic Party – incorporated some of Schmitt’s ideas about the abolition of the state into their statement of their own principles.68 In 1897,

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Schmitt told Arnold Eiloart that they had won Halas as a base of proletarian support for their ‘ideal anarchy’, and that ‘From Halas as a centre our ideas are spreading in all directions through the lowlands of Hungary.’69 Schmitt’s writing was regarded by many as overly complex, pompous and inaccessible.70 But his movement was patently regarded, by other major centres, as an important expression of their movement – worth reporting on, communicating with and publicizing. ‘Turned out of office, without means or position, he arraigns the governments of the world as if he were conscious of a heaven-born mission’, Ernest Crosby commented. ‘Such pretensions are ridiculous only when they are attached to falsehood, and not to truth.’71

The Vrede Group in The Hague The Vrede (Peace) group, based in the Netherlands, was formed from existing networks of Christian socialist activity. It was heavily influenced by Tolstoy’s thought. In the Northern provinces, a group of Protestant pastors – influenced by the strength of the labour movement and the poverty and social deprivation in many municipalities – sought a modus vivendi between socialism and the Church. Louis Bahler, the pastor at Schiermonnikoog; Anne de Koe, the pastor at Nieuwveen; and S. C. Kylstra, the pastor at Rottevalle, were among the leading figures.72 Another important figure was Jacob van Rees, Professor of Histology at the University of Amsterdam. He was active in temperance propaganda, a convinced vegetarian and conducted his laboratory procedures without vivisection. He opposed the state and all forms of militarism. Van Rees met de Koe in Nieuwveen, and the two men were struck by the similarity of their Tolstoyan outlook.73 There was a secular anarchist movement in the Netherlands and it included former churchmen like H. C. J. Krijthe and Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, but Christian anarchism was a new and independent phenomenon whose advocates sought their own platform and demanded more attention for the philosophy developed by Tolstoy.74 Their movement gained considerable impetus from the

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refusal of military service of Johannes van de Veer in 1895. Tolstoy’s commentary on the case made it something of a cause ce´le`bre for the Dutch Tolstoyans to rally around. On his release from military prison, Van der Veer joined the circle of Christian anarchists in The Hague and contributed to their initiatives in the advocacy of peace, temperance, anti-vivisection and vegetarianism. When Albert Sˇkarvan visited Van der Veer in the summer of 1897, he found him ‘surrounded by a group of people, most of whom not only see through the political and social lies of to-day, but who also recognise where the remedy for the ills of humanity is to be sought, who see the truth we are needing is the truth of uncorrupted Christianity’. Sˇkarvan attended a public meeting in The Hague on 17 August, on the theme of ‘Love or Violence’, at which Bahler, de Koe and Van der Veer spoke in front of an estimated 600 people. Bahler spoke on the unchristian attitude of the modern state and Van der Veer spoke on passive resistance. The pastors present stated (and regularly preached to their congregations) that the truth was to be found not in the teaching of the Church, but in the teaching of Christ, and that the Church was ‘a useless and harmful institution, paid by the state and dependent on it, which in the name of Christ pronounces the existing force-system good, and is its agent and accomplice in brutalising and demoralising the masses’. They pronounced themselves guilty ‘in that they served the Church, and received remuneration from the state in money which was wrung from its subjects, mainly from the oppressed and heavily-laden working class’.75 Van der Veer, who Rudolf Jans describes as probably the most complete Tolstoyan in the Netherlands,76 was in correspondence with Tolstoy from 1896 onwards. He and Bahler wrote to Tolstoy early in August 1897 that they intended to set up a newspaper, to be edited initially by Van der Veer, which would disseminate the Christian anarchist worldview.77 This idea was discussed and decided upon by a small group on the afternoon of the ‘Love or Violence’ meeting. Vrede (Peace) began publication in October the same year. Its first editorial called for the pursuit of a new life based on the practical application of Christ’s teachings.78 The printing house

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established by this group, the Drukkerij Vrede, also issued books and pamphlets – principally works by Tolstoy and by Dutch Tolstoyans. The editorship of the paper was taken over by Bahler in 1898, when Van der Veer left to live in England, and by Felix Ortt in July 1899; Vrede continued until 1909 under the alternate management of Ortt, Bahler and Lodewijk van Mierop. Ortt had abandoned a position as an engineer in the Rijkswaterstaat – the government department responsible for the maintenance of canals, dykes, roads and bridges – in order to devote himself to the advocacy of Christian anarchist principles. The Vrede group remained close to the Netherlands Vegetarian League (of which Felix Ortt was president) and the Netherlands League to Combat Vivisection, and advertised the activities of both bodies. They also organized their own meetings; often large scale and sometimes outdoors in public. Harold Williams, a young New Zealander and a devotee of Tolstoy’s thought, witnessed one of these meetings and regarded it as ‘a testimony to the freedom of public speech in Holland that they have not once been interfered with by the police’.79 From 1901, the editorial staff of Vrede set up a sister paper, the Arbeiders’ Weekblad. While Vrede was aimed at the propertied classes, the new paper was intended for the labouring classes. Williams, writing for the New Order, doubted the paper’s ability to ‘arrest attention in face of the competition of vigorous Socialist journals’.80 The Internationale Broederschap (International Brotherhood), as the group became known, made a first attempt at communal living at Blaricum. This colony was active until 1903.81 Felix Ortt told the British Tolstoyans that their name expressed ‘our feeling of a close union with the “Brotherhoods” in England and America’.82 The Vrede group was in touch with other major centres of Tolstoyism. Tolstoy recommended contact with Schmitt in Budapest to Bahler, and had already put Bahler in touch with Sˇkarvan.83 They received Schmitt’s paper Die Religion des Geistes, and printed letters and reports from Budapest. The Dutch Tolstoyans were also in touch with the Christian Commonwealth colony in the United States (this enterprise will be discussed in Chapter Four) – a letter from Tolstoy

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to colonists at the Commonwealth, written in March 1898, appeared in translation in Vrede as early as May the same year.84 Vrede and the British paper The New Order were advertising one another by 1898. Van der Veer, who had a particular interest in the Doukhobor emigration, was in England from 1898 onwards and sent the paper regular reports on the progress both of the emigration and of the movement in England. Although his assessment of the British movement was later scathing, he was certainly struck initially by the commonality of their aims. He told an audience at the Purleigh colony in 1898 that: It is a fine thing to talk about unity . . . but we have deeds now. We have been talking about the brotherhood of man for centuries, but today there exist groups who have broken down the frontiers of nationalities and a bond of union is felt . . . We believe this bond will become stronger. Such a meeting as this is evidence of that bond and will help us in our work in Holland. If it gives us courage to know we are working with God, it gives us even more courage to know we are working in unity with others who are trying to live honestly in accordance with Christ’s teaching. I can now go back to Holland with a happy heart and tell the brothers there how you live and work together here.85

The Role of the Individual: Albert Sˇkarvan and Ernest Howard Crosby Multi-functional centres like those in The Hague, Budapest and Croydon played an important role as hubs within the movement, propagandizing and practising Christian anarchism and attracting sympathizers both locally and internationally. Individuals could play an equally important role. Albert Sˇkarvan is a good example: he spent the years following his departure from the Austro-Hungarian Empire visiting Tolstoy and Tolstoyan groups across Europe. Although for much of his stay in England he was seriously ill, when in good health

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Sˇkarvan forwarded, shared and translated news from Tolstoyan groups across Europe. Sˇkarvan’s work kept readers in each of these centres abreast of the activities of their counterparts. He eventually settled in Switzerland, at the counter-cultural colony at Monte Verita, near Ascona, but still kept up to date with the British and Dutch Tolstoyans and in regular correspondence with Schmitt.86 In the United States, Ernest Howard Crosby was Tolstoy’s leading advocate. Crosby pursued his work for the Tolstoyan cause more or less independently, through advocacy and education rather than association and practical experiment. On his return from Egypt to the United States – having resigned his position as a judge in the international court and refused a position as Professor of Law at the City University of New York – Crosby pursued a form of civic Tolstoyism, working with democratic and labour organizations for social reform. His own Social Reform Club, founded in New York City in 1894, was one of the principal conduits for this work. Another important vehicle was the New York Civic Council, a citywide federation of labour and social reform organizations of which Crosby was president from 1901– 5, and whose slogan was ‘if the people will unite, money cannot rule New York.’ Crosby’s efforts in the field of social reform were hardly anarchic, but they were very clearly marked by an adherence to Tolstoyan principles. He campaigned for improvements in housing conditions in New York’s tenements, against the profiteering of landlords;87 he vigorously opposed punishment; and he refused to endorse legislative solutions, for example to the prohibition of alcohol and tobacco. He argued that the use of these commodities could ‘only be put down by a spread of counter sentiment, not by legislation or the police’.88 He was also a fervent anti-militarist and anti-imperialist, who lectured and campaigned against American aggression and the expansion of American interests overseas. As a Tolstoyan, Crosby abhorred the use of any kind of violence, but he also struggled with the military’s insistence on blind obedience, which called for the abdication of individual reason and conscience.89 Crosby made some attempts to put his principles into practice at ‘Grasmere’, an estate bought for his family by his parents-in-law at

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Rhinebeck in New York State, by farming and by acts of ‘profuse and perhaps indiscriminate charity’. Despite his pretentions to a Tolstoyan lifestyle there, the opposition of his wife and relatives to his new-found ideals made it difficult to fully escape his comfortable position. He sought, like Tolstoy, to rid himself of wealth and property, and left these instead in the hands of his wife.90 During his law career, Crosby had been close to Theodore Roosevelt, but his public advocacy of Tolstoyism ended their friendship. Roosevelt ‘thoroughly distrusted’ Tolstoy and found his philosophy ‘profoundly immoral’.91 Crosby’s principal value to the movement was as a publicist. He devoted himself to what Kenworthy described as ‘a wide campaign upon our principles’,92 promoting and elucidating Tolstoy’s views, writing and lecturing on Tolstoyism at churches and reform societies across the United States. He contributed to reformist publications like Ariel, The Kingdom, The Peace Advocate, Papyrus and The Coming Nation and engaged in debate in more mainstream publications, although his views were often dismissed as extreme. He produced volumes of prose and poetry inspired by his Tolstoyism – Swords and Ploughshares, Plain Talk in Psalm and Parable, Captain Jinks – Hero (a fervently anti-militarist novel which satirized the absurdities of warfare) – as well as volumes dedicated to the work of his heroes – Tolstoy and his Message; Tolstoy as a Schoolmaster; Carpenter: Poet and Prophet; and Garrison, the Non-Resistant and Abolitionist. He also tried to write plays, but these met with no great success. Crosby’s diaries, which survive for the years 1904– 6, give some indication of the scale and scope of his lecturing commitments. Of the 118 engagements recorded across these three years, 60 were lectures dealing specifically with Tolstoy. The others dealt either with other non-resistant heroes (Garrison or Walt Whitman, for example) or topics such as labour, the Church, immigration and social problems from a Tolstoyan standpoint.93 Of course, Tolstoy’s life and beliefs were an attractive topic for both authors and lecturers, and Crosby was not alone in tackling them. Thomas van Ness, for example, of the Second Unitarian Church in Boston, told an audience at the Boston Technology

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Figure 3.3 Ernest Crosby’s ‘Grasmere’ bookplate. [Photograph courtesy of Special Collections, Michigan State University Libraries]

YMCA, in March 1906, that Tolstoy was ‘a shining light in the midst of Russia’s disorder and blackness’. He was convinced that more and more ministers in United States were coming around to Tolstoy’s interpretation of the New Testament.94 Edward Braniff lectured on Tolstoy to the Greenwood Club in Kansas, in the winter of 1901, which was composed principally of teachers and other professional men.95 But Crosby was certainly the most prolific, the closest to Tolstoy in his thought (and through his correspondence) and the most determined to elucidate Tolstoy’s philosophy to an American public. Crosby’s lecturing style was variously described as scholarly, entertaining, charming and ‘forceful and magnetic’.96 He engaged his listeners with humour and a conversational style, relating the aspects of Tolstoy’s thought he discussed to his listeners’ own lives and experiences to demonstrate that Tolstoy ‘makes us think in a way in which we all ought to think’.97 Crosby declined payment for these lectures: when, in January 1901, ‘some misguided people at Buffalo’ offered him $100 for a talk on Tolstoy, he deducted his travel expenses and forwarded the rest to Vladimir Chertkov to support the work of the Free Age Press. ‘If you can use it in some way to push the sale of your publications in America’, Crosby wrote, ‘so much the better’. 98

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Although his was largely an independent campaign, Crosby did work with other likeminded individuals in the United States, and sought to draw them into cooperation with their international counterparts. As early as 1895, he urged William Dean Howells to contribute to The New Order99 and he told George Gibson of the Christian Commonwealth that he was sure that both Tolstoy and Kenworthy would write for its paper, The Social Gospel, ‘if they understand your field’.100 Crosby was an associate editor of the latter journal and regularly contributed to it. He was sympathetic to the Commonwealth project although he chose not to immerse himself completely in it. Howells was very ‘deep in Tolstoy’ according to Edward Everett Hale, to the extent that ‘he does not know but he ought to be ploughing and reaping’. Hale too was a sympathizer. He regarded Jesus as ‘the most practical political adviser the world has had’.101 Clarence Darrow regarded himself as a ‘disciple’ of Tolstoy right up to the First World War.102 William Jennings Bryan was perhaps the most high profile American admirer of Tolstoy; he was much influenced by his visit to Yasnaya Polyana in 1903 (although he admitted that he had not read any Tolstoy prior to this, he had read a lot of articles about him in newspapers and magazines).103 Bolton Hall, to whom Crosby had introduced Tolstoy’s works, believed there was ‘growing up a large, though unorganized, body’ in the United States ‘who accept what they regard as the Tolstoian Philosophy’.104 Crosby also promoted other centres of Tolstoyan Christian anarchism and attempted to draw in interested parties and keep them in touch with each other. He penned articles for The Arena on Jeno¨ Henrik Schmitt and the Religion des Geistes group, and on Timofei Bondarev’s exposition of bread-labour (based on his reading of Bondarev’s work in French translation).105 Crosby’s own writings had a strong presence in the international movement – some contemporaries noted that he was taken more seriously in England and on the continent, than he was in America.106 His prose and poetry appeared in The New Order, in The Candlestick from its inception and later in The Crank. Selections from his works were translated and published in German, Austrian, French and Finnish periodicals.107 His Tolstoy as a Schoolmaster was published in a

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Russian edition. His works were supplied to the British market by Tolstoyan publishing outlets and experienced buoyant sales.108 His 50th birthday was celebrated in an article in Freie Literatur in November 1906. Crosby visited the British Tolstoyans on several occasions – he first called on Kenworthy, in London, on his way back to Connecticut from Yasnaya Polyana in 1894. He was surprised at Kenworthy’s relative obscurity (the manager of The Times had never heard of him), but enjoyed a conversation with him about the work of the Brotherhood Churches and their plans for a settlement on the land.109 On Tolstoy’s advice, Crosby began a correspondence with Schmitt, and he suggested to Kenworthy that some of Schmitt’s writings should be translated into English.110 When Crosby visited England again in 1900, his sister Edith, who encountered Chertkov, Arthur St John and Arthur Fifield over a vegetarian lunch in London, contrasted her brother with these ‘serious revolutionaries’: Tchertkoff is a noble looking man, large, with fine head & very thoughtful, kind, blue eyes. He came in grey flannel shirt (with coat over it, of course) which suited him & did not look too “cranky”. St John, a small, thin man, very quiet, with rather remarkable dreamy & yet sharp eyes, has just returned from a Russian prison. Fifield is an energetic, young cockney, with cockney accent, who is a sort of literary jack of all trades, apparently . . . He seems to be Tchertkoff’s literary valet . . . Ernest seemed such an amusingly kindly amateur in comparison with these other professionals; trying patronisingly to be one of them, & yet so conventional when seen with the “real thing!” I wonder what they think of him?111 Crosby visited the Tolstoyans in London and the Purleigh colony in the autumn of 1900, and remained in touch with the key figures in the British movement even when it began to decline.112

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Connections to South Africa and the Antipodes In Aberdeen, Isabella Fyvie Mayo provided a link to Hermann Kallenbach, a South African Tolstoyan who co-founded, with Gandhi, a settlement named ‘Tolstoy Farm’ about 20 miles southwest of Johannesburg. The settlement, on land that Kallenbach owned, was intended as a haven for the families of satyagraha campaigners protesting for civil rights for Indians in South Africa. The land was cultivated communally, meals were shared and from 1911 Gandhi ran the farm school, in which the curriculum balanced manual and mental labour, self-reliance and self-sufficiency and appeal to reason rather than punishment.113 Gandhi described himself in this period as a devoted follower of Tolstoy, but was already starting to diverge from him in both his attitude to the state and his understanding of the significance of nonviolence (i.e. his commitment to non-violent resistance, rather than non-resistance). His contacts in the British movement were numerous. His library included 11 titles published by Arthur Fifield’s publishing firm, and 29 published by C. W. Daniel – these included Ernest Crosby’s Tolstoy as a Schoolmaster, Percy Redfern’s Tolstoy – a Study, Salome Hocking (Fifield)’s Tolstoyan novel Belinda the Backward and many copies of the Daniels’ periodical The Open Road.114 When in Britain in 1909, he visited the Whiteway colony. Kallenbach was a vegetarian, a teetotaller and learned to make sandals in order to make Tolstoy Farm self-sufficient in footwear. It was he who suggested the settlement’s name.115 Kallenbach and Mayo corresponded on a regular basis between 1911 and 1914, sharing both ideas and news of their activities.116 Kallenbach visited Mayo in Aberdeen in September 1911, and she helped to put him in touch with the remaining activists in the British Tolstoyan movement.117 The British Tolstoyans also had occasional contacts in the Antipodes. George Hodgson of Melbourne, Australia, ran a Sermon on the Mount class and endeavoured ‘to carry on some kind of propaganda work’. He felt rather isolated in his work, however, and became frustrated that his attempts to exchange information with the British movement were not always reciprocated.118 In New Zealand, Harold Williams subscribed to

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The New Order and corresponded with Kenworthy. He later moved to Europe and visited several of the major centres of Tolstoyism.119 And a Tolstoyan named Morton was still practising his faith on his farm in Western Australia in the 1930s.120

The Russians in the International Movement Just as this Tolstoyan activity was becoming increasingly vigorous and connected in the late 1890s, circumstances conspired to bring a number of key Russian Tolstoyans into closer contact with their western counterparts. Kenworthy’s visit to Russia at the beginning of 1896 had cemented relations between the Croydon group and Tolstoy’s Russian co-workers. Both Kenworthy and Frank Henderson corresponded with Chertkov on publishing matters, and Kenworthy was also in touch by mail with Evgenii Popov. In the autumn of 1896, Ivan Gorbunov-Posadov visited Kenworthy in England and discussed a number of projects, including the possible establishment of a Russian publishing house. Kenworthy reported that friends in Croydon ‘felt a real intimacy with him’ and that ‘our relation to Russian friends is a very real one’.121 In February 1897, Kenworthy received a telegram informing him of the imminent arrival of Vladimir Chertkov in England. Chertkov was forced into exile as a result of his involvement with the campaign against persecution of members of the non-resistant Doukhobor sect. This ushered in a new but by no means less productive phase of his work in the Tolstoyan cause. Over the next couple of years, other leading and lower-level Russian Tolstoyans joined him, briefly or more permanently, at the ‘Russian colony’ he established alongside the English colony at Purleigh. Pavel Biriukov, Dmitri Khilkov and Pavel Boulanger all spent time among the British Tolstoyans. Inevitably, Chertkov’s Tolstoyans also interacted with a range of other shades of Russian revolutionary in exile in Britain. Dmitri Abrikosov visited his brother Khrisanf (a keen Tolstoyan) at the Chertkovs’ in Purleigh, and described a house ‘full of guests who were interested in Tolstoy’s teachings and came to discuss them’, but also a Russian lady who sought to persuade him that ‘the only

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revolutionary activity which could be of any use in Russia was terrorism’.122 V. P. Zhuk (V. P. Maslov-Stokoz), an adherent of the Russian revolutionary terrorist group Narodnaia Volia (the People’s Will) lived at Purleigh and worked for Chertkov at the Free Age Press.123 Likewise in Geneva, where Biriukov and Khilkov went on to spend much of their lives, Tolstoyans mixed with Social Democrats and other Russian revolutionaries.124 In Britain, the presence of the Russians, British freedom in publishing and politics and the relocation to England of the Doukhobor campaign – including fundraising and logistics for the emigration of members of the sect – all combined to create a truly international centre for Tolstoyism by the late 1890s. Both Albert Sˇkarvan and Johannes van der Veer were also in England by 1899; the latter, at least in part, because of a desire to be closer to the centre of operations for the Doukhobors. Chertkov’s position as Tolstoy’s closest associate and now as his principal representative in England – a position he guarded jealously – automatically put him at the centre of the British movement. British Tolstoyans sought his presence at their meetings and his clarification of what Tolstoy’s views, and his own, might be on a variety of subjects – the use of money, diet and ‘the sex question’. Florence Holah asked for his advice on Tolstoy’s attitude to food – should one really be aiming for total abstinence, and therefore suicide? ‘As there is no opportunity of asking Tolstoi himself what he means, as one would like to do, one turns to you as a sort of interpreter.’125 And when, in the summer of 1897, Arthur Fifield requested Chertkov’s presence at a Sunday meeting in Croydon on ‘the basis of morality’, he hoped Chertkov could represent Tolstoy’s views and his own. If he could not attend, perhaps he could send a short written statement?126 Chertkov became rapidly involved in publishing matters, taking part in decisions even about the content and distribution of The New Order.127 His relationship to Tolstoy and his own commanding personality inspired ‘intense admiration and affection’128 amongst many of those who worked with him, and he drew numerous sympathetic individuals into his service, working on translation, editing or printing for his publishing projects.

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Tolstoy’s English adherents did not always submit to Chertkov’s point of view, however. Both Holah and Fifield upbraided him on occasion for refusing to engage with criticisms of Tolstoy, or for endorsing Tolstoy in argument without explaining why he, himself, agreed with Tolstoy’s position.129 Frank Henderson on one occasion bluntly told him he could not know what Tolstoy thought, though he later apologized for his lack of deference.130 Chertkov’s dogmatic and volatile character made it difficult for his co-workers to avoid falling out with him: he developed rivalries with Kenworthy and Maude and his publishing enterprises had a rapid turnover of staff. Johannes Van der Veer, who worked as a printer for Chertkov while in England in 1899, resigned in frustration at Chertkov’s criticism of the pace at which his printing work proceeded, and advised him curtly that if his criticism were to be valuable, he should himself get some experience of the work at hand.131 Arthur Fifield, who tolerated working for Chertkov as manager at the Free Age Press for longer than many, was exasperated by the fact that when Chertkov had found a man like me with no axe to grind and not anxious to feather his nest, in full sympathy then with the doctrines, a competent publisher and not too bad an editor and assistant translator, he yet could not control himself sufficiently to keep me, anxious as I was to stay.132 Fifield put Chertkov’s extreme behaviour down to his jealousy of ‘all helpers who might interpose between himself and Tolstoy’.133 And although Chertkov has often earned a reputation as manipulative and controlling, few who knew him regarded him as really Machiavellian – they believed in his good nature, that he meant well, even when he was behaving in the most insufferable ways.134 For all this, through his publishing enterprises, Chertkov established one of the longest lasting manifestations of Tolstoyism in England. The Free Age Press and its associated Russian publishing business at Tuckton House near Bournemouth, which are discussed in the next chapter, continued to produce editions of Tolstoy up to

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and during the First World War, under the management of Alexander Sirnis (a member of the London branch of the Russian Social Democratic Party) and later under Ludvig Perno, who lived in Bournemouth until his death in 1970.135 A local man directing a visitor to Tuckton commented that the Russians there ‘work on the land and also print a lot of books’136 – a fair assessment of the activities of Tolstoyans of all nationalities.

Campaigns and Common Causes The presence of the Russian e´migre´s in Britain, the increasing circulation of information about sympathetic activity internationally and the frequent referencing of each other by these groups in their own press, helped to create the sense of an international Christian anarchist movement, and gave it momentum. So too did the publicity these groups gave to common causes. The conversion narratives, letters of resignation and stories of refusal of military service discussed in Chapter Two made good copy for Tolstoyan newspapers and publishing houses. Tolstoy’s article on the Van der Veer case, ‘The Beginning of the End’, was circulated widely among Tolstoyans, who sought to get it into the mainstream press as well as their own publications.137 Sedlak’s ‘My Military Experiences’ was serialized by The New Order in 1900. Sˇkarvan’s account of his refusal of military service was published by Vladimir Chertkov’s press in 1898.138 The case of the Russian Tolstoyan Evdokim Drozhzhin was reported in Ohne Staat in 1897.139 The letters of Russian non-resister Petr Olkhovik, which recounted his refusal to enter into military service, were serialized by The New Order and published in a Russian edition by Chertkov’s press, a French edition in Geneva and a Dutch edition was issued by the Vrede publishing house.140 Schmitt’s trial for incitement against the state was reported by both The New Order and Vrede, and an account of it even appeared in the British vegetarian periodical The Vegetarian Messenger.141 Tolstoy’s seventieth birthday in 1898 and his eightieth birthday in 1908 inspired high profile tributes by ‘the illustrious and

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intellectual’ in public life. In 1898, for example, a banquet was held in New York at which one hundred ‘representative men, publicists and litterateurs’ gathered to toast Tolstoy.142 In August 1908, a birthday greeting signed by 800 English writers and artists was hand delivered to Yasnaya Polyana by the librarian at the British Museum, Charles Wright.143 However, Christian anarchists also claimed these anniversaries as a chance to celebrate Tolstoy’s ‘real’ impact and to reflect upon their own movement. Isabella Fyvie Mayo complained about the celebrations in 1908 that the promoters had: not in the least entered into the Tolstoy spirit! . . . Would it not be the best “homage” to endeavour to see life at least a little from Tolstoy’s standpoint? . . . to think to “appreciate” the teacher and the Philosopher save by heed to his teaching, seems to me an insulting futility! He does not want strings of names, or crowds of “pilgrims”.144 The editors of The Open Road organized a letter from their readership which would ‘more nearly express the feelings and wishes of Tolstoy’s sympathizers in England than that at present before the public’, and which acknowledged their debt to him for his disentangling of ‘the teaching of Jesus from theologies about him’. ‘Few of us’, they reflected, ‘perhaps none, have been able entirely to readjust our ways to the new life-conception, but some, as you have bidden, at least no longer shut their eyes to the truth, but acknowledge it, though it condemns them’.145 The cause that provided the greatest impetus for action across the movement was the campaign for the emigration of members of the non-resistant Doukhobor sect from Russia (see Chapter One). Tolstoy actively used his network of international contacts to publicize the cause and to assist with logistics, and his sympathizers abroad took up the cause with alacrity. Their newspapers canvassed for likely locations in which the Doukhobors might resettle. In March 1898, Tolstoy wrote to George Gibson of the Christian Commonwealth, to ask about the possibility of settlement in the United States. He estimated that around 10,000 would emigrate in

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total, and told Gibson of his plans to publish an appeal in the international press. ‘Meanwhile you will oblige me – you and your friend Herron, Crosby and others – if you give me some suggestions about this matter.’146 The editors of The Social Gospel, the Commonwealth’s newspaper, circulated ‘questions as to the advisability of attempting to move them to America’ to around 100 individuals. Nearly all respondents favoured the enterprise, and the paper reported that ‘the question of getting land for them will not be an over-serious one’.147 Vladimir Chertkov appealed specifically to American sympathizers in the paper’s pages. He asked for recommendations of localities with, ideally, a dry climate and cold winters; the loan or hire of vessels for transportation; general help through subscriptions; and ‘the spreading of information by distribution of leaflets, letters in newspapers, sale of books etc’. Anyone willing to give themselves to this work, he stressed, would ‘become sharers together in a movement which directly tends to the coming and establishment of the kingdom of God amongst men’.148 A suggestion by Commonwealth member C. F. Willard that the Doukhobors be settled in Texas gained currency around this time. Tolstoy forwarded the suggestion to Chertkov in England and asked Crosby to let Kenworthy or Chertkov know ‘how much acres they could have in Texas at what price . . . at what price the ships could take the men for the passage and . . . [that they should raise] in America a subscription for the Doukhoborys’.149 Tolstoyan publishing houses spread literature and information about the campaign. One of the most important pieces of campaign literature was Vladimir Chertkov’s Christian Martyrdom in Russia, first published by the Brotherhood Publishing Company at Croydon. This small book brought together materials on Doukhobor history and on their current situation, including Doukhobor testimony and eyewitness accounts relating to their treatment since the arms burning of 1895, their beliefs and their exemplary behaviour. It contained a reprint of an ‘appeal for help’ (Pomogite!) published by Chertkov, Biriukov and Ivan Tregubov in Russia, and a supporting statement from Tolstoy (as the most prominent figure associated with the campaign) asserting the accuracy of the material the appeal

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contained and exhorting readers if not to directly help ‘those through whom the work of God is being done’ or to partake in the work themselves, at least not to oppose it.150 Christian Martyrdom in Russia was published in a British version with a preface by Kenworthy, and a Canadian version with a preface by James Mavor, who was also involved in the logistics of the emigration. It appealed for contributions to Chertkov, in Croydon, and promised that profits from the sale of the book would be added to the fund.151 The pamphlet News of the Doukhobortsi was produced to keep sympathizers up to date with the progress of the emigration, and was used by newspapers as a source of latest information – it went into at least a seventh issue. Johannes van der Veer, editor of the Tolstoyan journal Vrede, published his own account of the history of the Doukhobors, Passive Resistance in Theory and Practice, and also marketed Christian Martyrdom in Russia. The Tolstoyan groups set up subscriptions through their newspapers even before permission for the emigration had been granted. Kenworthy had first made mention of raising funds for emigration in the summer of 1897 – at that time he envisaged that ‘a few hundred pounds would set such a plan on foot. The extent of the operations would depend on the resources forthcoming as time went on’.152 While contributions came in steadily, the sums raised were paltry. Jeno¨ Henrik Schmitt’s paper, Ohne Staat, collected 56 florins in a couple of months up to May 1897.153 The Dutch Tolstoyan newspaper Vrede reported contributions to its Doukhobor Support Fund totalling 65 guilders between December 1897 and January 1899 – this included not only individual contributions, but also the sale of brochures.154 Ernest Crosby started a subscription in the pages of the Social Gospel, but was disappointed with the results; he mentions having raised ‘$600, or $700 dollars’ by the beginning of 1899.155 Some small contributions were raised from readers of the British Tolstoyan newspaper The New Order, but the most significant sum was raised by sacrificing funds at the disposal of the Tolstoyan colony at Purleigh – initially £500, which they could ‘easily spare’, and later a further £800, which left them with ‘only enough money to carry on the work of the Colony for about six months’.156

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The efforts of the international Tolstoyan network were dwarfed by Tolstoy’s own ability to secure funds from wealthy individuals and to raise money through his own works. The emigration was in large part financed by the proceeds of Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection – literally resurrected for this purpose, since he had begun work on it in the 1880s but abandoned it. Its serialization in Russia provided substantial sums. But Tolstoy’s international contacts handled its translation and publication abroad. In the United States, Ernest Crosby negotiated a deal for the serialization of the work in Cosmopolitan. This initially netted $2,000 (£400), but this money had to eventually be returned after a controversy over the editing of the text held up the delivery of the instalments. Crosby did secure $4,000 (£800) for Resurrection’s publication in book form by Dodd, Mead and Co – with promising sales this had risen to £977 by the autumn of 1900.157 Tolstoyan efforts were also significantly less successful than those of the Society of Friends’ effective fundraising network. Although they could not approve of the anti-authoritarian nature of the Doukhobors’ protest or the stridently anarchic tone of some of the campaign literature,158 the Society of Friends readily identified with their refusal to bear arms and the Meeting for Sufferings appointed a sub-committee for the Doukhobors which publicized the cause and engaged in fundraising. Nearly 8,000 copies of their appeal to members of the Society of Friends were dispatched in Britain, and additional copies were sent to leading Friends and Mennonites in the United States. This appeal raised a total of £7,019 15s 9d.159 The Friends’ Committee’s fundraising abilities proved even more impressive in the face of impending disaster. When a group of 1,000 Doukhobors in Batum used their own remaining money to charter a ship to take them to Cyprus before permission had been arranged for them to land, negotiations with the Colonial office were almost derailed. The Colonial Office demanded £22,000 – eventually beaten down to £16,500 – as security before allowing the passengers to disembark. The Friends’ Committee managed to raise the total sum in guarantees in the space of two days, by sending individual members of the Committee to Birmingham, Norfolk and Bristol to raise money amongst their contacts.160 There were several single

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guarantees of £1,000 or even £2,000 each, but also a large number of much smaller amounts.161 Although dwarfed by the effectiveness of the Quakers, the campaign for the Doukhobor emigration played an important part in the development and self-image of the Tolstoyan movement at its high-water mark in the 1890s. It strengthened networks, provided a reason for visits and prompted the exchange of literature and correspondence. The Doukhobors provided a concrete example, it seemed, of the ideal that the Tolstoyan movement was based on. In a letter of 1897, the Croydon Tolstoyans thanked the Doukhobors for the example they had set, which was helping them to hold fast to the ideals they held in common. They asked the Doukhobors to think of them as a ‘great host of present and future sympathisers’ with their cause. Each of the individuals or centres described in this chapter had their own emphases and their own specific concerns: the denunciation of the state, in the case of Schmitt; or peace and vegetarianism, in the case of the Dutch Tolstoyans. Nevertheless, their connection to Tolstoy and increasing connection to each other in the 1890s and 1900s gave them a real sense of an emerging Christian anarchist movement: one with a vigorous international presence and a strong future – inspired by the true understanding of Christ’s teaching – to look forward to. In 1895, John Kenworthy wrote enthusiastically to Tolstoy to thank him for putting him in touch with Glasgow-based sympathizer Alexander MacDonald. ‘One by one’, he wrote, ‘we are coming to know others who are like-minded with us, and our audience is distinctly widening. It is hardly describable in words, but one feels that the new life, the new spirit, is moving on every side.’162 Tolstoy reminded Kenworthy that while their own enterprises and attempts to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth were valuable, so too was the international network – past, present and future. Precious is not that community which we may organise at Toula or Croydon with the help of those near to us in time and space, although such a community may also have its object and signification, but precious is that community of men of all

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times and all nations, who unite in the truth, in which I have been brought into communion with you, so distant from me in space and time, and amongst others with you.163 This chapter has demonstrated the ways in which the Tolstoyan network operated beyond national boundaries. The following chapters will examine the activities and the convictions of Tolstoyan Christian anarchists in Britain and beyond, and will explore the ways in which they looked: backward, to past heroes; outwards, to sympathetic contexts; and forwards, to the future manifestation of their ultimate ambition, the Kingdom of God on earth.

CHAPTER 4 TOLSTOYISM IN PRACTICE: COMMUNITIES, SOCIETIES AND PUBLISHING ENTERPRISES

Tolstoyan Communities The Tolstoyan emphasis on brotherhood and bread-labour and the desire to act only in accordance with their conscience made establishing or joining an agricultural colony a logical step for many Tolstoyans. They sought to separate themselves from the existing competitive conditions of society, but also to demonstrate to that society how an alternative order might operate. Tolstoyan Christian anarchists were not alone in this ambition. Communitarian experiments proliferated in the late nineteenth century, each with their own rationale. In the United States as many as 150 such communities were established between 1860 and 1918, prompting Emerson to comment that there was ‘not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket’.1 Many were contemporaneous with the Tolstoyan experiments. The Ruskin colony in Tennessee, founded by Julius Augustus Wayland in 1894, operated as a cooperative colony but was socialist and secular in its outlook, with a strong focus on structure and organization – the colony was set up as a corporation and each colonist became a shareholder, owning a certain amount of stock.2

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In Britain the Tolstoyans had close links with both the Starnthwaite cooperative colony in Cumbria (1892– 1901) and the anarcho-communist colony at Clousden Hill outside Newcastle (1895– 1902), and they advertised and exchanged personnel and speakers with both.3 In Holland, Frederik Van Eeden urged the establishment of cooperative, self-sufficient farms where those who were out of work would be able to find employment. His colony ‘Walden’ at Bussum (1898–1907) was an inspiration for the Vrede group, despite the differences in their ideas, and they located their own colony at Blaricum close by.4 For the Tolstoyans in Britain and in the Netherlands, establishing a presence ‘on the land’ seemed a natural progression in their activities; an opportunity to put their beliefs into practice. In the United States, the Christian Commonwealth took its inspiration not only from Tolstoy but from a broad foundation of American social and communitarian movements, and from Henry George, Edward Bellamy and George Herron. Nevertheless the Commonwealth’s principles were soundly non-resistant and they counted several prominent Tolstoyans among their leadership and associates. In the Transvaal, Gandhi and Kallenbach founded Tolstoy Farm, and at San Bernado in Chile, a ‘Tolstoy colony’ was established by Fernando Santivan, Augosto d’Halmar and Julio Ortiz de Zarate in 1903.5 In other parts of the world, however, a colony did not seem such a necessary part of the movement. In Finland, for example, Armo Nokkola tells us that Tolstoyism, while it was very influential, did not manifest itself in colonial experiments. And a young Tolstoyan in Germany described that country as ‘a country of scholars. New thought here finds its way into books, pamphlets, and articles, rarely into colonies’.6 Tolstoy’s own attitude to these communal experiments developed with experience. The virtues of getting ‘back to the land’ in an agricultural colony seemed to Tolstoy’s followers to be implicit in his teaching. Indeed, Tolstoy’s philosophy indirectly inspired later communal enterprises, such as the kibbutz movement in Israel.7 Nevertheless, nowhere in his writings had Tolstoy recommended this course of action – except perhaps in the short story Work While Ye Have the Light, which he told Aylmer Maude he only ever thought

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of with shame.8 In 1908, by which time it was clear that many Tolstoyan colony projects had ended in failure, he articulated his disillusionment in conversation with Aleksandr Goldenveizer, telling him that: One ought not to separate oneself from other people. If there is anything good in a man, let that light be spread about him wherever he lives. What numbers of people settled in communities, yet nothing came of it! All their energies went at first into external arrangement of life, and when at length they settled down, there began to be quarrels and gossip, and it all fell to pieces . . .9 In the 1890s when these projects were flourishing, however, Tolstoy took a keen if cautious interest in them. He followed the progress of the Christian Commonwealth closely. In a letter to George Gibson, one of its founding members, he explained his reservations as follows: The contradictions between his surroundings and his convictions are very painful for a man who is sincere in his Christian faith, and therefore the organization of communities seems to such a man the only means of delivering himself from these contradictions. But this is an illusion. Every community is a small island in the midst of an ocean of unchristian conditions of life, so that the Christian relations exist only between members of the colony but outside that must remain unchristian, otherwise the colony would not exist for a moment. And therefore to live in community cannot save a Christian from the contradiction between his conscience and his life. I do not mean to say that I do not approve of communities such as your commonwealth, or that I do not think them to be a good thing. On the contrary, I approve of them with all my heart and am very interested in your commonwealth and wish it the greatest success. I think that every man who can free himself from the conditions of worldly life without breaking the ties of love – love the main

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principle in the name of which he seeks new forms of life – I think such a man not only must, but naturally join people who have the same beliefs and try to live up to them. If I were free I would immediately even at my age join such a colony. I only wished to say that the mere forming of communities is not a solution for the Christian problem, but is only one of the means of its solution . . . The ideal will be attained only when every man in the whole world will say: Why should I sell my services and buy yours?. If mine are greater than yours I owe them to you, because if there is in the whole world one man who does not think and act by this principle, and who, will take and keep by violence, what he can take from others, no man can live a true Christian life, as well in a community as outside it. We cannot be saved separately; we must be saved together. And this can be attained only through the modification of the conception of life i.e. the faith of all men; and to this end we must work all together – men living in the world as well as men living in communities.10 In fact, most colonies of this kind did not intend to separate themselves from society. They had grander aspirations – to act as centres of the kind of light Tolstoy described, and spread that light into society. Their founders were well-versed in debates about the merits and drawbacks of separating oneself from competitive society. The vigorous discussions between Bruce Wallace, Kenworthy and St John about abstention from political life and about the value or otherwise of manual labour seems only to have strengthened the British Tolstoyans’ conviction that they were doing the right thing in ‘coming out of the old order’.11 The founders of the Christian Commonwealth had been brought together by a debate on precisely the same issue in the pages of the Christian socialist journal The Kingdom. While their opponents opposed the separatist tendency of the communitarian idea, John Chipman, George Gibson and Ralph Albertson were united in their agreement on the necessity of such separation. This meeting of minds led to their decision to found a cooperative colony.12 Albertson’s view was that ‘Poverty and ignorance and crime and degradation . . . would

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increase around Jane Addams and Graham Taylor faster than they could ameliorate them. The only hope . . . was in separation and segregation.’13 Or, as Gibson explained it in his response to Tolstoy: . . . if two or more families do not begin to live the life of love, it cannot spread and reorganize society and make it Christian. The individual can not remain in the midst of the selfish struggle without being involved in it, without partaking of its sins and plagues. It seems to me, wherever modern machinery and capital have taken the power of independent Christian action away from the individual and compelled him to gather his living through the selfish machinery processes, prices, relations, he is called of God to come out of such evil combination (as in Rev. 18); and if he be too poor and helpless to support life apart for himself and family, they must be redeemed, by those who have means.14 Gibson, said Albertson, was the most ‘thorough-going Tolstoyan’ of the group. In his previous career he had been the editor of Nebraska’s Populist newspaper. He was concerned primarily with the problems created by selfish industrialism, and in the pages of his newspaper (which he renamed The Wealth Makers) he promoted ‘many-sided cooperation’ rather than ‘single-handed competition’. Gibson believed that Populist and Christian principles were (or ought to be) essentially the same – an interesting example of the position Tolstoyism could occupy on the fringes of a mainstream political movement.15 By the time of his involvement in the Christian Commonwealth, Gibson told Tolstoy that he was ‘entirely committed to Christ’s non-resistant teachings’, and that the other editors and writers associated with the Social Gospel were becoming ‘more and more possessed with the truth of love’.16 Ralph Albertson, who was the Commonwealth’s orator, had been the pastor at the Congregational Church in Springfield, Ohio – although by the time of the Kingdom debate he had left to join the Willard Cooperative Colony in North Carolina.17 Always an unconventional preacher, Albertson was heavily influenced by Christian socialist George Herron, particularly his ‘Message of Jesus

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to Men of Wealth’, a sermon in which he condemned the self-interest, immorality and injustice of modern American society. Despite being struck by the truth of Herron’s message, Albertson was frustrated at his reluctance to take practical action and his resignation to being a voice in the wilderness. For Albertson, this did not go far enough. Hull House does not go far enough. The new Socialist party does not go far enough. Trade Unions and Single Tax and cooperation and charity and education all fall short or actually go astray. I believe that nothing will cure industrial iniquity short of the life of Jesus here and now . . .18 Albertson was also deeply affected by a conversation with Ernest Crosby about Tolstoy and Tolstoyism, in Chicago during the Pullman Strike of 1894.19 The Commonwealth entertained a range of political and religious views. One member rather uncharacteristically aimed at a reunion between the Commonwealth and the Episcopal Church, in which he was a minister. The colonists were committed to the principle of nonresistance, but shied away from the term ‘anarchism’, and their project was too highly structured for the term to sit easily upon it. Work was carefully organized into departments, including: agriculture, building, lumbering, orchard and nursery (Prof. Damon); educational (Sue Faye); extension (Albertson); and poultry, dairy and housekeeping (Mrs Brown). Business meetings were held every Monday to discuss progress. They elected a president and drew up a constitution, which began simply as follows: The recognised unalterable organic law of the Christian Commonwealth shall be: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbour asthyself. Membership in this body shall be open to all and never be denied to any who come to us in the spirit of love, unselfishness, and true fellowship.20

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but was formalized at the beginning of 1899 in an extensive form, along with a covenant which members had to sign, as follows: I accept as the law of my life Christ’s law, that I shall love my neighbor as myself. I will use, hold, or dispose of all my property, my labor and my income according to the dictates of love for the happiness of all who need. I will not withhold for any selfish ends aught that I have from the fullest service that love inspires. As quickly as I may be able I will withdraw myself from the selfish competitive strife and devote myself to the cooperative life and labor of a local Christian Commonwealth. As a member of this organisation I will work according to my ability in labor together with God for the production of goods for human happiness.21 The colony was established on a 930-acre plantation 12 miles east of Columbus in Muscogee County, Georgia; the result of a scouting trip undertaken by Albertson and T. C. Mackenzie through Georgia in a horse-drawn grocer’s wagon in the autumn of 1896. The location seemed promising: ‘the climate, the soil, the transportation, power, labor, the scarcity of capital, local conditions of neglect – all spelled opportunity and advantages for enterprise and hard work’.22 John Chipman put up $1,000 of the $4,000 cost of the land, and committed to paying three further annual instalments of the same amount.23 Like all such enterprises the Commonwealth’s first year was a pioneer year, in which ‘Preachers, professors, and poets . . . worked side by side with farmers and mechanics, shrinking from nothing.’24 They were occupied with the building of houses for families and communal accommodation for unmarried men, and with the establishment of an orchard (growing plums, peaches, pears, apples, cherries, prunes, figs, apricots and quinces), a nursery, dairy farming, a sawmill and eventually a cotton mill (which produced the first ‘cloth of love’ in early 1899).25 There were 90 people at the Commonwealth by the beginning of 1898. A Commonwealth post office and a railway station were established. There were social events

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Figure 4.1 Group photograph of members of the Christian Commonwealth. [Photograph courtesy of the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library/University of Georgia Libraries]

and reading groups, including a Tolstoy reading group, and in January 1898 the colony school opened in a four-room school house run by Sue Faye, with three assistants.26 Their plans were not modest or exclusive. They wanted to start a cooperative store in Columbus, ‘on something near the Rochdale plan’. They planned to locate a branch colony on the Gulf coast and build their own steamer to connect them and bring more raw materials and food supplies to the Commonwealth. We are planning also for a university, an industrial school, a brotherhood school, where all branches of useful knowledge, art, science, literature, mechanical skill, agriculture, etc., shall be taught, to the end that all individual talents and powers of service may be cultivated, trained, educated, perfected, so that utmost service of every sort may be rendered. In this university,

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not a part, but all our children are to be educated, in service, and the grace, dignity, divineness and love-creating power of free brotherhood labor of every sort, shall be upon all strongly impressed.27 The Christian Commonwealth envisaged setting up new communities to overcome the problem of isolation – they were in touch with individuals in Virginia, Tennessee, Colorado and Florida, who were all suggesting new locations.28 Explaining the Commonwealth’s plans to an audience in Chicago in 1898, George Gibson said: ‘We have not put ourselves away from the world and its needs, but have taken it upon our hearts, and are pouring ourselves out to meet human needs.’29 They cooperated with the local black population, but could not let their friends join the Commonwealth for fear of the reaction of local whites. This would ‘endanger the safety of the movement . . . It would not matter if we employed negroes, but if we allowed them to work on an equality with us we should have to leave the country’.30 At the height of their experiment, the Commonwealth was championed by a number of leading American reformist figures. Jane Addams, George Herron and Ernest Crosby all visited. Nils Olas Nelson, whose manufacturing firm housed, educated and offered a share of the profits to its workforce in a purpose-built cooperative village in LeClaire, Illinois, set up a fund for outsiders who were willing to contribute to paying off the Commonwealth’s mortgage.31 He was also interested in founding a new Commonwealth at LeClaire, alongside the N. O. Nelson manufacturing company. It was suggested that some existing Commonwealth members might go to get the project off the ground, if others also volunteered.32 Ralph Albertson remembered that the praise the Commonwealth received from idealists who did not join it contributed substantially to the maintenance of morale at the colony. ‘People from “the outside world” wrote such warm commendation, such admiration and love that frequently their letters were read out in the general meeting. Rich men, businessmen, college professors, even two men prominent in politics, added their words of praise.’33 Likewise, the Commonwealth was regarded as a model and a part of their

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movement by Christian anarchists in Europe. It was recommended by Tolstoy to his correspondents, and its progress reported in sympathetic newspapers.34 In January 1899, The Social Gospel printed a letter received from T. Altaresky in Palestine, asking for copies of the newspaper and expressing his earnest desire to join such a commonwealth as theirs.35 The British movement hosted two colonies – one at Purleigh in Essex and another at Whiteway, near Stroud, in Gloucestershire – as well as a number of smaller scale collective enterprises. The first mention of any kind of agricultural initiative in The New Order referred to the idea, mooted in March 1895, of a ‘Brotherhood Camp’ – on land to be purchased near Croydon, as a place to go in the summer and to grow market garden produce for the Brotherhood Store.36 This market garden or allotment idea persisted through 1895 and, although nothing came of it, it was clear that the ideal of self-sufficiency through ‘bread-labour’ was increasingly on Kenworthy’s mind. In an editorial in The New Order in June, Kenworthy wrote of ‘the need of honest labour as the beginning of a right life’, and lamented ‘the fields quarter-tilled, or lying waste, while myriads of people who are not allowed to work are perishing for food and clothing in the cities’.37 The following month he stressed the need to match the foothold that the Croydon Brotherhood had established in industry, with a similar enterprise on the land.38 In the spring of 1896, following Kenworthy’s visit to Tolstoy, the issue was raised again in the context of a discussion of the Clousden Hill colony. The paper praised the colonists at Clousden Hill, describing their enterprise as ‘precisely the sort of effort we are now trying to make at Croydon’. They had started at the other end of the social structure, in industry, and had gathered a body of people to support and provide a market for such a colony, but they now hoped to establish one, ‘on a small scale at all events’.39 In June 1896, a brief announcement was made that ‘we are now making arrangements for the acquisition of some land (about twenty acres)’, and in November 1896 they were finally able to announce the purchase of ten acres of arable land, with a frontage for houses, at Purleigh, near Maldon in Essex.40

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1896 – 7 was Purleigh’s ‘pioneer year’. Hubert Hammond, one of the first on to the land in November 1896, reported the following autumn that there were now ‘nearly fifty people (including the fifteen actually on the colony) scattered about the district, who have all come into Essex with some desire to live worthy lives’.41 For the first six months or so there were three young men, and during last year the number of colonists increased – a boat builder and carpenter, an auctioneer, a tailor, a professor of chemistry, an engineer, two bank clerks, a Russian who had worked in several communities in Russia, and who had learned cabinet making, and a practical gardener and his wife, daughter and three sons (the youngest a boy of 14), making altogether 14 actual colonists. There are also two men working with us for a time. One is thinking of leaving shortly, having found the life unsuited to him, and the other after having acquired some notion of the way we carry on this enterprise, has an idea of starting a somewhat similar affair in the West of England. In addition there are about a dozen people very closely connected with the colony who live near and help in various ways – mainly work on the colony, monetary help, and the encouragement and sympathy of people with the same view of life.42 Besides the practical work of the colony – planting, the construction of a workshop, a greenhouse, henhouses and of course accommodation for the residents – the Purleigh colonists enjoyed an increasingly active social life as more colonists and sympathizers joined them. Music evenings, reading groups and lectures (on horticulture, for example) were held. Entertainments were also organized in Purleigh, in a room in the village inn – recitations, readings and songs – and at the first gathering Tolstoy’s Ivan the Fool was read. The colony generated local and national curiosity, featuring in reports

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in The Daily News, The Clarion, The Manchester Guardian and The Essex County Chronicle in August and September 1898. Purleigh was a magnet for aspiring colonists in Britain, as Percy Redfern reminds us.43 Like their later counterparts in the Commonwealth, the Purleigh pioneers had rehearsed their reasons for beginning a land colony in discussion with representatives of the wider socialist movement. The only way, they felt, to establish their lives on truly Christian lines and to get into a ‘right relationship’ with their fellow men, was to remove themselves from capitalist society and to supply their own needs through ‘bread labour’. James Penstone, who visited Purleigh in the autumn of 1897, articulated motives that were broadly shared by those involved in the colony project: My object in going to the Purleigh Colony was the same as going to the Brotherhood Church – To find out how I could get my living, to be honest, true and just in all my dealings, to wrong no one in thought word or deed. So far as I understand, this can best be done in a voluntary cooperative group. Opportunity for all to begin on the land for production, distribution and exchange. A colony where there would be no greed of gain, or lust of power, or dread of want – where women would be on an equal footing with men – a social life where hunger, cold, prostitution, intemperance, poverty, crime, panic and industrial terror have been abolished.44 This shared vision was complicated, however, by the Tolstoyan emphasis on ‘independence in thought and action’ – a principle that a new colonist in 1898 described as one of the cornerstones of life at Purleigh.45 The colonists’ views on individual aspects of the Tolstoyan vision – on diet, on sex, on whether to use money, stamps or railways – varied widely.46 Michael Holman identifies a number of overarching yet conflicting imperatives faced at Purleigh: the desire

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to proselytize and win local converts; the obligation to allow entry to all who wished to join; and the need to get the colony onto a selfsufficient footing.47 William Hone, the only colonist with real agricultural expertise, confessed that he was ‘not convinced that the whole Tolstoyan view of life was correct . . . Some of Tolstoy’s conclusions I thought were overstrained, and others I did not accept at all’. He was concerned that they should actually spend enough time on the practical work so as to be able to live by the results of their efforts: Much time spent in meditation coupled with vague or visionary ideas that somehow things will come out all right will never accomplish much in the direction of building up Colonies. Meditation is doubtless good in its proper proportion to other duties, I would not like to be understood as disregarding the spiritual side, but I personally do not admire that kind of spirituality that disregards the material, or only considers its own development. There are those in this movement who will give up and lose all material belongings and still go on working in it rather than actively object to the action of others whatever course they pursue. Others of us are not prepared to stand by and ignore the practical working side, and consequently we expect all concerned to do the best they are capable of.48 Arnold Eiloart on the other hand, argued that work should always be done in the spirit of love. It seemed to him that work had become ‘the manifestation of another spirit – fear that we shan’t get enough to eat’. This could only hinder the growth of love, and was a ‘wrong spirit’.49 As Holman points out, the emphasis on free discussion and unanimity in decision-making was always likely to favour the ‘talkers’ rather than the ‘workers’.50 The foundation of the breakaway Tolstoyan colony at Whiteway in 1898 was initiated in part by a dispute about whether prospective colonists should be vetted or automatically admitted. The new project was funded by Samuel Bracher, a Quaker journalist who had

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thought of joining the Purleigh colony but objected to the decision, taken in July 1898, to reject the application of two young men who had been living at the colony for the past month. Bracher took with him a number of key Purleigh residents – William Sinclair and Sudbury Protheroe, who had been there from the start, and Joseph Burtt and Arnold Eiloart.51 Nellie Shaw – who had never become a Purleigh resident, but now joined the Whiteway group – recalled the dispiriting effect that the emphasis on the colonies had on the Brotherhood enterprises in Croydon.52 In the summer of 1899, she and Lucy Andrews finally closed their Brotherhood Dressmaking Company (the only remaining industry connected to the Brotherhood Church) and moved to Gloucestershire to join Whiteway.53 At Purleigh, Herbert Archer admitted that some ‘temporary constraint’ was caused by the establishment of the new colony at Whiteway, but: in spite of the slight tension that has been felt we believe that all concerned in the formation of the new group are actuated by high motives and are sincerely desirous of furthering the same ultimate end that we are ourselves striving for. The Colony has always hoped to be able to render assistance in the formation of new groups as occasion required, and this development, though earlier than was anticipated, is, in a sense, a realisation of this hope.54 At Whiteway, the colonists busied themselves with ploughing, sowing and baking (chiefly the domain of Sudbury Protheroe), and acquired two cows for milk. In the summer of 1899, Nellie Shaw described their diet as consisting of: Bread and a little butter, porridge and tea or cocoa for breakfast; beans, lentils or some other pulse, cooked with onions and potatoes are the chief dishes at dinnertime, varied occasionally with rice, rhubarb, or wholemeal pudding, or bread and cheese. We never have jam or cake unless it is given to us, and then it is much appreciated.55

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Although the colonists proselytized in the neighbourhood and engaged (amongst themselves and with the groups at Purleigh and Leeds) in debates about the correct attitudes to diet, money and sex, they resisted any definition of their beliefs. The only qualification for membership, Shaw told an audience in Croydon, was ‘a desire to be with us, to base life on a footing of “goodwill” to all men’.56 The Vrede group had both a rented house in Amsterdam, where they carried on ‘city-work’ (inviting people for discussion, disseminating literature), and, from 1900, a colony at Blaricum. The land on which the colony was based – 11 hectares of arable land and some woodland – was purchased by Jacob van Rees. Prospective members of the colony of the Internationale Broederschap began by living at a cottage in nearby Laren, while they constructed accommodation and began work on the colony land. Ortt reported that: the members are of various classes of society; there are labourers as well as men of high education; but all are one in the aim of living in the Spirit of Christ. We are all vegetarians, teetotallers, non-resistants, anti-militarists, and opposed to vivisection; and so we feel a strong fellowship with Tolstoy and the Doukhobors and the ideas expressed in the NEW ORDER, the ‘Herald of the Golden Age’ and kindred journals.57 Henriette Hendrix, a journalist for the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, visited both Walden and Blaricum in the autumn of 1900. At Walden, Van Eeden explained to her the key differences between the two communities. Walden remained within society, he said, whereas the colonists at the International Brotherhood sought to remove themselves from it. Walden did not reject money or the use of modern technology, whereas the International Brotherhood did. Walden also had no objection to buying produce or to making a profit, providing that it was devoted to the expansion of their community or the assistance of others.58At Blaricum, Hendrix felt the presence of Tolstoyan ideology keenly. Kylstra told her that the colonists called themselves Christian anarchists and principally

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followed Tolstoy’s ideas: they were abolitionists, vegetarians and antimilitarists.59 There were readings from Resurrection in the evenings and a portrait of Tolstoy hung in the library.60 The Dutch colonists were also keenly aware of Tolstoy’s reservations about the community experiment, however. In an article for Vrede on the establishment of the Blaricum colony, Van Mierop set a cautious tone. He quoted extensively from Tolstoy’s letter to the colonists at the Christian Commonwealth, and acknowledged the duty to ‘maintain love among all we meet and mix with’. Like Gibson, Van Mierop saw community life as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. He recognized that many things – including failed harvests and disagreements amongst those involved – might lead to the failure of the colony. Indeed, if a better way to live in the spirit of Jesus could be identified or if their present experiment came to compromise their principles, then he believed they should be prepared to give the project up.61 These Christian Anarchist communitarian experiments were an important part of the Tolstoyan movement of the 1890s and 1900s. They exchanged membership and attracted international recruits. Purleigh recruited a Danish conscientious objector in 1898. Blaricum hosted an Englishman known simply as ‘Bob’ who had briefly been resident at Purleigh. Whiteway became home to Frantisˇek Sedlak, who had travelled to Britain on Tolstoy’s advice, and later to Belgian anarchist Eugene Gaspard Marin.62 In the summer of 1899, Daniel Franks and his wife, members of Bruce Wallace’s Brotherhood Church, arrived at the Christian Commonwealth in Georgia.63 In the context of the Doukhobor campaign, a catalogue of leading Tolstoyans – Vladimir Chertkov, Pavel Biriukov, Dmitri Khilkov, Johannes van der Veer and Albert Sˇkarvan – spent time at Purleigh. Sympathizers travelled to visit the colonies: New Zealand Tolstoyan Harold Williams visited the Blaricum colony, Purleigh and the Derby Tolstoyans once he arrived in Europe.64 They provided a practical example – a physical expression of Tolstoyism that could be visited, reported on, discussed and recommended.

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Tolstoy Societies For those who did not go so far as to join or launch a communitarian experiment, the broadly contemporary Tolstoyan ‘societies’ offered a place to discuss Tolstoy’s works and ideas and to meet likeminded people. There were several kinds of Tolstoy society. They could be literary – an extension of both the fashion for Russian literature and the late nineteenth-century enthusiasm for the likes of Shakespeare, Carlyle and Wordsworth societies. One 1890s short story about the social circle of a group of society ladies caricatured this phenomenon: Minnie said we must get up a Tolstoi Club; she said the Russians were the coming race, and Tolstoi was their greatest writer, and the most Christian of moralists (at least, she had read so), and that everybody was talking about him, and we should be behindhand if we could not. So we turned one of our clubs, which had nothing particular on hand just then, into one; and besides Tolstoi, we read other Russian novelists, Turgenieff and – that man whose name is so hard to pronounce, who writes all about convicts and – and other criminals.65 Tolstoy’s name could be loosely applied to clubs with broader reformist interests, in these cases being essentially interchangeable with the names of other reformers – Ruskin, for example. Tolstoy’s name signified a bold statement of principle, even if that principle was not fully carried into the activities of the society. A ‘Tolstoi Club’ was in existence in Boston in the late 1880s and early 1890s, coordinated by Edward Everett Hale.66 Hale was a keen reader and advocate of Tolstoy’s works, but was also involved in a wide range of philanthropic and reform movements – the most prominent of which were his ‘Lend a Hand’ clubs. The name of the Tolstoi club seems to have been the subject of criticism.67 The same name was suggested for a youth group set up at around the same time, but other suggestions included Benjamin Franklin, and the organizers eventually settled on ‘The Paul Revere Club’. It was thought better to let the boys suggest their own name, ‘as long as it was a good one’.68

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An interesting forerunner of the Tolstoy societies are the much more organized British network of Ruskin societies, which had branches in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and Aberdeen, and which engaged in civic and social reform activities, as well as reading and discussion.69 While Ruskin encouraged the establishment of Ruskin societies (though he guarded against ‘isms’, and protested that he could not ‘easily or decorously’ promote them himself),70 Tolstoy was overtly hostile to the foundation of societies in his name, just as he was to the idea of a movement that followed his ideas specifically. Of course, many centres of Christian anarchist thought hosted Tolstoy reading groups or ‘Sermon on the Mount’ classes. The Crank’s Table, an informal London-based meeting and dining circle, was devoted to the discussion of Tolstoy’s ideas. In England, Tolstoy societies operated in London and in Manchester – both closely linked to the existing Tolstoyan movement. The London Tolstoyan Society was founded in 1898 and from 1 January 1899 was holding regular weekly Sunday meetings in the premises of the West London School of Music, 78 and 80 Edgware Road, at the corner of Stourcliffe Street. The lecture room was above a corner shop, up a steep flight of stone stairs and was equipped with a stage, a piano and an assortment of musical and theatrical props, most of which were apparently covered in dust. Charles Daniel, who was involved in the organization of the meetings, ran a bookstall at the back of the room.71 Dorothy Richardson described the arrival of a fictional enthusiast at the society as follows: A notice of a meeting of London Tolstoyans. We rushed out in the pouring rain to the Edgware Road and found nothing at the address but a barred-up corner shop-front. Michael wanted to go home. I told him to go and stood staring at the shop waiting for it to turn into the Tolstoyans. I knew it would. It did . . . I turned down a side street and found a doorway, a bead of gas shining inside just showing a stone staircase. We crept up and found a bare room, almost in darkness, a small gas jet, and a few rows of kitchen chairs and a few people sitting scattered about. A young man at a piano picked out a few bars of Grieg and

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played them over and over again. Then the meeting began. Dora, reading a paper on Tolstoi’s ideas. Well, I felt I was hearing the whole truth spoken aloud for the first time . . .72 In 1899 and 1900, most of the lectures were delivered by Kenworthy, either on texts by Tolstoy (What I Believe, The Gospel in Brief and What Then Must We Do? all came up for discussion) or on related topics: ‘Socialist Economics and Our Teaching’, ‘Industrial Development’, ‘John Ruskin’, ‘The Early Christians’ or ‘The Understanding of Life’. Other Tolstoyans were also drafted in. Aylmer Maude spoke on ‘The War’, and on Tolstoy; Frank Henderson spoke on ‘The War on Commerce’ and on Buddhism; and Arthur St John spoke on the logistics of the Doukhobor emigration. Jane Holah gave a lecture on ‘Legislation and Progress’; William Hare on ‘The Politics of Today’; and Charles Daniel on ‘Concerning NonResistance’. Chertkov also addressed the society on at least one occasion.73 Speakers were often solicited from amongst the audience and so the society’s meetings became ‘a nursery for budding speakers’.74 There was ‘no formal membership, no tenets, no subscription, no president. There was the room. And there was an honorary secretary, who made it his business to solicit the services of the lecturers and to send notices of the meetings to such papers as published them free of charge’.75 The Manchester Tolstoy Society was established by Percy Redfern in the autumn of 1900. It met in a room in the Ancoats University settlement and in the summer of 1901 began to hold open-air meetings. The society had no formal programme, but they summarized their discussions in a record that could be lent to interested parties.76 W. Simpson was the chair, Redfern the secretary and George Howarth the treasurer.77 Chertkov lectured for them and Aylmer Maude spoke on several occasions, though not in complete endorsement of Tolstoy’s philosophy. Amongst themselves, the members debated the universal applicability of Tolstoy’s teaching and of the theory of non-resistance, and they agreed to discuss all aspects of Tolstoy’s thought including the treatment of sex relationships ‘in a brotherly and sisterly tone’. The society kept a

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Figure 4.2 Society.

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A flyer advertising the meetings of the London Tolstoyan

library of books by and about Tolstoy, and distributed both their own leaflets and sympathetic material (Free Age Press pamphlets and copies of The Candlestick) to sympathizers, but also at ‘Church of England meetings’.78 Redfern explained to a fairly hostile Tolstoy in a letter of August 1901 what had prompted him to set up the society. He had, by his ‘own free will and learning’, come to a conception of life broadly the same as Tolstoy’s. He wanted to act according to his principles and to help others avoid the delusions he had escaped. ‘And the practical value of my thoughts and feelings I find increased both for myself and others through association.’79 Frances Worland, a regular at the London Tolstoyan Society, recalled similar feelings. She, and many others, it seemed, were looking for something ‘that seldom comes in solitude but only when “two or three are gathered together.”’80 While she did not fully accept the Tolstoyan worldview, she was fascinated by the society’s meetings. ‘Once found’, she said, ‘I never

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missed a Sunday, except when out of town, for the remaining two years of the Society’s existence. Not that I found there what I was seeking. But I found there those who were seeking that which I sought.’81 Worland judged the average attendance at the London Tolstoyan Society’s meetings to be 20 persons – 30 was regarded as a good number and 50 was a crowd. She only once saw the room (which could accommodate around 100 people) full.82 Her figures are supported by Charles Daniel’s contemporary estimate that there were ‘something like 20 to 30 people’ in regular attendance.83 Percy Redfern reckoned that between 60 and 100, and on occasion 150, people attended the open-air meetings of the Manchester Tolstoy Society.84 Some of the London society’s membership had been ‘members of the old group at Croydon, out of which sprung the Purleigh and Whiteway colonies’.85 Worland recalled that certain people never failed to appear each Sunday night, whereas others came irregularly, but still continued to come. She described them, rather unflatteringly, as a group of the disgruntled. Disgruntled ‘Christians’ and disgruntled rationalists. Disgruntled individualists and disgruntled socialists. Disgruntled anarchists. And the very lonely; and the absolutely ‘down and out’, who were disgruntled with life itself. Tolstoy was the thread round which they all crystallized. For Tolstoy was Christian, rationalist, individualist, socialist and anarchist – all of these in their deeper meanings, none of them as generally understood. Ranged always on the side of the unfortunate; himself disgruntled with life as he seemed forced to live it, and lonely as those are lonely whose lives are one long unresolved conflict. The ‘Christians’ were seeking a religion freed from what they had come to regard as superstitious accretion. The rationalists were becoming alarmed at what they were beginning to sense as the moral effect of education in which religion had no place. The socialists were visualising a world enchained in

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bureaucracy and finding that it did not sort with liberty, equality and fraternity. The individualists were doubting if, perchance, it might not be required of them to be their brother’s keeper. The anarchists were beginning to see the futility of terrorism. And the lonely and the ‘down and out’ came for companionship and fellowship. Was there any other place in England, I wondered one night, where a professional man who lived in Hyde Park Gardens could sit in the same row with a man from the ‘doss-house’ round the corner, and both be unconscious (for the time being, at any rate) of anything but the subject under discussion.86 While they attracted a membership, lecture societies did not fulfil their members’ ambitions to live according to their principles. Although W. Simpson envisaged the objects of the Manchester society being ‘the study of Tolstoy’s teaching’, ‘the dissemination of his teachings’ and ‘the regulation of our lives in accordance with them’, only the first of these aims was agreed by all the members.87 Worland recalled that on one occasion, at the end of a meeting of the London Tolstoyan Society, a: benevolent looking white-haired old man said gently: ‘All this what we’ve been hearing is very interesting and very beautiful, but what I want to know is, what are we going for to do?’ ‘Do?’ said a good-tempered looking working tailor, ‘do? Why, lose the last ‘bus if we stop ‘ere much longer!’88

Publishing Enterprises There were other means, however, by which aspiring Tolstoyans could contribute to the movement. Charles Daniel, who established a publishing business in 1902 with ‘the express purpose of propagating Tolstoy’s ideas’,89 was described by one biographer as ‘not a beginner

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or finisher of things, but a go-between – one who, through the medium of the printed word, put one mind in touch with another’.90 Although once tempted to join a Tolstoyan colony, Daniel ‘instead dug myself into a publishing business filled to the brim with anxieties and no cash. I was very nearly a no-moneyite but not from conviction or choice’.91 Daniel had begun his career in publishing by working for Walter Scott. Imogen Gassert identifies three strands in Daniel’s own publishing endeavours. Firstly, the publication of the works of those he considered to be ‘great thinkers of his own and earlier times’ – first and foremost Tolstoy, but also Rousseau, Emerson, Mazzini, Swedenborg and St Augustine. Secondly, his own serial publications – The Tolstoyan, The Crank and The Open Road – in which he, his wife and other sympathetic writers (including, in an example of the longevity of international Tolstoyan cooperation, Ernest Crosby) expounded their views. These journals embraced multiple contexts and hosted debate on all aspects of the Tolstoyan worldview.92 The final category comprised vanity publishing enterprises, undertaken principally to prop up the finances of the business. In this category, Daniel would publish ‘practically any book that did not actually conflict with his own ideals’.93 During the First World War, his firm earned notoriety as a publisher of stridently pacifist literature and a reputation for issuing material that no other publisher would touch. In 1918, when a young woman offered Stanley Unwin a novel dealing with homosexuality and conscientious objection, he told the author that he did not think any publisher would touch it – ‘the only one who might conceivably do so was C. W. Daniel’. The commitment to producing accessible editions of Tolstoy, and the works of other authors (past and present) sympathetic to the Christian anarchist worldview and its many related contexts, was a function performed by publishing enterprises across the international movement in the 1890s and 1900s. Many of the larger centres of Christian anarchist thought or practice hosted their own publishing house. The Christian Commonwealth press was part of the ‘extension department’ regarded by Gibson and Albertson as ‘the most important department of all’, since it ‘is what keeps us in the world, while not of it’.

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The Vrede printing house sold translations of Tolstoy’s pamphlets – Het Einde Nadert (The Beginning of the End) and Het Koninkrijk Gods is binnen in u (The Kingdom of God is Within You), for example – as well as tracts by members of their own group: Christelijk Anarchisme by Felix Ortt and Lijdelijk Verzet in Theorie en Practijk (Passive Resistance in Theory and Practice), Van der Veer’s account of the history and life of the Doukhobors. They also sold a version of Jeno¨ Henrik Schmitt’s ‘Catechism of the Religion of the Spirit’, translated into Dutch by Louis Bahler. Likewise, the Croydon Brotherhood Church ran their own ‘Brotherhood Publishing Company’ from 1895 onwards. Beginning with Tolstoy’s translations of the gospels – both the full and the summarized versions – they began on those of Tolstoy’s later works that they considered most important, publishing the shorter tracts themselves and relying on Walter Scott to produce the longer texts.94 Their aim was to publish not only Tolstoy but also ‘other literature which best sets forth our convictions and work’.95 These included books and pamphlets written by the members of the Brotherhood Church – for example: Kenworthy’s Slavery Ancient and Modern and Tolstoy: His Teaching and Influence and Nellie Shaw’s Some Impressions of the Sermon on the Mount. Arthur Baker, who ran the ‘New Cooperation News’ column, started a series of his own, the ‘New Moral World’ series, which included pamphlets on likeminded contemporary and predecessor movements – on the Brook Farm cooperative community of the 1840s and on Shakerism, for example. However, publishing Tolstoy’s own writings had an important recruitment function; Kenworthy maintained that ‘it is through the people who have read your writings that we have been able to make ourselves heard’.96 C. W. Daniel made very little of the fact that his publications received substantial praise from Tolstoy.97 For others, however, Tolstoy’s approval was a mark of the authority of their firm’s publications or their journal or pamphlet’s ‘voice’. For Tolstoy himself, it was important ‘not only that his views were presented to as wide an audience as possible but also that they were correctly and consistently presented’.98 He was impressed with the Brotherhood

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Publishing Company’s first publications of his work, and at Chertkov’s instigation wrote fully endorsing their editions of his works: Sympathising with all my heart with the aims of your Brotherhood Publishing Co, I intend to put at your disposition the first translation of all my writings as yet unpublished, as well as forthcoming. Should you find it in any way expedient, as for instance in order to secure for them a wider circulation, to offer the first publication of any of my works to one of the English periodical papers or magazines, and should any pecuniary profit there from ensue, I would desire it to be devoted to the work of your Brotherhood Publishing Company.99 As there was no copyright agreement between England and Russia, pretty much anyone could publish anything they liked. Nevertheless this statement made the company’s close relationship to Tolstoy clear to their readers. Kenworthy considered that the letter ‘put the position of our Co. þ myself here beyond reach of doubt’.100 The Brotherhood Publishing Company’s responsibility for the production of Tolstoy’s philosophical works was rapidly usurped, however, after Vladimir Chertkov’s arrival in Britain. In the first years of Chertkov’s stay in England, he undertook the publication of Russian language materials under his own name and largely under his own steam. Within a couple of years, however, he was giving serious thought to scaling up the English language publication of Tolstoy’s works, and was already advertising himself as the ‘sole agent for the first publication of translations of Count Leo Tolstoy’s writings’. Kenworthy and Henderson, already squabbling amongst themselves over control of both The New Order and the Brotherhood Publishing Company, found themselves jostling for position in what suddenly seemed to be a crowded field. They responded by proposing new schemes for the dissemination of Tolstoy’s works, and pressing Chertkov for cooperation with their existing lines of work.

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Kenworthy was variously suggested to be at work on ‘a wellproduced cloth bound series of reform literature’ or several volumes of ‘a kind of running commentary’ on Tolstoy.101 Henderson continued his production of Tolstoy materials, notionally in friendly competition with Chertkov, but at times deliberately undercutting him.102 As late as 1903, Henderson was still running ‘The Tolstoy Depot’ at 26 Paternoster Square – its telegraphic address was ‘Tolstoyan, London’. It sold copies of Ernest Crosby’s Plain Talk in Psalm and Parable and his Earth For All Calendar.103 With funds supplied by wealthy Russian businessman Aleksandr Konshin, Chertkov launched his new firm in the summer of 1900 under a name suggested by Kenworthy – the Free Age Press. Chertkov’s publishing enterprise had two branches. The first, Izdatel’stvo Svobodnago Slova (the Free Word Press), produced Russian language Tolstoyan materials for dissemination inside and outside Russia. It published the journal Svobodnoe Slovo and an anthology, Svobodnye Listki, and sought to produce complete Russian editions of all Tolstoy’s censored works. The second, the Free Age Press, devoted itself to the production and circulation of Tolstoy’s writings in cheap editions, for an English language readership internationally.104 By the end of 1901 the firm was operating from a new premises at Tuckton House, in Christchurch. The Free Age Press produced the green paper-covered pamphlets so well remembered by Tolstoyan converts like Percy Redfern and Stephen Hobhouse. These were either single works by Tolstoy such as Patriotism and Government, The Slavery of Our Times, and My Confession, or extracts from his diaries and letters compiled by Chertkov, such as Letters to Friends on the Personal Christian Life, and Letters on War.105 The press had considerable international reach. Their publications could be purchased in bookshops in Paris, Nice and Cannes; Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden; Geneva, Lausanne, Berne and Zurich; Rome, Copenhagen and Belgrade; and further afield in Shanghai, Singapore, Yokohama, Port Said and New York City.106 In addition, they shipped copies from their catalogue direct to purchasers in ‘out-ofthe-way places in China, India, North and South America, Japan, Egypt, Malaya, Australia, [and] New Zealand’.107 Now that

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Chertkov was in England, Tolstoy transferred the special relationship regarding his publications to the Free Age Press. He praised the publications for their presentation, price and accessibility to ‘English speaking working people’, and promised to send to the press any future works he produced. A statement to this effect was printed inside the cover of Free Age Press booklets from 1901 onwards.108 Chertkov drew numerous members of the Tolstoyan movement into his service in his publishing enterprises, whether printing (as Johannes van der Veer did while in England in 1899), answering translation queries (Pavel Biriukov, in Switzerland, was sent and answered many of these) or editing and making corrections for their English readership. Both Florence and Jane Holah undertook the latter kind of work and later so did Isabella Fyvie Mayo, who Chertkov particularly trusted to correct his translations in ‘the right spirit’.109 Much of the Free Age Press’s initial success, however, can be credited to Arthur Fifield, a member of the Croydon Brotherhood and formerly an employee of the publishing firm James Bowden, who joined Chertkov as managing editor of his new enterprise in 1900. Fifield did not enter this undertaking lightly. He was conscious that he would be burning his bridges in the city, and was anxious to know that this would be a solid, businesslike enterprise, with enough capital to make it rapidly self-supporting. If this was to be a really serious, well-considered undertaking, he told Chertkov, aimed at spreading the works of Tolstoy and kindred authors as widely as possible, then neither he nor his wife would hesitate to join the enterprise.110 ‘I wanted to be a “good Tolstoyan”’, he later recalled, ‘to be useful in the world, to take little and give much, and not to compete but to originate.’111 Fifield was ‘publisher, manager, joint editor, joint translator, publicity agent, advertising expert, warehouseman, porter, packer, clerk, bookkeeper, office boy and stamplicker, all in one’. Under his management the Free Age Press was not only the best-known, but probably also the most profitable Tolstoyan publishing house. Fifield sent review copies in their hundreds to ‘carefully chosen newspapers of every degree of orthodoxy’, supplied the railway bookstalls with

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publications on sale or return at half of the published price and answered each of the 50 daily letters and orders the same day. His aim, he maintained, was that the ‘sympathisers, the interested, and the booksellers’ would get to know ‘that the service of the Free Age Press, in spite of its idealism, was practical, punctual and efficient’.112 Fifield’s efforts paid off – the firm received some glowing reviews of its publications in its first couple of years and their sales were solid – both through mainstream trade channels and through their own networks. The Clarion sold books for them, as did the Stop the War Committee. By September 1900, they had published 3,000 copies each of six titles and had sold 17,000 of these 18,000 volumes. They had produced and distributed 40,000 propaganda leaflets and 25,000 circulars.113 Aylmer Maude was scathing about the Free Age Press in his Life of Tolstoy, describing it in a first draft as an ‘establishment which had to be fed with bad translations to keep it going’. The press, however, as Fifield pointed out, was a project ‘entirely after Tolstoy’s own heart’ in that it distributed his works widely and cheaply to the people. Tolstoy would not have cared two straws, Fifield remarked, about Maude’s intention to produce ‘a uniform edition at a higher price for the middle classes and well-to-do’.114 Chertkov’s insistence on the no copyright ethic did not make running a Tolstoyan publishing house easy, however. It was difficult to get good translators and to get journal editors to take Free Age Press material (a practice used to generate publicity for the book editions) when they knew it would be issued without copyright. Fifield complained that: Of course I know ‘no copyright’ is the ideal, just as giving the books away without any charge is the ideal, getting the paper made for nothing, composing, printing, binding, distributing, and living without financial relations are also the ideal. And as we compromise on these points, knowing it is compromise, yet yielding because the development of the general consciousness has not yet reached the point where those who feed, clothe, house, make paper, print for us, cease to impose their wills on us – so the events of the last few months have shewn me that

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the human consciousness has also not reached the point where the imposition of our will on newspaper editors, translators, booksellers, can be effected without bad results, both to the ‘writers’ (whether Tolstoy himself or not), those willed upon, and the spread of the ideas.115 Fifield’s relationship with Chertkov, like that of most British Tolstoyans, was stormy and he split with the Free Age Press in 1902, unable to work any longer under the stressful conditions imposed by Chertkov’s constant changes of mind and mood and his attempts to overrule or undermine Fifield’s business decisions. A string of individuals were involved in the management of The Free Age Press and Tuckton House in his wake: Thomas Lawrie, John Davis, Frank Thompson, Ernest Ames (of the Leeds Tolstoyans) and, after Chertkov’s return to Russia, Alexander Sirnis and Ludvig Perno. When Thompson left the press and decided to emigrate to Australia, Aylmer Maude wrote to him that he was hardly surprised, given Chertkov’s track record at alienating his Tolstoyan co-workers. ‘Neither Fifield, Archer, Van de Veer, Zhook, Bontch-Brouevitch, Shkarvan nor myself endured their chains as long as you have done . . . No doubt V. T. means well, but he has too little control over himself to be qualified to exercise control over others.’116 Although publishing output diminished, work continued at Tuckton up to and after the First World War. Chertkov was active in organizing meetings locally and in the 1907 – 8 season was president of the football team which played at ‘the Rookery’, near Tuckton, in green jerseys with black collars and cuffs. Ames was the secretary.117 During the war years, Sirnis was still cooperating where he could with Fifield, Daniel and Florence Holah.118 Fifield launched his own publishing enterprise, which, like Daniel’s, produced material sympathetic to the Tolstoyan spirit. He published a ‘Simple Life Series’ of booklets, which included works by Tolstoy (True and False Life), Thoreau (On the Duty of Civil Disobedience and Walden: My Life in the Woods) and Ernest Crosby (Tolstoy and his Message and Tolstoy as a Schoolmaster). His catalogue included texts on animal rights by the likes of H. S. Salt, and his most famous

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publication, Married Life, by Marie Stopes. Fifield’s wife, Salome Hocking, wrote a novel about the Tolstoyan movement, Belinda the Backward (see Chapter Six), which he also published. Fifield’s firm may not have had the profile or the high-energy approach of the Free Age Press, but he succeeded through his later enterprise in reconciling his desire to work for ‘the cause’ and his commitment to efficient and honest business practice.

The Tolstoyan Periodical Press The periodicals published by centres of Christian anarchist thought were another vehicle for the serialization of Tolstoy’s works. From Pavel Biriukov’s Svobodnaya Mysl in Geneva to William Hare’s Candlestick in Derby, these newspapers allowed leading sympathizers a platform for their views, advertised the meetings of their associated groups, made literary recommendations to their readers and advertised the sympathetic reading material available through their offices. Both The New Order and Die Religion des Geistes compiled ‘libraries’ of works that represented their own and Tolstoy’s views.119 They reported on similar contemporary projects – often, though not always, communal experiments. The Croydon Brotherhood Intelligence’s relaunch as The New Order in November 1895 was specifically intended to give the paper a wider focus and hence significance, that the group might ‘spread, as well as we can, thoughts and events which arise among people who seek the Christian life’.120 It sought to put readers in touch with local sympathizers – in 1896 through plans for a correspondence circle, to bring the individuals ‘in almost every party of the country’ who sympathized with their ideals into regular touch with one another, ‘however isolated, and however far away’121 – and in 1899 by publishing the names of readers who wanted to find likeminded people in their locality. There were also ‘papers published in many countries, which we should like to have; work is being done which we should like to know about’.122 Arthur Baker’s ‘New Cooperation News’ section invited readers to contribute information about sympathetic experiments.

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The New Australia colony in Paraguay; Freeland in East Africa, Topolobampo; the Starnthwaite Colony; and Ruskin in Tennessee all featured. The Social Gospel’s ‘Review of Progress’ performed a similar function. A prominent place was reserved for precursor experiments and sympathetic figures (or ‘the honoured dead’123) – from St Francis of Assisi to the Diggers to Brook Farm, which featured in an article in the Social Gospel’s first issue and which was described as ‘of peculiar and perennial interest, because it was an effort, one of the first efforts in this country, to escape from the strife of commercialism, by organizing an industrial society on what was believed to be the natural plan’.124 Charles Daniel’s paper The Crank contained a series of articles on ‘Historic Cranks’. This was not a task reserved solely for newspapers. Morrison Davidson wrote an entire book on ‘Precursors of Henry George’, and during the course of writing it developed a new enthusiasm for the writings of Gerard Winstanley, whom he regarded as ‘an Alter Ego of Leo Tolstoy . . . our Theosophic friends would be justified in saying we have here a clear case of Reincarnation’.125 Each newspaper catered to the interests and contexts of their own readership and each had their own particular thrust. The Candlestick was notable for its opposition to imperialism and colonialism, for example; Vrede for its focus on inner and outer peace in all aspects of life; and Ohne Staat for its hostility to the state.126 The degree to which these enterprises can be regarded as avowedly Tolstoyan varied. While The New Order described itself as a ‘special channel between English readers and Tolstoy’,127 Vrede insisted that the paper was a vehicle for discussion of ‘the practice of love’ and not for dissemination of ‘Tolstoyan’ principles.128 Nevertheless, its editorial team filled the pages with extracts from Tolstoy’s writings, diary and correspondence. Ohne Staat regularly printed letters Tolstoy had written to Schmitt and The Candlestick published Tolstoy’s Letter to Liberals over five pages in its first issue.129 Longer works were serialized within the papers or in supplements.130 Tolstoy received all of these newspapers, and recommended them to other groups. The role he played as a figurehead for the various groups is clear within their pages.

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Many of these periodicals were short-lived and their closures were often a result of financial difficulties. Striving for commercial success would have been contrary to the principles on which these enterprises were established. Ohne Staat urged readers who had not paid but were able to pay their debts to do so,131 but The Social Gospel maintained that they would not pursue the debts of those who had failed to keep up to date with subscriptions. ‘No one is in debt to The Social Gospel. We have no debtors. We forgive them. We collect no debts. We may be compelled to stop your paper. We may notify you of this. But we shall never send you a dun or attempt to collect money from you.’132 Vrede allowed its subscribers to choose the amount they paid for their subscription according to their means.133 Both circulation and longevity were important considerations, however, since these periodicals were one of the most important means of spreading the Tolstoyan message. Ohne Staat urged its readers to do what they could to further the circulation of the paper.134 Ralph Albertson described the Social Gospel as the Christian Commonwealth’s ‘chief means of communication to spread brotherhood doctrine’ and asked their readers to ‘use all available means to help us multiply copies and find readers for it’.135 It was in fact one of the most successful in terms of circulation – James Dombrowski estimates this at around 2,000 copies.136 It was received in every state of the union, as well as 17 countries abroad – these included England, Russia, Hungary, Switzerland, France and New Zealand.137 Their subscribers went far beyond their immediate circle of sympathizers – they received testimonials from George Herron, Samuel Jones (the Mayor of Toledo) and Edward Everett Hale, and in Britain from Chertkov and from Bruce Wallace, as well as sympathizers in Dundee and Nottingham.138 In terms of longevity, the Dutch Tolstoyan newspaper Vrede was a notable success, being printed under that title from 1897 until 1909 and under a variety of others for approximately another 13 years. Others were active over a much shorter period – the Croydon-based New Order ran only from 1895 until 1901, while Schmitt’s Ohne Staat began as a weekly in January 1897, dropped to monthly in March that year and was forced to close in December 1899. The paper was in

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constant financial difficulties and in its last months was supported by contributions from its readers. When the first issue of The Tolstoyan appeared in 1903 it expressed its aim ‘to break the record of its kind, and live beyond the sunset into another day’, but in fact survived only for a year.139 The proliferation of these periodicals raised interesting questions about the use of technology in furthering an essentially anti-modern message. Arthur Baker responded to criticisms about The New Order’s paper, printing and typeface by reminding readers that the labour involved was voluntary, that the press and the type were borrowed and that all this self-sacrifice was rewarded by knowing they were on the right path.140 When in 1898 they considered moving the paper’s production to Purleigh, Kenworthy argued that: it follows that the books and papers we circulate should be, not only thought and expressed rightly, but printed and published rightly. The moral weight of the printed page which conveys truth, is increased to the reader who knows that the truth in the book has been applied to its material production.141 They also sought to avoid ‘the ordinary channels of trade’, seeking to ‘make our new system from the root up’ by relying on sympathizers to secure the paper’s circulation.142 Likewise, Tolstoy congratulated Van der Veer on the production of Vrede, telling him that ‘what has particularly gladdened me in your letter is that you yourself print your paper. We often forget what follows from our convictions . . . The way you print your paper must produce not less effect than the ideas it contains.’143 The Social Gospel was also printed at the Commonwealth – the paper’s editors began with a second-hand press bought for $46, but in the summer of 1898 the Vrooman brothers sent them a printing outfit valued at around $2,000.144 The rights and wrongs of advertising were also debated by the New Order’s correspondents. T. G. Sadler regarded advertising, even of honestly produced products, as competition and advised waiting until orders come by recommendation – ‘which God surely will see

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to’.145 Frank Henderson, who edited the paper from 1898 onwards, conceded that he disliked advertising and found it intrusive, but defended the policy as follows: I wish, for example, to see in wide circulation the writings of Leo Tolstoy; it appears to me that readers of the NEW ORDER share my wish; we have gained so much by these writings that we cannot but wish others to benefit also. How then can we recommend these writings? By word of mouth – yes. By writing – yes. By printing – yes. At none of these points can I imagine N. O. readers resenting our recommendation (announcement, advertisement – what you like). I take it that N. O. readers expect and wish information of books such as are advertised herein. Paid advertisements are not thrust upon them, otherwise the N. O. would not be run at a loss, as happens at present.146 Of course in order to reach a wider audience, Tolstoy’s followers really needed to convey their message in a wider press. While the mainstream press took an interest in Tolstoy, his followers and his philosophy only ever really entered their pages as objects of curiosity. Where Tolstoyan Christian anarchists could make use of sympathetic if not completely like-minded publications, they did. The New Age, for example, was regarded by the British Tolstoyans as the ‘foremost and frankest advocate of our cause in the regular press’, and gave an indication of ‘the relation in which our movement stands to the rest of the world’.147 It published advertisements for Brotherhood Publishing Company publications, articles by Kenworthy, and with increasing frequency carried specially translated essays by Tolstoy – on military service and on marriage – and in 1898 a serialization (the first publication in England) of The Christian Teaching. Tolstoy’s articles generated a great deal of interest and debate (principally disagreement) amongst the journal’s readers.148 Isabella Fyvie Mayo regarded the ‘literature of the cooperative movement [as] particularly open to all Tolstoy items’.149 Percy

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Redfern wrote for the cooperative periodical The Wheatsheaf even in his Tolstoyan days, and Aylmer Maude praised his initiative in doing so: to address such a large audience as that subscribed to The Wheatsheaf, to ‘inoculate the readers with the plain common sense side of the deepest truths you have reached – is no small service’.150 And for brief periods in 1902– 5, both John Kenworthy and Arthur St John took over the small local newspaper The Midland Herald, based in Bilston, and attempted to put their Tolstoyan stamp on it. Kenworthy aimed to use the paper to educate local people in ‘the first principles of politics’, in order that they might become citizens of a more just and fair town. His articles tackled the injustice of the Corn Laws of 1902, the end of the war in South Africa and a critique of Edward VII’s coronation.151 St John sought through the paper to highlight ‘forces of goodwill and intelligence and healthy life’ everywhere, but also to bring to light injustice. He headed each editorial column with the caption ‘The Editor hopes that every one who contributes to, or cooperates in the production of, this paper will recognise his or her own responsibility and try to do himself or herself justice.’ Typical editorials argued that one will always get more from life by working at ‘necessary production’, contributing real good to human life and making an ‘honest living’, or that the ills of the British Empire were a result of ‘the habit you have of giving your conscience up to other people. The remedy then must be in taking your conscience and your action into your own hands, and this applies to every one of us’.152 The relationship between Tolstoyism in theory and Tolstoyism in practice was not always easily navigated. This chapter has explored the activities of Tolstoyan Christian anarchists in the 1890s and 1900s, in both the British movement and in those sympathetic international centres that they interacted with. Colonists in communal enterprises sought not only to separate themselves from society, but to actively engage with it and to set an example – to work hard and organize while also living the ‘right life’ spiritually and retaining independence of conscience and action. The members of Tolstoyan societies came together for discussion, but often found this was not a substitute for action. The initiators of publishing

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enterprises that disseminated the Tolstoyan message tried to make their publications as accessible as possible, but still operated as businesses – they renounced copyright while jostling for position as the handlers and interpreters of Tolstoy’s works. This chapter has focused on the practical manifestations of Tolstoyism in the 1890s and 1900s. The next chapter will focus in more depth on some key Tolstoyan beliefs and the contexts in which these beliefs led Tolstoy’s followers to act and interact.

CHAPTER 5 CONTEXTS AND CONVICTIONS

In his 1953 essay on Tolstoy’s view of history, Isaiah Berlin argued that Tolstoy had all the talents of a fox (who knows many things) but that he believed in being a hedgehog (who knows one big thing).1 In the context of nineteenth-century reform movements, Tolstoyans also wanted to be hedgehogs, but often behaved like foxes. They engaged with a wide range of social reform issues and movements – vegetarianism, temperance, anti-imperialism and the peace movement, to name just a few. In the early days of the Brotherhood Church, Nellie Shaw recalled that ‘every kind of crank’ came to the church at Tamworth Road: ‘Atheists, Spiritualists, Individualists, Communists, Anarchists, ordinary politicians, Vegetarians, antivivisectionists and anti-vaccinationists – in fact every kind of “anti” had a welcome and a hearing, and had to stand a lively criticism in this discussion which followed.’2 Tolstoyan Christian anarchists shared venues and exchanged speakers with reformist groups from the cooperative movement to Ruskin societies, and they published and joined in debate in their newspapers. The breadth of their interests did not make Tolstoyans unusual in nineteenth century reform circles, in which it was common to find activists with broad reformist consciences embracing numerous sympathetic causes. This phenomenon was captured in the late nineteenth century in the term ‘anti-everythingarianism’.3 In Britain the Humanitarian League strove to unite a range of causes, and in the

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Netherlands the League for Total Abstention performed a similar function. However, for Tolstoy’s Christian anarchist followers, pursuing a range of different interests and concerns was not enough. In 1900, when Percy Redfern established the Manchester Tolstoy Society, he explained the rationale as follows: Now I can temporarily associate with different groups – vegetarians, socialists, land reformers, ‘rationalists’, theosophists, Wesleyans and so forth. If I had some definite bias towards any particular material reform that might content me. But I want to face life as a whole. That we cannot do in mixed societies in which we must not introduce controversial subjects foreign to the particular aims of that society. So in addition to working occasionally with particular bodies one seeks society with others who also wish to face life as a whole. Hence a Tolstoy society.4 This need to ‘face life as a whole’ and to find a coherent and complete philosophy of life, united Tolstoyans and gave their movement a coherence that they felt others lacked. As well as working within a variety of contexts, they also defined themselves and their answers in relation to these other movements. They welcomed diversity, but they were ultimately about unity. The principles that underlined their philosophy of life were brotherhood, non-violence and nonresistance to evil by violence. This latter doctrine united them, but it was also the belief that most often set limitations on their cooperation with other reformers. Brotherhood, non-violence and non-resistance informed their views on war, on government (because no government could exist except by force), on property and money (which were a means of coercing others to serve you), on marriage and on diet. This chapter examines the ways in which Tolstoyans put some of their key beliefs into practice, and explores their resulting interactions – and the limits to their interactions – with other sympathetic groups. It focuses primarily on the British movement, but draws examples also from their international counterparts.

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Non-resistance in Theory and Practice The commitment to non-resistance in its fundamental form was one of the first struggles to confront Tolstoy’s followers when they accepted his philosophy, and it remained a central point of discussion in lectures, meetings and the pages of Tolstoyan newspapers well into the 1900s. In 1896, Ernest Crosby presented Kenworthy with a series of points for debate in The New Order. ‘Can we take Christ’s words literally in all things? . . . And if the principle of hyperbole is admitted, where should it stop?’; ‘Does Christ’s action in the temple qualify His sayings relating to force?’; ‘Does violent language differ in essence from physical force?’; and finally, ‘Should we use force to a mad dog, a lunatic, an intoxicated man, a child, or an idiot?’5 In 1902, Jane Holah reported that the ‘Croydon discussion societies seem all to be engaged in debating non-resistance’ – though in some cases a ‘grotesque caricature’ of Tolstoy’s thinking was presented, the choice of topic was a positive sign.6 And in 1904 – 5, the Theosophical Society, the Humanitarian League and The Crank jointly hosted a debate on the topic involving Arthur St John, Aylmer Maude, Charles Daniel and George Bernard Shaw. Tolstoyans struggled sincerely with these issues themselves, and they debated them with those on the fringes and outside their movement. Crosby’s final question to Kenworthy – the question of ‘the man who ran amok’ – was the one which posed the most theoretical difficulties for Tolstoyans, and which was most often seized upon by their opponents. How far was it possible to carry the principle of nonresistance through to its full and logical conclusion? Was it really wrong to act to restrain someone who intended to kill you, your wife or a child? This was the one point on which Adin Ballou had been immovable in his discussions with Tolstoy. He did not sanction violence, but the employment of ‘uninjurious, benevolent physical force’ against drunkards and insane people was in the interests of all parties – indeed the assailant, as well as the victim, would be thankful that ‘beneficent restraint’ was imposed.7 Likewise, Aylmer Maude found that the more of Tolstoy’s articles on non-resistance he translated, the more he believed that ‘to use physical

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force is sometimes the best thing we can do’.8 For Maude, it was the motive and not the action that was important. The true principle was ‘not that force and violence may never be used, but it is that the motive actuating every thought and action should be to benefit and not to injure mankind’.9 As one contributor to The Open Road put it, the mistake was to assume that non-resistance was identical with love of one’s neighbour. Physical force could also be guided by love.10 The orthodox response was that the best way to ‘rescue [the victim], and to bring [the assailant] to a better mind, would be to offer unresistingly to receive the blows intended for another’.11 Kenworthy answered Crosby as follows: Certainly, I should say, use physical force wherever the spirit of pure, self-forgetting love calls for it. But when will that be? Never, I believe, unless it be against an animal, and perhaps not even then . . . . . . Every physical conflict comes from two sources within us – fear for ourselves, and want of love (that is, hate) to our antagonist. If we had no fear, and were filled with love, who could fight even the man who is attempting to cut one’s throat?12 Many Tolstoyans struggled to be so orthodox on this issue. While some believed that restraining and disarming such an individual ‘in the interest alike of himself and others, until he became more reasonable’ would be ‘quite in harmony with the spirit of nonresistance’; for others this was a no-win situation – if you did not employ violence, you would be killed, and if you did ‘you establish a precedent that may, in time, lead to such fiendish acts as the launching of a whole nation against another’.13 Arthur St John preferred to see the application of the principle as dependent not on theoretical study or a ‘hard and fast dogma or formula to be insisted upon . . . or to be disputed about’.

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I hope no one will ask me what I should do if I saw a readymade murderer about to slaughter my wife. Even if I could say for certain what I should do, the question is hardly a profitable one. It would perhaps be more worth while enquiring what Jesus would do – or what your ideal man would do – under such circumstances. For the profitable thing to try to find out in this connection is, surely, the ideal and aim – the direction in which to seek development and train ourselves.14 For St John, love was a principle and non-resistance was a policy. A man who wishes to act on a principle cannot have a fixed policy. He cannot say: ‘I will always do such and such things in all circumstances, and never deviate from this rule,’ because he cannot know what love will require him to do at any given time. Therefore the question whether a man should practice non-resistance cannot be answered in the abstract; it can only be answered for each case as it arises, and sometimes the answer will be yes and sometimes no.15 He adhered firmly, however, to the belief that resistance to evil always increased the evil, and that the multiplication of laws could only help the lawyer, not the honest citizen. Punishment ‘creates and confirms criminals, and tends to corrupt and demoralize the rest of society’. . . . if we concede that wrong-doers must be punished, then either everyone who does wrong must be punished for every wrong deed he does or a line must be drawn somewhere between the deeds and persons to be punished and those not to be punished. Now how is it possible either to punish every wrong deed or to draw such a line that shall be a just line? As a matter of fact, in our society the position of the line which is drawn is much affected by the power and the guile of those who manage to get it drawn below themselves and their deeds. And the more elaborate and the more complicated the provisions the harder does it tend to become for

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the poor and simple to get justice, and the more wiles do the wily weave round their victims.16 The ideal way to deal with evil, St John concluded, was not to deal with it. ‘And the way to deal with the evil man – or rather with anyone who happens to do evil – is, not to persecute him or cast him out, but to open our arms to him, welcome him into the fold of social love, and convince him of his own goodness.’17 Bernard Shaw accepted that there was an ‘output of evil’ in men’s actions. ‘When a man began to blacken your eyes, if you began to blacken his, the output was doubled. Then there were two violent men in the street instead of one.’ Shaw was a vegetarian and an admirer of Tolstoy, but hardly a Tolstoyan. The way to correct the man’s behaviour, he believed, was to hand him over to the police, who would ‘cure him of his bad tendency’. ‘As for the man who could not behave himself without having other people’s time wasted in preventing him from doing wrong things – we should not punish him, we should kill him.’18 Or, as John Bruce Wallace put it when rehearsing the same argument some seven years earlier, ‘One might feel the utmost tenderest compassion, the purest benevolence, towards a dangerous homicidal maniac, and yet, out of regard to one’s fellowmen, not hesitate a moment as to preventing his walking abroad with a loaded rifle.’19 Orthodox Tolstoyans railed against this belief that ‘the end justifies the means’. It was the spirit in which the action was performed that counted, not the eventual outcome. Isabella Fyvie Mayo lamented that ‘the world is poisoned by the idea that it is possible to do evil and secure good . . . from Governments seeking to maintain order – to individuals seeking to obtain freedom. Even philanthropists, physicians and preachers all suffer from the same malady’.20 But resolving this question was not easy. Was it not necessary to think of the results of an action to decide whether it was right or wrong?21 Was it ever possible to correctly predict the eventual outcome of an action? Vladimir Chertkov believed not: this was why it was always better ‘to give preference to one’s moral intuitions, avoiding what one feels and believes to be wrong,

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whatever practical loss to external human welfare such conduct may appear to entail’.22 It was the ‘moral purity’ of one’s actions that counted. If coercion sometimes appeared useful, this was an illusion, as one could not foresee all the consequences of one’s actions.23 Ernest Crosby on the other hand concluded that ‘if peace means final acquiescence in wrong . . . then your peace is a crime’.24 And George Frankland, condemning adherence to non-resistance, opined that non-resistance actively invited further evil: ‘Tolstoy, and Jesus’s teaching, signifies not merely “Resist not evil by violence”, but “Resist not evil at all; be absolutely passive to evil; invite more evil”.’25 Also at issue was the difference, or similarity, between physical force and moral force. When Crosby asked Kenworthy whether violent language differed in essence from physical force, Kenworthy replied that violent language is ‘language strong beyond truth’. Jesus’s language was powerful and accurate, not violent.26 ‘The argument for perfect truthfulness’, Kenworthy told Tolstoy, ‘seems to me to stand side-by-side with that for “non-resistance”.’27 On the issue of the temple, Kenworthy insisted that Jesus did not use force against either animals or money changers – he drove the animals out and ‘the force of His teaching and the public opinion behind Him’ drove out the money changers and the sellers of animals. Most Tolstoyans passionately believed in the need to convert public opinion, not only by example but by persistently ‘speaking the truth about the existing state of things’.28 But the question of verbal coercion or persuasion was not so clear-cut for everyone. Jane Addams felt that Tolstoy distinguished too firmly between physical force and moral force. Shouldn’t they also avoid forcing their views on to others, and condemning them because they disagreed? Nonresistance for Addams meant ‘selecting the good in the neighbourhood and refraining from railing at the bad’. In fact, she maintained that the anticipation of conflict between oneself and society, ‘the expectation of opposition and martyrdom, the holding oneself in readiness for it, was in itself a sort of resistance and worked evil or at best was merely negative’.29 Likewise, Jane Holah believed that nonresistance was not merely about physical force, it was ‘an attitude of

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mind in which we devote our whole attention to the development of good’. Tolstoy’s own attitude to the established Church seemed to Holah to be one of ‘strong mental resistance. He antagonizes the evil in them.’30 Non-resistance was debated in theory and was faced head on in everyday life and social interaction. While in England in 1899, for example, Johannes van der Veer chose to miss a train to Gloucester when the feeling struck him that it was wrong to rush for a place and deny others the chance of a seat.31 Non-resistance also fundamentally informed Tolstoyan beliefs in a whole range of other spheres, as this chapter will demonstrate.

Anarchism, Socialism and the State From the earliest inception of their movement, Kenworthy and the British Tolstoyans conceived themselves as close to anarchists and socialists. Their roots, after all, were in the socialist and cooperative movements; they had an overlapping membership with the Croydon Socialist Society and they invited ‘socialist and advanced societies’ to send details of their activities for advertisement in their newspaper. In an editorial for the Croydon Brotherhood Intelligence as early as 1895, Kenworthy wrote that: If we wish to-day to discover men with clear purpose and earnestness for the salvation of the perishing people’s bodies and souls, we shall find them, not in the ‘house of God’ where Jesus, the poor friend of the poor, receives the worship of lips, but rather among the contemned Socialists and Anarchists of the street corner.32 They also believed this was where they were most likely to win converts. Kenworthy maintained that ‘the minds most open to receive our doctrine of life are largely to be found among socialists and anarchists’.33 Nevertheless, they were separated from the mainstream of anarchist thought by their attitude to violence and by their religion, and they were separated from the broader stream of

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socialist thought by their attitude to government, politics and the state. The Tolstoyans were fortunate in their relationship with British anarchists. The British anarchist movement was small. In 1906, W. C. Hart doubted that there were 50 people calling themselves anarchists in London, and complained that the oldest established (and at this time only) organ of anarchist thought, Freedom, had a circulation of only around 500 across the country.34 Its small size meant that the presence of the Russian anarchist prince Peter Kropotkin in England had a considerable influence on the development of the movement. Kropotkin’s emphasis on mutual aid, freely giving more than one expects to receive and not avenging wrongs meant that there was not an enormous gulf between British anarchists and Tolstoyans. Kropotkin wrote very appreciatively of Ernest Crosby’s Plain Talk in Psalm and Parable, for example, although he took exception to the references to God.35 The Tolstoyans advertised the anarchist colony at Clousden Hill, outside Newcastle, and hosted lectures by Kropotkin at Croydon in 1896 and at Purleigh in 1899. Kenworthy found Kropotkin’s words: full of insight and right feeling, and I think the barrier between us is very slight. His life seems in advance of his thought on the question of the use of violence. He is one of those to whom is largely due the growing conviction that anarchism, after preaching its doctrine of liberty, must develop and live by the morality, the religion, in the observance of which liberty is obtained. Certainly, our anarchist groups are beginning to look for a morality.36 In correspondence with Tolstoy, Kenworthy claimed that the anarchist movement in England was losing its violent character, beginning to advocate voluntary cooperation and moving closer to the Tolstoyan position. ‘They have, as it were, found us out’, he wrote, ‘and now often ask me to write and speak for them, which I do as far as I can.’37

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By contrast, continental Tolstoyans encountered a much more vigorous and hostile anarchism. Eliza Pickard of the Leeds Tolstoyans contrasted the materialism of Bakunin – ‘who has many followers in Germany, Austria, etc.’ – with anarchists like Kropotkin, Louise Michel and E´lise´e Reclus, who she described as ‘men of nobler type’.38 Schmitt explained to his English correspondents that the materialistic tendency was stronger amongst anarchists in Central Europe than in England: ‘. . . the fight against it gives our work a peculiar character’. He considered materialism entirely in keeping with the ideals of Social Democrats and other parties, but for anarchists it was an internal contradiction and needed to be combated. They had begun a fight against ‘Bakunism’ in the German Anarchist organ Der Sozialist, ‘which will not cease, but which has already won over to us many influential leaders’.39 Tolstoy also recognized the importance of this struggle. Writing to Schmitt after the latter’s trial, Tolstoy praised Schmitt’s impassioned speech and admitted he was surprised that he had been acquitted on this basis. But he was disappointed that in a country like Hungary, where it was possible for Schmitt to deliver such a speech, there should be so few followers. It demonstrated, he felt, that the real enemy of their cause was not government, but both the two-faced, worldly pseudo-Christianity of the Church, and the materialistic, atheistic, socialist worldview. He was pleased to see that Schmitt was entering into this struggle with such zeal.40 In the popular imagination, the term ‘anarchism’ conjured up disorder, incitement to revolt and random terrorist acts. Haia Shpayer-Makov argues that although this image ‘imparted little of the authentic pursuits and beliefs of British anarchism’ and was an obstacle to public understanding of the movement, it was also through this image that anarchism made its most noticeable impact on society at large.41 Hence, John Bruce Wallace explained, ‘folks mix up our innocent non-resisting Kenworthy with dynamiters’.42 Tolstoyan Christian anarchists expended a lot of energy in setting out their own definitions of anarchism. In an early edition of Ohne Staat, Schmitt argued that free organization, non-violence, the destruction of blind faith in authority and liberation from internal and external

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ties – rather than acts of violence – were the principles of anarchy.43 Eliza Pickard rejected the emphasis on confusion and disorder that characterized dictionary definitions of anarchism – order need not be imposed by ‘force law and worn out authority’, but could be brought about by ‘brotherhood between man and man’.44 Vladimir Chertkov argued that true anarchism, Christian anarchism rather than ‘external political anarchism’, completely rejected all coercive power, ‘all compulsion on the part of anyone towards anyone else’.45 The Tolstoyan understanding of the world was shaped by a belief in God. While the language of religion, truth seeking and evangelism characterized even quite secular parts of the socialist and reform movements, Tolstoyan practices were naturally infused with religiosity.46 They held ‘prayer and fellowship’ meetings, studied the Bible and other selected religious texts and delivered sermons (though these were generally ‘brotherhood, Christ-life sermons, pointed, practical, instructive, inspiring’). On these grounds they might have been expected to cooperate closely with the Labour Church, established by John Trevor in 1891 to provide a forum for socialist Christianity.47 Kenworthy did occasionally lecture at Labour Churches and in 1896, in The Labour Prophet, declared himself ‘wholly in sympathy with the Labour Church movement. Nowhere do I find a freer platform, and more ready hearers for anything I have to say . . .’. In turn, Reginald Beckett spoke to an audience at Tamworth Road in the spring of 1898 on ‘the Labour Church, what it is and what it does’.48 The Manchester Tolstoy Society sought to arrange an ‘inter-meeting’ with the Labour Church in late 1900, but it is not clear whether this meeting took place.49 The exchange of views was not always amicable, however. In a 1898 review of John Trevor’s My Quest for God, Kenworthy criticized the author’s insufficiently articulate ‘knowledge of the machinery of society’ and dismissed the Labour Church movement as a failure, ‘inspired with a great sentiment that chokes, and is dissipating’.50 D. B. Foster found the Labour Church ‘far too indefinite’ in their articulation of their religion.51 On the other hand, the British Tolstoyan movement did draw members from non-conformist

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religious groups, notably from the Society of Friends. Lillian Hunt (later Ferris) felt ‘much at home’ in the meetings of the Leeds Brotherhood Church. ‘The mental attitude seemed to me the same as among Friends, and there was more freedom and simplicity and less conventionality.’52 As we have already seen, the issue of complete abstinence from the political process was a cause of significant friction between Tolstoyan Christian anarchists and their socialist counterparts, religious or otherwise. The ‘most definite opposition’ to renunciation of ‘the old order’ came from socialists and Christian socialists, who argued that ‘such people give up their means of doing good, and act selfishly by isolating themselves and “leaving others unhelped in the system”’.53 Bruce Wallace railed against what he regarded as the ‘parody’ of Tolstoy’s views pursued by his British followers. Unlike their counterparts in Russia, the British Tolstoyans had the power to vote and Wallace believed they should use it to: vote away the unjust institution of landlordism and every other institution that robs and oppresses the people; to vote against the use of the military and constabulary for the maintenance of unjust property claims; and finally . . . to vote force out of use altogether and let government vanish in the organization of mutual fraternal help.54 In a country where responsibility for government and therefore for organized force was held collectively, Wallace argued that withholding a vote could only ‘add to the force of every vote cast for keeping up the existing evil order’.55 This conflict was not unique to the Tolstoyans in democratic Britain, Japanese socialist Sakai Toshihiko, for example, criticized his country’s Tolstoyans for being ‘escapists who willy-nilly withdrew from the class struggle’.56 The Tolstoyan ambition was to demonstrate to society at large a more Christian way of life. As Nellie Shaw put it: ‘Let every Socialist, Communist and Anarchist be an embodiment of love . . . and there will be no need to agitate that Parliament shall enforce that which is voluntarily practiced.’57 State socialism, from the Tolstoyan point of

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view, was ‘a truly dreadful consummation’ – since it relied completely on coercion. The socialists wished to: rise to the control of [the] system, in order that they may force men to do justly. But all the time (and it may be generations) that the Socialists take to get into power, the System is going on crushing the souls of the people, secure from real interruption. Because the Socialists, persuading themselves that they are going to overthrow it, meanwhile give it their support.58 If the present economic system, in which one man owned what another had produced, was akin to burglary, Charles Daniel argued that ‘by socialist agitation the State is being driven to communalise the burglary, so to speak. What is wanted is honesty, justice – natural honesty and justice. The world is in need of character. That is the only real property after all.’59 Society needed to ‘set free its vital force’ in order to overcome its disease, rather than multiplying prescriptions.60 Shaw recalled, however, that Kenworthy’s increasing emphasis on Tolstoyan ‘Communist Anarchism’ – particularly a lecture he delivered one Sunday in which he denounced voting and the whole political machinery – caused many local socialists to leave the Croydon group.61 Even Aylmer Maude concluded that ‘at a certain stage of the reform movement, a man adopting [the philosophy of non-resistance] is sure to be left behind by practical reformers’.62 Neither did state socialists regard Tolstoyans as simply a benign or eccentric force. In a 1899 report on a visit to Whiteway, John Spargo despaired at the damage Tolstoyism was causing to the socialist movement: But can anything else result from the logical application of his teachings? . . . about a year after my visit I received a letter from one who had been largely instrumental in establishing the colony, in which he told me that £1,500 and over had been spent upon it up till then. And what is the result of that expenditure

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and the heavy labour? The answer is that it has wrecked the socialist movement there and brought it to ridicule. How long will socialist societies continue to engage colony agents and Tolstoyan lecturers whose labours bear such fruit?63 Spargo also engaged in a polemic against Ernest Crosby over state socialism. Crosby fundamentally opposed it because of its explicit denial of individual freedom of action. He accused socialists of a ‘lack of faith in the laws of nature’, and asserted that it was impossible for a state to decide to prevent or eradicate competition. What was needed was a new motive, ‘the real cooperative, communistic, socialist spirit, which will make men combine for the purpose of assisting each other and the community’. Every Rochdale store, every little colony is an informal rehearsal of the great symphony, but the history of many of these trials makes me believe that we are not quite educated up to the point yet. The assumption that it is easier to cooperate on a great scale seems to me faulty. If we are ready now for fraternal cooperation, many of the little experiments of late years should have succeeded. It is a poor law that does not work on a small scale as well as upon a great one. I believe that the cooperative principle will in the end triumph, but it must be a spirit and not a mere machine . . . .64 Spargo dismissed Crosby’s pretentions to be a socialist – he was ‘too respectable and too conservative’. No one would expect ‘the sage of Rhinebeck’ to advocate anything more revolutionary than ‘mild measures for the amelioration of social ills’. ‘He demands pledges and guarantees that Socialism will bring him only great and good gifts, imposing no obligation in return.’65

Peace, Anti-militarism and Anti-imperialism Opposition to war was one of the most important tenets of the Tolstoyan worldview, and refusal of military service was regarded as

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particularly central. However, Tolstoyan Christian anarchists found themselves somewhat isolated from the mainstream peace movements at the turn of the century. Earlier nineteenth-century pioneers, such as William Lloyd Garrison, Adin Ballou and Elihu Burrit, had been committed advocates of complete refusal to bear arms. By the late nineteenth century, the peace movement was a transnational lobby, characterized by international congresses, lecture circuits and the publication and exchange of peace literature. Although it was a diverse movement in which ‘distinct and sometimes conflicted forms of pacifist analysis’ had to ‘learn to live within the parameters of the same organization’,66 the principal emphasis was on lobbying governments, arbitration mechanisms and disarmament. When refusal to bear arms was discussed at peace congresses, it was usually rejected. Continental peace activists also frowned upon references to religion.67 Although Tolstoy gradually earned respect for his uncompromising stance, the views he expounded in The Kingdom of God is Within You were regarded as ‘very ultra’ and ‘the Christianity that rejects war’, or ‘Tolstoi Christianity’ remained on the fringes.68 For Tolstoy, and for his followers, the peace societies’ emphasis on ‘reading addresses, writing books, choosing presidents, vice-presidents, and secretaries, and meeting and talking first in one city and then in another’ made them irrelevant. The question was ‘solely one of the personal relation of each man to the moral and religious question now facing us all – the question of the rightness or wrongness of taking part in military service’.69 Tolstoyan newspapers advertised peace literature – Bertha von Suttner’s Lay Down Your Arms, for example – and printed communications from the International Peace Bureau.70 They conceded the role that both congresses and literature had to play in popularising the cause of peace. But in the end they believed, with Tolstoy, that there was only one way to render war impossible, and that was for those who were called to take part in it to refuse to fight.71 The dislocation between their stance and that of the broader peace movement was exemplified in discussions over whether to award Tolstoy the Nobel Peace Prize, which was established in 1896 and first awarded in 1901. The prize was to go to ‘the person who shall have done the most or best work for fraternity among nations,

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for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding and promoting of peace congresses’.72 Although continental conscientious objectors like Van der Veer, Sˇkarvan or the Doukhobors acted as an inspiration for others in the movement, and indeed made British and American Tolstoyans anxious about their inability to make a similar stand, the wars that coincided with the height of Tolstoyan activity were AngloAmerican and imperial in character: the Spanish-American war (1898), the Boer War and the war in the Philippines (1899– 1902). Tolstoyan Christian anarchists joined in broader enterprises that opposed these conflicts and the militarism and imperialism that accompanied them. Three American Tolstoyans – Ernest Howard Crosby, Bolton Hall and William Dean Howells – signed the manifesto urging workers to refuse to participate in the Spanish-American War.73 Crosby lectured and campaigned tirelessly against American imperialism. Tolstoyans applied their opposition to imperialism and militarism to domestic contexts too – in critiques of the ‘flags and singing, trumpets, clapping and hurrahs’ that surrounded the British Empire and the British monarchy,74 for example, or in opposition to proposals for national service or increases in funding for the armed forces.75 But their emphasis on following their own conscience set them apart. In Britain, Tolstoyan Christian anarchists not only targeted the government but also sought to bring the organized ‘peace crusade’ around to an understanding of their principles and tactics. Jane Holah was a member of her local branch of the Peace Union, and although she had struggled as to whether she ought to resign from this position, she strove instead to persuade her local society to fully accept the principle on which its work rested – ‘that all use of physical force for public or private ends is a virtual denying of the teaching of Jesus’. In a letter of February 1899 (which she had written in consultation with both Vladimir Chertkov and Eliza Pickard), she sought to convince them that, while the peace societies might be doing good work in creating a healthy public opinion, ‘there is a great movement entirely outside and independent of PSs, a

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movement that PSs seem unwilling to join hands with, which is really doing their specific work as effectually, perhaps more effectually than they’.76 By 1899, there was a strand of vocal public opposition to the Boer War, for which W. T. Stead’s ‘Stop the War Committee’ provided a focus.77 In the spring of the same year, representatives of 26 governments met at The Hague Peace Conference, convened at the initiative of Tsar Nicholas II to discuss disarmament and the means of achieving a lasting peace. Vladimir Chertkov found it impossible to share in the torrent of enthusiasm for the tsar’s proposal. The zeal with which people took part in peace demonstrations, ‘as in many other philanthropic and humanitarian movements’, he believed, resulted from ‘a desire to ease one’s mind by protesting against a social evil that has become too evident, while instinctively avoiding all that may reveal the connection between one’s own personal life and the essential causes that lie at the root of the evil’.78 At Purleigh, Kenworthy, Chertkov, Van der Veer and Maude took over a Parish Council meeting dedicated to discussion of the tsar’s proposal, and drove through resolutions that all war, the glorification of war and even caning (since the meeting was held in a school) was brutal.79 At a peace meeting organized by William Hare in Derby in February 1899, at which Kenworthy and Chertkov also spoke, Hare apparently ‘smote the Peace masqueraders hip and thigh’.80 Several hundred opponents of the Boer War attended this meeting, and Florence Holah observed that they received the non-resistant message with enthusiasm – though she admitted they may have been carried away by the power of the speeches. Nevertheless, she concluded, this must have been ‘about the best Peace Demonstration meeting there has been in England’.81 In the Netherlands, the Dutch Christian anarchists opposed not only the actions of the Transvaal government, but also the Boer resistance. The Boers might have justice on their side, argued Felix Ortt, but their actions were not Christian; indeed in their resistance to the Transvaal government they contributed to the growth of hatred, and the death of brotherly love. All that was really at stake in this war was the organization of the state.82

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These imperial wars and the peace movements that opposed them coincided with the Tolstoyan campaign in support of the Doukhobors, and complicated the appeals made on behalf of the latter. Arthur Fifield warned Chertkov that the public at large did not ‘care a button’ about the subject of peace – if they had a prejudice, it was in favour of militarism. ‘The reading public on the other hand are just now wildly enthusiastic in [W. T.] Stead’s cause’, and would not hear a word against it.83 Chertkov was disappointed that international peace organizations proved so unsympathetic to the Doukhobor appeal. When he sent a copy of Christian Martyrdom in Russia to ‘one of the most prominent representatives of the peace movement on the continent’, he was astonished to receive a reply stating that ‘the International Peace movement, do not (and cannot) recommend the refusal of military service as a means of our action’. Chertkov concluded that: there must be something radically wrong in the movement of the Peace Societies. If representatives of these Societies do not understand the spiritual motive, consisting in the consciousness of the moral unlawfulness of oneself taking part in that which one believes to be wrong, if they do not understand this motive, which is the only one that can ever make war impossible, they are certainly not fitted to participate in the cause they are advocating.84 In the same essay, Chertkov quoted from an article by Mo´r Jo´kai, President of the Hungarian Peace Society, in which Jo´kai described an interview he had had with a deputation of Nazarenes, asking for his mediation with the authorities in regard to their refusal of military service. He explained to them that ‘I firmly believe that the present generation is enabled to enjoy peace just because it is so excellently armed.’ Chertkov urged all peace societies to consider whether they shared Jo´kai’s views. He urged those who did not agree not to hold back because they feared that internal conflict would weaken the movement. It was better that the peace movement should

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fall to pieces than that any individual should withhold the expression of the truth.85 If the peace societies proved unsympathetic, the broader public was even less so. Ernest Crosby also told Tolstoy that in America there was little sympathy for the Doukhobors’ refusal to serve as soldiers, particularly in time of peace: It is as if they were told that there was a famine among the Jews, because they would not eat leavened bread, which was furnished in quantities. They would say ‘It is their own fault, we can spend the money in better ways than on fools’. Especially this year the feeling in favour of peace is feeble.86 The judge in Albert Sˇkarvan’s case made a statement which captures this dislocation between the peace movement and the Tolstoyans more widely: You’re a serious man, you’ve read and thought a lot. But I must say this: you would be acting more sensibly, even though you are unwilling to renounce your idea, if you would first complete the short term of service still remaining and then devote yourself to the investigation and promotion of your ideas. There are, you know, in our country too, people who support the idea of disarmament and peace. So, if this question indeed interests you and you have the talent, you can devote yourself to its study. In the course of time you may even become a member of parliament and then you can try to achieve something for peace! But if you continue as you are doing now, you will waste away in jail and no-one will take any notice of you.87 For the judge, Sˇkarvan’s protest could make no difference. But for Sˇkarvan and other Tolstoyans, it was the only thing that could make a difference.

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Tolstoyans and Vegetarians The nineteenth-century vegetarian movement offered a sympathetic context for Tolstoyans, adopting as it did a generous reformist outlook. Although closest conceptually and socially to the temperance, animal rights and anti-vivisection movements, vegetarianism seemed to be correlated to ‘all sorts of strange isms’: vegetarians were likely ‘to hold new and strange views on political economy, to be a member of the society for Psychical Research, to dress in all wool clothing, to abjure the razor, and to wear soft and unsightly hats’.88 Vegetarians were involved in the foundation of the Humanitarian League in Britain, which sought to bring together reformist causes under ‘a general principle of humaneness’, and in the League for Total Abstention in the Netherlands.89 In its early history, vegetarianism had an evangelical streak – the movement used religious arguments (that vegetarianism led to a more spiritual life and that gluttony was a sin) and sought to expand their cause through the publication of tracts and preaching at openair meetings.90 Vegetarianism became increasingly organized from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, with the formation of the first vegetarian society in Manchester in 1847, an American vegetarian society in 1850 and a German vegetarian society in 1867. It also became increasingly visible through its periodical literature and handbooks and through the presence of vegetarian restaurants in European cities. Tolstoy was a prominent figure in the nineteenthcentury vegetarian movement as a whole, not simply for his own followers. His essay The First Step formed the introduction to a Russian translation of Howard Williams’s The Ethics of Diet, and vegetarian periodicals published his essays and stories. For some of Tolstoy’s followers, vegetarianism was a central part of their belief system and of its practical application. Felix Ortt was president of the Dutch Vegetarian Society and Vrede advertised the works of leading members of this society in its pages – Marie Jungius’s vegetarian cookbook, for example, and J. W. Gerhard’s Het Vegetarisme in verband met de geheel onthouding en ’t sociale vraagstuk [Vegetarianism in relation to total abstention and the social issue]. In

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Bulgaria, Tolstoyans were responsible for the establishment of the vegetarian movement: their Bulgarian Vegetarian Union aimed to ‘raise the moral, intellectual and physical level of the individual’.91 Vegetarian restaurants provided a physical meeting space for Tolstoyans, whether at the Vegetarian Cooperative Association on Sixth of September Street in Sofia, at the Pomona vegetarian hotel and restaurant in The Hague or the Central Vegetarian Restaurant in Farringdon Street, London. Arthur St John sought the assistance of vegetarians and food reformers to make the Croydon Brotherhood Store ‘a depot for wholesome non-flesh food’, and both Kenworthy and Bruce Wallace spoke at the National Vegetarian Congress in London in 1899.92 Total abstinence from meat eating was not a universal or obligatory part of the philosophy of the Tolstoyan movement, however. While most of the Purleigh colonists abstained from meat, not all of them did.93 The members of the Christian Commonwealth enjoyed both chicken and turkey for their thanksgiving dinner.94 From meat eating to fruitarianism, the movement embraced and tolerated a wide variety of positions. The nature of the Tolstoyan vegetarian diet obviously depended on circumstances. As a trainee minister on a circuit in New Zealand Harold Williams struggled to eat well as a vegetarian, and in the first days of the colony experience vegetarian meals were often basic. But when James Penstone lunched at Purleigh in the autumn of 1897, he commented that ‘there is no self-denial, or hard living on a vegetarian diet as far as I can see. It was far, far better than I had in my plough-boy days’.95 At the vegetarian meal that Edith Crosby shared with Crosby, Arthur Fifield, Vladimir Chertkov and Arthur St John: We had a most gorgeous vegetarian menu – Omelet, macaroni, vegetable marrow, tomatoes, potatoes & beans – followed by jelly, trifle, & stewed pears, – then melon & grapes – & salad & cheese! And the social reformers showed themselves to be rivals to ‘Them Religious that ‘eats awful’!’96 In Moscow for the celebrations of the centenary of Tolstoy’s birth in 1928, Charles Daniel enjoyed ‘omelette, cauliflower, apple sandwich

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and ice cream’ at the Moscow Vegetarian Society’s restaurant.97 Although Johannes van der Veer recalled a man who abjured ‘the philosophy of the stomach’ and decreased his portions of food daily,98 Tolstoyan vegetarianism was not generally about frugality or renunciation for its own sake. Florence Holah believed that: If a man give up his dinner, or anything else, because another needs it, nothing could be better, but if he fast for fasting’s own sake – as the church people do – it seems to me that may become a great evil . . . all deliberate renunciation tends to concentrate one’s thoughts and attention upon one’s self.99 The arguments Tolstoyans used for their vegetarianism were borrowed from the established rhetoric of the wider vegetarian movement – a rhetoric that had already been formed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.100 Their justifications fell broadly into two categories: humanitarian or animal rights-related and pseudo-scientific or health-related. Into the latter category fell arguments about the cleanliness or otherwise of ‘flesh food’, which highlighted both the living processes of the animal and the status of the carcass after death. Ernest Crosby, in an extended essay on vegetarianism, rehearsed a number of these arguments. Meat, he argued, was ‘full of waste material making its way out of the body. There are also numerous diseases – tuberculosis, influenza, anthrax. We think of human corpses as unclean, but animal corpses are just the same’. Disposing of poisons produced by the flesh we eat, as well as the ones the human body produced, increased the labour of the kidneys and the digestive organs. By contrast, vegetable food was clean and cleansing, there were no ‘disgusting secrets’.101 Likewise, Arthur St John spoke of the process of ‘eating their dead bodies, with all the sweat, nitrogenous waste and putrid matter that necessarily remains with the flesh after death’.102 The human intestines and teeth were unsuited for carnivorous behaviour.103 Even Edward VII’s appendicitis, which delayed his coronation from June to August 1902, was put down to his meat rather than vegetarian diet.104 Meat was an ‘unnatural’ food for man, Crosby contended – if

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it were natural would people not be willing to eat it raw, as with vegetables? He also argued that the strongest (horse, ox, camel), fastest (antelope, hare), longest-lived (elephant) and most intelligent (elephant, ape) animals are herbivores.105 As opponents of vegetarianism often focused on the lack of nutrition in the vegetarian diet, both variety in vegetarian food and the physical strength or sporting abilities of vegetarians also occupied a prominent place in vegetarian propaganda.106 Although there were ‘a mere handful of vegetarians in Europe’, Crosby told his reader, they were ‘already gathering in far more than their share of athletic honours, in walking competitions, rackets, and cycling’.107 These scientific or health-related arguments were widely used. For followers of Tolstoy, however, the more important were the humanitarian or animal rights arguments, which had at their heart the principles of brotherhood and non-violence. The cruelty of killing animals for food and the means by which this was done were central. Although the principle of non-violence extended to animals as well as humans, distinction was made between domestic, herbivorous animals and beasts of prey. ‘With strange perversity we pick out the most inoffensive animals for slaughter’, Crosby argued. ‘There might be an element of justice in preying upon beasts of prey, but we prefer to slay the harmless deer and cow and sheep.’108 Kenworthy distinguished between ‘lionish and tigerish “individualism”’ and animals that have ‘entered the social stage’.109 These ‘social’ animals deserved the same respect and treatment as humans. Crosby reported that ‘A vegetarian friend of mine received a present of a brace of grouse one August from an ill-informed acquaintance. In his letter of thanks he advised the donor that he had interred them decorously in his back-yard.’110 Tolstoyan censure of the mistreatment of animals extended to their use as labour power – poor treatment, cruelty, overwork and neglect – and for entertainment – shooting, hunting, dog-fighting or ratworrying. Many Tolstoyans – particularly in the Dutch movement – were active in their opposition to vivisection. Kenworthy described vivisection as ‘the practice of a people who have denied God and their own souls’. The vast array of diseases and accidents that came upon

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the human race were ‘a part of the social conditions we have made’ and vivisection was no ‘way of escape for ourselves from the punishment of sins and errors’.111 The use of leather and other animal products was eschewed. Pavel Biriukov, for example, wore rubber shoes,112 while others preferred sandals or to go barefoot. ‘If there is one thing in our civilisation more odious than butchery, it is our foot-wear’, Crosby argued. What would our hands be like if we carried them about in leather boxes? The foot should be as presentable as the hand, as healthy, sun-burned, and almost as pliable. It needs the purifying access of the air and the stimulating effects of the outdoor cold and heat. Instead of allowing it this freedom, we shut it up in a stiff, foul, unventilated prison, where its clammy pallor suggests vegetables that sprout in a dark cellar . . . We shudder at the Chinese lady’s foot, while our own are not so very different from hers after all.113 In 1902, a section of the Doukhobor community in Canada resolved to abstain from the use of animals or animal products entirely, setting free their sheep and cattle, disposing of sheepskin coats, leather boots and animal harnesses and emptying pillows of their feathers.114 Arthur Voysey at Fonthill chose to use rotten vegetable matter rather than animal manure on his fields as ‘the earth itself was naturally vegetarian’.115 Humanitarian arguments extended also to those involved in the slaughter of animals and their preparation as food. James Gregory tells us that reference to the brutalization of butchers and slaughtermen ‘enabled vegetarians to avoid the charge that their compassion was animal-centred’.116 For Tolstoyans, these questions of violence and brutalization were not tactical but central. Tolstoy’s repulsion upon his visit to a Moscow abattoir, recounted in What Then Must We Do?, was echoed by his followers in their accounts of the conditions in which animals were kept, transported and slaughtered. Crosby described the horror of abattoirs he had seen in New Hampshire (‘an ugly board shanty in the fields, with a pile of

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hideous offal at one side and a sickening stench to leeward’), in Alexandria (‘I walked along the shore of the Mediterranean behind it . . . but I had to leap across rivulets of blood running down into that poetic sea’) and in Venice (‘I shall never forget the forbidding look of the place or the lowing and bellowing of the kine concealed somewhere in its foul recesses’).117 How could the men who worked in such a place avoid being brutalized? This was one of the worst forms of labour, as one Chicago abattoir worker allegedly told an officer of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals: ‘We’re only doing your dirty work, Sir.’118 Meat-eaters, Arthur St John cautioned, ‘might think of the hardening process which their demands necessitate on the naturally sympathetic hearts of those who make their living . . . by butchering and doing their dirty, cruel work for them.’119 John Kenworthy argued not only that being a slaughterman but also being a drover was an inhumane and brutalising profession.120 It was even argued that strictly speaking bee-keeping was against Tolstoyan principles, since it relied on coercion. Clearly there were a range of opinions though, as the Purleigh colonists kept a swarm of bees.121 Although some members of the peace movement rejected any connection between peace and vegetarianism as causes – a member of the London Peace Society apparently said there was no connection between war and diet122 – there was a strong connection in the other direction and Tolstoyans made this link explicit. Here they had much in common with the members of the Humanitarian League, who insisted that the emancipation of men and animals from cruelty and injustice were inseparable causes.123 Vladimir Chertkov told an audience at the Vegetarian Society that it was impossible to regard the killing of animals for food as evil, but not to condemn the killing of men through war or capital punishment.124 In a lecture notionally about vegetarianism but in fact dedicated to propagandizing the Doukhobor cause, he insisted that the Doukhobors were not vegetarians ‘because they have specially studied the question of a normal diet and decided to join a certain humanitarian movement. They refrain from killing animals merely because they are filled with too much love and goodwill to all

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living creatures to be able to deprive them of life’. ‘The most urgent task which lies before each of us’, he argued, ‘consists not so much in the dissemination of vegetarianism amongst mankind as in the deepening of that humane aspiration which lies at the basis of vegetarianism and its expansion over all the field covered by our consciousness and our conduct’.125 Tolstoyans, however, could not join animal rights activists in lobbying for changes to the law or the introduction of penalties for mistreatment. ‘Fear of punishment’, Kenworthy assured an audience at the Humanitarian League, is the lowest appeal that can be made to man’s nature, and one which is of outward force only . . . only when man becomes humane to man, will he become humane to animals. Our first effort then, as humanitarians, must be to promote a social spirit, and conditions to which cruelty will be foreign, and kindness natural. Human brotherhood in practice is the essential step towards practical recognition of our kinship with the animal creation . . . would it not be better to labour directly for more just and humane social conditions, rather than to resort to the “eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” of the law?126 Non-violence, non-resistance and brotherhood – the principal tenets of the Tolstoyan worldview – were the principles that underlay and motivated Tolstoyan vegetarianism.

Marriage and the ‘Sex Question’ Of all the debates that exercised the Tolstoyan movement, the sex question – or ‘S.Q.’ as it became known at Purleigh – was one of the most controversial. Tolstoy’s views on sex and marriage were made notorious by the publication of The Kreutzer Sonata (first published in London in 1890), and its ‘epilogue’ (published in 1896). In December 1897, Tolstoy contributed a specially commissioned article ‘On Marriage’ to The New Age, in which he clarified his thoughts further. Here he argued that sexual intercourse was ‘a transgression of the

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plainest demands of morality’ and that continence should be practised in marriage; that men and women should be educated that sexual love was not poetic, but degrading; and that ‘falling in love’ always impeded the progress of worthwhile work. He did not advocate chastity as a rule or a precept, but as an ideal towards which men and women should strive. An ideal could not be attained, or its realization pictured – if it could, it would no longer be an ideal.127 Tolstoy’s followers articulated their own beliefs in response to and in discussion of these texts, and with reference to discussions and practices that operated in the worlds around them. Jack Goring maintained that by defining the ideal, i.e. chastity, Tolstoy transformed it into a precept which might lead men into error. Was it not safer to leave the question ‘an open one, to be settled by the individual conscience?’ He questioned whether sex is always selfish and opposed to the interests of others, and wondered whether the ideal unit may not be male or female alone, but ‘male and female united’. Just ‘because abstemiousness in the matter of food is right’, he argued, ‘it does not follow that the ideal in that direction is total absention. Why should it follow in the matter of sexual intercourse?’128 Florence Worland argued that chastity and celibacy were hardly the same – a celibate might be spiritually unchaste. Chastity was about purity and usefulness of purpose. ‘To eat and drink apart from the necessity to keep the body in health, to sleep apart from the necessity for recuperation, and cohabitation apart from reproduction, are all acts of unchastity. They are unchaste – out of place, because they are useless and wasteful. They dissipate energy’.129 In 1897, George Bedborough’s journal The Adult (which discussed all kinds of views on sex and marital relations, including free love and serial monogamy) was on sale at the Croydon Brotherhood Store, though this was the cause of some consternation.130 In fact, as in the case of diet, Tolstoyan attitudes to sex, marriage and divorce encompassed a broad spectrum of different beliefs and practices. Kenworthy laid down his understanding of the Tolstoyan position in a series of articles on the subject in The New Order. He contrasted the unselfish love for all humankind that the Christian anarchist movement aimed at, with the fictional, romantic and passionate love that young

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people absorbed themselves in and the ‘mere animalism’ that occupied a level on the spectrum below this. Plants, insects and fish reproduce in hundreds and rabbits in thousands, he argued, but stage by stage the species rise in lessening power of reproduction. The ultimate ‘ideal of celibacy is before man, the highest animal, as the logical necessity of his progress’.131 Indulgence of the reproductive instinct would lead ‘not even back to the state of plants and vermin, but to loss of intellect, loss of physique, atrophy and death’. Kenworthy did not agree that it was possible to indulge in controlled passion either. How would this be measured? Anyone who had the self-control to ration the reproductive instinct would abstain altogether. ‘In the sex-relation, humanity is face to face with a force, a passion, which must be fought and conquered.’132 One’s interest in life should not be an animal interest, but a spiritual interest. He did allow that not everyone could reach this ideal, however. The fallback position was monogamous marriage. The most important thing, for ordinary men and women, was to distinguish between ‘sex-love’ and the ideal. They should avoid ‘all disastrous confusions, which would confound animal passion or even personal affection with spiritual aspiration’. If their passion for sex-union is, ‘after frank confession of the true state of the case’ too strong for them, then they should marry. ‘But marriage is not a haven of rest for the passion. The struggle is yet to be fought out; not on the lofty heroic lines of celibacy, but in the domain of motherhood or fatherhood, of self-respecting, selfcontrolled manhood and womanhood.’ In the unbreakable tie of monogamous marriage, there was ‘a clear line of established practice. The celibate’s struggle is conducted in advance even of that line; behind that line is the enemy’s country, the desert expanse of confused animalism.’133 A majority of those within the Tolstoyan community accepted the standard of monogamy and that there should be no remarriage. Separation was acceptable, but divorce remained enormously controversial. George Herron’s divorce and swift remarriage shocked other Christian socialists, and the scandal ‘terminated his public usefulness’.134 The revelation that Jacob van Rees was supporting a

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mistress caused consternation amongst his co-workers in the International Brotherhood in The Hague.135 When Ralph Albertson separated from his wife and remarried he found his forward thinking co-workers divided. George Gibson, though he appreciated that Albertson would find him narrowminded, declared himself ‘sufficiently old-fashioned to believe in Christ’s interpretation of the natural law and order of sex relations, the purpose of the law being the permanency of the family and the protection of the children’ – the sin in this case was against the children.136 Alexander Kent, who ran an independent church in Washington, hoped everyone was happier in the new situation, and that others would adjust themselves to it.137 Albertson was convinced that his friends in the movement were more shocked because of the amicable nature of the separation. He and his wife had simply ‘begun to bore each other’ and considered that they had ‘no right to live together in legalized adultery . . . So we both went out and renewed our lives – old as we were.’138 The Tolstoyan belief in not swearing oaths and having nothing to do with law and the government manifested itself in the phenomenon of ‘free unions’, common also amongst the wider anarchist movement. Many, though by no means all, Tolstoyans favoured this method of marriage, and most regarded these unions as sacred and unbreakable.139 The ethos of the free union was described, as follows, by Ernest Ames of the Leeds group: We could not agree to take part in the legal-religious marriage of society, because of the implied lowering of standard. Marriage to us is a religious concern, and not a legal contract. It consists in a spiritual bond of union between two people, and whomsoever God hath joined together let no man put asunder. We accepted Christ’s standard of marriage; that of a permanent union and did not admit the rightness of divorce. This, of course, put us at variance with Church and State, which made marriage a legal contract, and allows the possibility of dissolution.

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Instead, their marriages were celebrated by ‘a public declaration, by the parties concerned, at one of our weekly public meetings’. This position was divisive – Ames admitted that it caused much concern not only amongst outsiders but also amongst some of their own people.140 Tom Ferris and Lillian Hunt entered into a free union in Leeds at Christmas 1898. A note on their marriage recorded that their marriage was ‘sanctioned’ by a meeting of the Brotherhood Church on Christmas morning: These two have done us the inestimable service of protesting against the low standard of the legal marriage, by refusing to go through the legal ceremony; or bind themselves to a legal contract. We earnestly desire for them happiness, and the strength to bear the reproaches and contumely which their courageous step will probably occasion.141 Both Ferris and Hunt came from Quaker families and, despite their emphasis on fidelity, they were disowned by their respective local meetings (Brighouse for Ferris and Bristol and Frenchay for Hunt) as a result.142 The Brighouse meeting concluded that: such disregard of the reasonable and proper safeguards provided by the State, for the fulfillment of the marriage contract and for the well-being of Society; is not to be justified on Christian grounds, but tends to encourage disrespect for law, and for the solemn obligations of marriage, to injure the reputation of offspring and expose them to serious disabilities.143 When those associated with the Tolstoyan movement spoke about ‘free love’, they rarely meant promiscuity – they believed after all in ‘love without stint’ for their fellow man.144 The complications caused by the divergent attitudes to marriage and free unions, however, were demonstrated by the ongoing controversy surrounding the relationship of May Pinnell and William MacDonald. They were married in July 1896 and their marriage was announced by

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Kenworthy in The New Order in October.145 The following month a letter appeared from the couple, who sought to correct the impression that this was an ‘ordinary orthodox marriage’. ‘We have set ourselves in opposition to the ordinary conventions of the day, and consequently there was no religious or legal ceremony whatever. One of us has been connected with the Brotherhood Church almost from the commencement . . . and the principles taught there have determined us in our action.’146 This marriage, however – which dispensed with the Church and the law – caused alarm amongst what Kenworthy termed ‘some of the weaker brethren’.147 In a letter printed in December 1896, William Swainson – the Treasurer of the Brotherhood Church – stated: on behalf of myself and many of those who have been associated with the church from its commencement, that we take the earliest opportunity of signifying our entire dissent from such teaching. Some members of the church do hold these views, but they do so wholly on their own individual responsibility.148 By 1899, the MacDonalds were at Whiteway, where the dissolution of their marriage also caused controversy. They separated and May entered another free union with Arnold Eiloart. William MacDonald’s displeasure at this eventually led the new couple to ‘cease the marriage relation’. This excited condemnation from former admirers and sympathizers of the colony, as well as detractors, and earned the colonists a visit and a sermon from Kenworthy. Frank Henderson reported that ‘ . . . it has been represented to me that the Whiteway Colony is now a hotbed of lust, and that the life consists principally in exciting each other’s passions’. In fact, he says, ‘The Whiteway folks do not find it necessary to uphold the second union, or to oppose it; each has his or her own religious belief’.149 Tolstoy’s pronouncements on sex, marriage and gender roles were difficult for many of the women in the movement to stomach. In 1894, he told Ernest Crosby that:

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women do much harm because they use their liberty to neglect their duties of caring for their children, etc. In old times they were forced to keep in their place which was wrong; but all will be well when at least they use their liberty to accept their old domestic position.150 While other aspects of the Tolstoyan worldview seemed progressive, his attitude on this issue appeared retrogressive and contradictory. If he asked them to devote themselves to the bearing and raising of children, Florence Holah wondered, how could they also strive after chastity?151 Her sister-in-law, Jane, a passionate advocate of equality between the sexes, could not accept Tolstoy’s assertion that women should accept their husband’s guidance and submit their conscience to him. His words were a ‘contradiction of his own great message from God to the world’, and she feared for the effect they would have on ‘the many many women who are at this moment engaged in the painful conflict between the voice of God in their hearts, and the family tradition in which they have been brought up’.152 These Tolstoyan women accepted that equality should not be promoted as a political objective or by political means, but they nevertheless found Tolstoy’s attitude, and the attitude of some of their male counterparts in the movement, wanting. Isabella Fyvie Mayo had never taken part in the ‘women’s movement’ as she considered the form it took and the tactics it employed to be mistaken. She hoped for nothing for either men or women from any political party, or electoral right. But in his castigation of women who sought to go out to work, Tolstoy overlooked the predicament of women who were driven to do so ‘not by any foolish desire to “be like men” or to show that they can do men’s work’, but ‘to earn bread for old parents, for fatherless children, for helpless kinsfolk or friends’. This action was for Mayo an exhibition of their womanliness and not a renunciation of it.153 The ways in which views of sex, marriage and gender relations were interpreted or developed by domestic Tolstoyans were also a cause of concern. Florence Worland was shocked at the flippant comments that were made at the London Tolstoyan Society about the

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inferior mental capacity of women, and was surprised that no one else appeared to share her concern.154 Jane Holah was much troubled by Arthur St John’s ‘perplexing attitude’ to the sex question. She was so certain that ‘any departure from the ideal of monogamy spells degradation for women that I shudder at this retrogressive tendency being associated with a great spiritual and economic advance’.155 For men who were already married their participation in the movement caused them anxiety if their spouses did not share their convictions. Ernest Crosby’s wife, Fanny, apparently held to a dictum that ‘a man has no right to change his opinions after marriage’.156 In The New Order in June 1897, Henderson addressed the argument, often used, that it is easy for someone with no family ties to follow their conscience, but that for a husband or father, it was sometimes necessary to do things of which one’s conscience does not approve. Henderson disagreed. Surely the best thing to do for one’s family was also to wish them to attain perfection. ‘Shall we advance their moral or spiritual welfare by encouraging selfishness?’ In response to the argument that ‘Home duties’ come first, he asked ‘if all are brothers and sisters, what is the whole world but Home?’ ‘Would these perplexing questions ever arise . . . if we allowed ourselves to be wholly possessed by the spirit of love, if self-regard were banished, and the law of service became the law of our life?’157 Thomas Adair, writing from Belfast, advocated marrying likeminded people in order to raise hereditarily selfless children.158

Property, Money and Christian Economics Tolstoy’s followers confronted the questions of private property, exchange and ‘Christian economics’ both in a practical sense, in their dealings with one another, and in their theoretical discussions about how these issues ought to be managed in society as a whole. Although agriculture was praised as ‘the most necessary of all occupations, the foundation of them all, and the source of our very existence’159 and there was an increasing drive to ‘get on to the land’, Tolstoyans operated in and had to deal with existing industrial society, and in most cases still imagined the exchange of goods and services taking

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place in the society that was to come. In Britain, where ‘the majority of the people have been so long alienated from the land, that many of them . . . are unfit and unwilling to return to agricultural life’, this was perceived to be a particularly thorny issue.160 The question was how to conduct economic relations on a Christian basis. They drew inspiration from the works of other recent and contemporary writers, both literary and theoretical – Timofei Bondarev’s ‘bread-labour’ theory, as advanced by Tolstoy; Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, in which he outlined his theory of the single tax on land; Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which imagined the functioning of a cooperative economy in Boston in the year 2000; and Michael Flu¨rscheim’s The Real History of Money Island, which advocated the single tax and a banking system based on the exchange of commodities, using ‘labour notes’, not money.161 They also wrote their own Christian anarchist texts on economics – George Gibson, for example, wrote regular columns on ‘the economics of love’ in The Social Gospel, and Ernest Crosby penned an account of St Francis’s ‘subversive’ principles of political economy.162 John Kenworthy’s The Anatomy of Misery – first published in 1893 and reissued in 1900 – consisted of simple lectures on economics for ‘the people’, and it outlined a system of production, distribution and exchange that aimed to ‘equally promote the welfare of each member’. This new economic and social organization would be brought about not by violent revolution or political action, but by personal conduct – by reforming oneself.163 But how to alter one’s conduct in one’s own life and bring about the revolution in the way Kenworthy described? Sincere Tolstoyans who remained in ‘the system’, like Ernest Crosby, sought to ‘get off men’s backs’ as far as they could. The question as he saw it was how to: give a quid pro quo in work and not in money for all that we receive from the laboring masses who toil for us. We must keep our balance of account with them and with the world at large in our favour. We are bound by every moral consideration to give as much as we get. Now there are two ways to retain a balance in our favour. One is to keep down the debit side of the account

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and the other is to increase the credit. We can keep down the debit side by taking as little as possible from others and by making as little use as possible of their labor, by dispensing with luxuries and by leading a temperate and frugal life. On the other hand we can increase the credit side by being as useful to others as possible and especially to those who need our help the most, the toiling classes.164 Many Tolstoyans sought to occupy themselves in cooperative enterprises, but even these found it difficult to carry out their principles to the full in this line of work. The Brotherhood Dressmakers closed their enterprise in 1899 not because they could not make it pay, they said, but because they could not ‘continue to get our living by making clothes for fairly well-off people who can “pay” us for them’.165 Others campaigned against the most egregious offences of modern capitalism. While T. G. Sadler distributed literature opposing the taking of rent by Christians, Crosby also campaigned against usury, against rents, against the ‘unearned increment’ brought about the rising value of land, and against the principle of taxing vacant lots at a lower rate than those that are built on – in this case men were punished for making their land useful to the community. ‘My title to my coat is derived from the fact that I made it or that I acquired it directly or indirectly from the man who did’, he argued. ‘Such a source of title is plausible and comprehensible. But I did not make my land. Who did? God. To whom did he give it? . . . He gave it to the human race; but surely, then, not one human being should be left landless’ . . . ‘Do not confuse ownership with possession. They are quite distinct. It is necessary that the quiet possession of the land should be assured to the man who intends to improve it, but this does not mean that he should profit by the unearned increment.’166 Those Tolstoyans who joined a communitarian project confronted the rejection of private property in its fullest extent. At Whiteway, the colonists sought to escape the burden of property ownership by burning the deeds to the land after the purchase. The first edition of the Christian Commonwealth’s newspaper reported that colony life meant that:

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the question of individual property-holding rights and personal privileges vanishes like mist . . . Our main problems are as to how we may house more homeless, and feed more hungry, and provide industry for more labor, and bind up more brokenhearted, and inspire more faith and courage, and minister to more need, and contribute to more happiness.167 But how far should communal ownership extend in practice? Ralph Albertson was painfully aware, in retrospect, of references like that in the July 1898 edition of The Social Gospel to an ice-cream social with a musical and literary programme: ‘Mrs Albertson’s piano is quite a contribution to our pleasure at such times.’168 He also defended the wearing of one’s own clothes, on the grounds that someone’s hat might fit only them; but at Whiteway there was a laundry cupboard from which people could take whatever they liked. In order to take Christian economics to its ultimate conclusion, some Tolstoyans felt it was necessary to eschew the use of money entirely. In the British movement, ‘no-moneyism’ dominated debate during the summer of 1899.169 What was money, after all, but ‘a convenient instrument for compelling the unwilling labour of others?’ asked Florence Holah. ‘Having ceased to be a mere medium of exchange, its sole value now consists in the power it gives us of forcing others – weaker or less fortunate than ourselves – to do our bidding.’170 As one correspondent of The New Order put it: ‘To receive money is to express fear that one’s needs will not be supplied by love in men, i.e. by God . . . We should reform by casting out fear through perfect love. Then we shall gradually come to refuse money and trust the God in men.’171 Early no-moneyites conducted ‘penniless pilgrimages’, attempting to travel from London to Oxford, for example, without funds. On this journey, the travellers prevailed principally upon clergymen, whose reactions were mixed – some were generous, others slammed the door or declared the ‘pilgrims’ insane. They also had some success with both wealthy and poor laymen, however. They were offered substantial meals, drink and shelter, and had to turn

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down offers of meat and whisky. Typical encounters were described as follows: Try a vicar; explain to him that we are travelling to Oxford without money; he makes excuse – says he has no food; it belongs to his housekeeper – finishes by offering us money, and thinks his obligation ended when we refuse to accept; we thank him, leave literature, and depart . . . call at vicar’s, explain, and ask for breakfast; he hesitates, is afraid he has not enough to feed us, goes to consult housekeeper, returns, saying they think they have enough for us; we sit down to breakfast with him and cousin, eat all they have, maid goes to borrow bread, and we are supplied again.172 The pioneer colonists at Whiteway also made their way to Gloucester without money, finding food and shelter every night. Their refusal to take money, they reported, ‘has come like a thunder clap on those who have offered [food and shelter] to us on the way. We have talked with farmers and their wives, labourers, artisans, parsons and their wives, and are going to send some of them papers about the movement.’173 The Leeds group were among the first to tackle this issue seriously in the practice of their business and everyday lives. Their engineering workshop had been established and run on Christian principles – ‘No division into masters and workers, no system of wages, and no individual control’. Matters were decided communally and all needs met from a communal supply of money. The external relations of the group remained a concern, however: Though, inside our group we gave and received freely, yet with the outer world we bought and sold. The measure of our goodwill to our neighbours was money, not need. We purchased from factors and sold to consumers, and were not guided by human needs; for we know that those most in need of goods are generally without money. There was also another side to the money question: we found that if we put the very best work and

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material into our business that it was extremely difficult to secure an adequate return. We were compelled, to some extent, to be ruled by the conditions of the markets, which meant buying in the cheapest, and selling in the dearest. The alternative was to use indifferent material, or to lose trade.174 They had heard of the ‘no-money’ position, but did not fully appreciate its implications until they discussed it with advocates of the position at Purleigh and Whiteway: Now we saw how readily it applied itself to the difficulties of our position at Leeds. It was not so much a solution, as a complete clearing away of all the troubles. Here was an end to all complicity in buying and selling, and the mechanical relations it involved, and to the encouragement it gave to sweating and unjust conditions of employment, to say nothing of the economic waste. It at once placed material activity in its right place, by making it the means through which to build up right relations with one’s neighbours, instead of making good relations the means to influence one’s material welfare. For instance, one would no longer look upon labour – the power to produce – as a means to secure a living by offering the result for sale to those who had money, but would rather see in the ability to produce things people need – the means of drawing them nearer to one in love and goodwill, by offering to supply their needs freely, without barter. It would provide a means for extending the communism, which we had shared within our group, to all we came into contact with, by extending to all alike the same relation – that of freely giving according to need. All our transactions would be on a basis of brotherhood, and not of business.175 For those involved the abnegation not just of money but of all forms of exchange, seemed to clear away all kinds of difficulties. Tom Ferris commented that ‘its effect in helping towards the right life is immense, and the way it clears up difficulties must be experienced to be believed’.176 When Ferris returned to Whiteway in 1899 and

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delivered an ‘eloquent and forceful appeal’ on behalf of no-moneyism, Nellie Shaw recalled that the idea ‘caught on like the measles’, being accepted by almost all of the colonists.177 Ames insisted that under the new model the economic side of their business was a success. They were not taken advantage of materially. But while many were willing to cooperate on this economic basis, it was more difficult to extend this to religious and spiritual unity. Ferris attempted to extend the practice to Blackburn. When a reporter from The Blackburn Times visited him at 35 Victoria Street and asked to buy those works of Tolstoy he had seen in the window, he was told that he could have them for nothing. Indeed, payment, if tendered, could not be accepted. It was only Ferris that did not use money in Blackburn though – the others, including William Murray, could not go so far.178 The no-money issue, along with differences of opinion on the sex question, caused a split in the Leeds group. As their numbers grew, however, it became more difficult to find useful work for everyone to do, and they decided to ‘get on to the land’. They believed that ‘the freer we got from the artificialities of town life, and the closer our touch with the land, the greater is our power of usefulness to others, and the less are we an expense to the community’. This was the context of their move on to the land vacated by the Purleigh colonists in 1901 (see Chapter Six).179 The New Order introduced a ‘rational exchange project’, aimed at the abnegation not only of money but of all exchange – goods advertised in each issue were available to anyone who needed them. Arthur St John suggested this scheme probably would result in the exchange of labour or goods, but ‘always, one would hope, without any calculation or anxiety about getting an equivalent, only a desire to give enough and freely’. Settlements organized on this basis could put out a statement of what they needed and a statement of what they have to give away. As for taxes, they should say: ‘Happy to say we have no money to offer you. Of course you can seize what you think fit, but we don’t care for giving away except for some useful purpose, such as providing food, shelter, &c.’180 The first column offered: use of a furnished cottage within five miles of Purleigh; French, English

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language and English literature lessons; advice in choosing land and practical instruction in working it; a set of town-clothes for a man 5ft 6ins; and books on pure chemistry. Help was asked with indoor and outdoor work, unskilled farm work and help for the Doukhobors in settling in Canada.181 These experiments sparked a vigorous debate about what the refusal to use money actually achieved. Was the penniless pilgrimage really a demonstration of the Christian life, or just an exercise in taking advantage of the good nature of the people they met on their way?182 Nellie Shaw regarded it as ‘little more than vagabondage’. When cyclists departing Whiteway were asked to deliver an enormous stack of correspondence in order to avoid the senders using money, they inevitably stopped at the nearest post office and bought the stamps themselves. The refusal to purchase necessary foodstuffs, tools and so on simply shifted the burden of their purchase to somebody else.183 Likewise, some members of the Blackburn group mocked Ernest Ames’ list of sympathetic hosts on the road from Leeds and Blackburn to Purleigh, calling it ‘The Sponger’s Directory’.184 If we were to give freely and expect nothing in exchange, Louise Maude also questioned what we should regard as ours to give. If I knit someone a pair of stockings I give nothing but the work I put in; the material was got by wrong means, and I still have no real right to give it. If I spun the wool, it would still not be mine unless I had shorn the sheep on whose back it grew, and bred it on land free from rent. She warned against trying to do too much at once, deceiving oneself and misusing the goodwill of others. ‘When everyone is willing to serve his neighbour to the best of his ability . . . and limits his own wants as far as he is able, money will vanish as the rash disappears when the child has recovered from the measles.’185 In response, Florence Holah argued that anyone determined not to use money would be fully prepared to take all the consequences – they would not want others to spend money on their behalf, rather

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they would want others to follow their example. She also put the eternal question for Tolstoyans: how it was possible to conquer one’s own selfish nature and develop a life of love when ‘we are consciously and deliberately persisting in a course of conduct that is unjust and unloving?’ What other way was there to change things than by going to the ultimate extreme and demonstrating the ideal life and practice?186 Once she had made her own decision to abandon the use of money, she felt an enormous sense of relief. ‘It it just or right to use money – thus forcing others to serve me or do my will?’ she reasoned. ‘No. Then don’t do it. That is just about how the matter stands’.187 Tom Ferris regarded Maude’s instruction to use money until money becomes superfluous – ‘to continue acting selfishly until we become unselfish’ – as a piece of advice ‘which scarcely seems called for in a world where nearly everyone is doing just that very thing’. Maude was, in his view, ‘a truth resister – who strives rather to justify her own position than to climb further’.188 In another polemic on the no-money movement, Florence Holah made a direct comparison between this withdrawal from the competitive system and the refusal of military service. ‘In continental countries’, she wrote: men are being called upon to face this fundamental principle of Christianity (and indeed of humanity) in connection with the military service, and many are suffering persecution to the death, rather than violate their conscience. We, in England, have to face the same question in a less direct, but no less real form. Are we prepared to meet it in the same heroic spirit?189 In a letter supporting the movement in 1901, Tolstoy agreed that no-moneyism was ‘almost the same as refusal of military service’ and ‘undoubtedly right’.190 This chapter has explored the theoretical basis and practical application of some key areas of Tolstoyan thought, and some of the ways in which these brought them into contact with but also held them back from related reformist contexts. Space has restricted the

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number of areas of thought and practice discussed, and many more related contexts could have been explored. This chapter has said nothing, for example, on Tolstoyan relations with the theosophist movement, and relatively little on their relations with nonconformist churches. It has not touched on Tolstoyan views on education, and much more could have been said on punishment, but Tolstoyans’ contributions to educational debates and penal reform will be discussed in the next chapter. Tolstoyan interaction with the spiritualist movement will also be dealt with in the next chapter, as an interest in spiritualism often entailed a move away from the Tolstoyan movement and spiritualism was certainly frowned upon by Tolstoy himself. Nevertheless, the case studies have been chosen in order to demonstrate that while their interests allowed Tolstoyans to interact with a wide range of social reform movements, they were set apart by their desire, as Redfern put it, to ‘face life as a whole’ – their adherence to a whole worldview, at the bottom of which were the principles of brotherhood, non-violence and non-resistance to evil by violence. Redfern was in no sense isolated in his belief that Tolstoyism linked everything else. For Arnold Eiloart, antivaccinationists and suchlike faddists ‘exalt one idea at the expense of the balance and proportion of life’. What Tolstoy had done for him was to change his views ‘not in one direction alone, but in all, or almost all. Art (see Tolstoy’s “What is Art”) science, politics, education, commerce, war, law, sex relations, all are seen in new and clearer light’.191 In The Candlestick, F. J. Gould surveyed the social reform movement as follows: The teetotal movement is likely to fail because it has ‘seen the vice rather than the roots of the viciousness’. In some aspects Vegetarians assume a greater moral significance, for they appeal to a larger humanitarian instinct when they protect the animal as well as improve the man. They are prone to a certain absorption in their subject, as if human nature were so entirely influenced by diet and its relation to the lower creatures that table reform would solve the social problem . . . Not less honour

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is due to the apostles of International Arbitration and Peace. But here, also, one has to avoid the superficial sentiment which weeps at the sight of blood, while it lets the fundamental evils live on . . . Cooperation is so good that, in our pleasure at its progress, we may forget the need for a supreme philosophic end to cooperate for.192 To be a Tolstoyan meant to apply the principles of brotherhood, non-violence and non-resistance to violence in all aspects of life, and to follow one’s own conscience at the expense of the Church and state. Their condemnation of government, law and coercion of any kind set their solutions to social problems apart from those of other reformers. In their attitudes to the political process, to marriage and to money it limited their ability to cooperate, caused rifts within their own movement and alienated more moderate sympathizers. It also gave their movement, in Britain and elsewhere, its own distinct character and purpose, even while its members operated within wider local and global reformist networks.

CHAPTER 6 TOLSTOYAN LEGACIES

This is the first time I speak of it in public. It gives me much pain, but I feel I must do it. For I will now cry it aloud, that a consistent application of the Tolstoyan doctrine must lead to one of the following consequences: perishing in miserable wretchedness, growing mad or making away with oneself. J. K. van der Veer, ‘Tolstoyan Ascetism’, The Social Democrat, 5:6, 15 June 1901, p. 177. Tolstoy ruined, not those who took him seriously, but those who did not take him seriously enough! Those who became ‘ruined’ were those who tried to exploit the letter of the ‘teaching’ for their own ends. Such persons became ruined very quickly, because Tolstoy, albeit unwittingly, acted on them in a manner analogous to a corrosive acid and dissolved out of them everything but the pure gold. Woe betide them, if there was no gold in them! In other words, only those in whom there was no guile went through the Tolstoyan ‘movement’ (such as it was) and came out the other side in full possession of sanity and integrity; albeit not ‘Tolstoyans’. Florence Worland, ‘Meetings and Partings III’, Focus, 1:3, March 1926, p. 161. Johannes van der Veer had often been accused of following Tolstoy’s teachings too strictly. His experience of trying to apply the Tolstoyan

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philosophy in his own life, and observing others in the Dutch and British movements as they tried to do so, led him to a complete renunciation of his former beliefs, by 1901. Most sensible followers of Tolstoy, he concluded, were obliged to effect a compromise between theory and practice, because Tolstoy’s instruction to reject all material well-being and to always put others before oneself was contrary to human nature. What was the use, he asked, of propagating a theory which demanded the impossible? And what could be more reactionary than a doctrine ‘which represents the life of the most degraded as the ideal life’? Although his involvement in anti-war campaigning continued, he joined the Dutch Sociaal Democratische Arbeiders Partij (SDAP), convinced that socialism, which ‘has in view the happiness of all men’, was ‘a sound view, with which the future lies, and that of the Tolstoyans a sentimental view, which will necessarily die out in the near future’.1 Florence Worland in contrast had never really regarded herself as a Tolstoyan, although she asked the same questions and came up with some of the same answers. She and her husband, Charles Daniel, continued their publishing enterprises well into the 1920s, catering for new and ‘cranky’ reform interests, while also retaining their focus on Tolstoy and maintaining contact with the other Tolstoyans that remained.

The Experience of Defeat The thriving Tolstoyan movement of the 1890s began to lose impetus in the mid 1900s. The Christian anarchist colonies at Purleigh, Blaricum and Commonwealth all dissolved soon after the turn of the century. In 1902, Tom and Lilian Ferris, Ernest and Jennie Ames, Arthur Taylor and Bertie Rowe (of the Leeds and Blackburn groups) moved on to the colony land at Purleigh, but found it hard to sustain themselves. They survived (along with the rest of the district) an outbreak of smallpox in the winter of 1902– 3, but returned to Leeds in 1904.2 The Christian Commonwealth’s land was sold in December 1900 to William T. Harvey, a lumberman from Columbus who operated a

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sawmill and a ginnery and cultivated cotton and corn, ‘easily recouping his investment’.3 By 1904 only one former colonist, ‘Old Bassett’, was still on the colony land, talking about moving but refusing to sell his assets for a reasonable price.4 In 1904, there were only four colonists left at the International Brotherhood at Blaricum and the last colonist was eventually evicted in 1911.5 Although the Whiteway colony continued to thrive in the 1900s and beyond, the principle of communal life and work was abandoned as early as 1901. In the first years the hard work of a few habitually supported many less industrious residents and visitors. As it was felt that ‘we were only helping the lazy to be lazier and the selfish to be more selfish’, the land was divided into plots which each man would work for his own subsistence.6 Various explanations have been offered for the failure of these communitarian projects. The inadequacy of the fundamentally middle class intellectual membership for the agricultural work required; the failure of the colonists to put their principles into practice; and their inability to get along with one another are all cited by participants in and historians of these projects. The narrative curve they follow begins with idealism and ends in disillusion. There is some truth in this narrative and in all of these explanations. In Russia after all, where Tolstoyan communes (in their later phase) were established and populated by experienced agricultural workers, their existence was cut short only by external factors. At the Chilean Tolstoy colony, where artists and intellectuals undertook the agricultural work, the failure of the crops and disputes about religious matters terminated the experiment swiftly.7 Putting one’s belief in non-resistance into practice was no easy matter when it came to communal life. At Whiteway, colonists watched dispiritedly, in 1899, as Samuel Bracher led away their cows, in an attempt to reclaim some of the money he had put into the colony, and in the years to come they struggled to remain nonresistant in the face of the destruction of their crops by their neighbours’ livestock.8 The Christian Commonwealth’s demise began when some of its members petitioned for the colony to be put into receivership so that they might claim their share of the

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value of the land. Torn between abandoning the principle of nonresistance by opposing the trouble-makers in court, or allowing the colony to be broken up and effectively destroyed, the colonists opted to defend the case. Ralph Albertson believed that if ‘they had taken away our horses or money or any property we should not have prosecuted them’. But this was an attempt to destroy the community completely. ‘It was a situation that could not be met by anything in our philosophy. If we were to live we had to fight. It was the end of our dream of strictly obeying the Sermon on the Mount.’9 The appeal for receivership was promptly dismissed by the court. They received affidavits from both Albertson and Gibson to the effect that the petitioners had already received more than they brought into the colony.10 But the action poisoned the atmosphere at the Commonwealth and led to further disagreements amongst its supporters. Albertson had spoken in favour of contesting the petition at the colony’s general meeting and many members there had felt the legal defence would mean the end of their ideal.11 A number of the Commonwealth’s prominent sympathizers felt the same – the fan mail they had formerly received turned to criticism of the colony’s loss of ideals, which Albertson caricatured as follows: It was too bad, they said, that so glorious an ideal should have been given up so easily. Would it not have been possible with a little more love, with a little more tact, to keep the ‘kickers’ from rebellion? . . . Is not such love possible? You were going to show us, we hoped, that it was. Well we are hurt, our faith is hurt. We are almost but not quite broken hearted (as we sit here in our office in a Northern city and dictate this letter to our stenographer). Naturally we shall take less interest in what you are doing. With all good wishes, and so forth.12 The Right Relationship League, who had taken on the mortgage after John Chipman left the colony, declined to make further payments on the grounds that the colonists were no longer living according to their original ideals. An epidemic of typhoid fever led to the

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departure of several families from the colony, and it was fully disbanded in 1900. The International Brotherhood at Blaricum collapsed in an incident of actual violence, in which numerous colonists were involved. When Brotherhood residents ripped up the rails of the steam tram that ran past the colony as an expression of sympathy with striking railwaymen, their neighbours (fisherman and farmers who needed to transport their goods to market) attacked the colony – even launching a firebomb at Lodewijk van Mierop, who demonstratively sat reading his bible. The ensuing debate about what measures to take to defend the colony inevitably led to its demise.13 If non-resistance was difficult to practise, so too were brotherhood and love. In Henriette Hendrix’s account of life at Blaricum in 1900, she recorded that residents displayed a lack of kindness and charity, gave preferential treatment to the colonists who had been there from the start and neglected to care for pipesmoking English colonist ‘Bob’ when he fell ill.14 Kenworthy put the failure at Purleigh down to the character of the participants, which was not developed enough for such an undertaking – ‘it was as though they discovered that they were at liberty to believe what they liked and do what they liked’.15 Aylmer Maude thought that a lack of ‘definiteness’ in relations between the colonists was the root cause of the disagreements. In his opinion, ‘definiteness’ in property could only facilitate harmony between men. ‘It comes ultimately to this, that two men cannot both eat the same piece of bread, and there is no moral gain in pretending you do not claim the bread you eat.’16 At Commonwealth, on the other hand, Gibson felt the colonists had trusted too much in organization, rather than in spirit.17 These conflicting diagnoses reflect the fundamental contradiction that Michael Holman identifies in the Purleigh experiment. ‘Bread Labour’ required organization, whereas a commitment to complete non-resistance required that there be no organization.18 Tolstoyan colonists either entered into communal projects with little clarity about how the society they wished to create ought to operate, or they worked this out in detail but thereby compromised the ideal.

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Disillusionment or the experience of defeat inherent in the disintegration of colonies and groups did not, of course, usually destroy the participants themselves. What happened to these individuals when they turned away from Tolstoyism? What aspects of their beliefs did they carry into their new or altered lives? In what shapes did Tolstoyism live on, and how did it influence new contexts or remain in evidence within them? The following discussion answers some of these questions.

Later Reformist and ‘Cranky’ Contexts Van der Veer was not the only Tolstoyan to turn towards socialism. Anne de Koe also joined the SDAP, although he remained an admirer of Tolstoy.19 Alexander Sirnis, manager of Tuckton House and effectively Chertkov’s representative in England, was a Marxist who believed in ‘advocating the principles of Marxian economics and industrial unionism . . . in an unostentatious but persistent and telling way’.20 George Ferdinands, as a good Tolstoyan, regarded work in the socialist movement as redundant without a reformation of character on the part of every individual. Nevertheless he came to feel that it was ‘only through some such organisation as the Socialistic movement that the individual will be placed in an environment that will help him to think and act sanely’.21 For others, however, the element of coercion inevitably involved in state socialism precluded their involvement in the socialist movement. Among the other reformist and ‘cranky’ movements in which they could participate were spiritualism, penal reform, ‘food reform’ and educational reform. An important context for Tolstoyans that was not discussed in the previous chapter was spiritualism. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, a surprising number of Tolstoy’s followers turned their attention to the possibility of communication with the spirit world. Most notoriously, Tom Ferris and Bertie Rowe of the Leeds group travelled – without the use of money – to Yasnaya Polyana in 1903, in an attempt to persuade Tolstoy that he was wrong to dismiss spiritualism. The trip was the result of a ‘prophetic command’ delivered to Ferris by Rowe, who regarded himself as something of a

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medium. Ferris apparently found Tolstoy ‘unable to adapt his mind to new concepts. “You know, Mr Ferris,” he said at our last interview, “I am too old to receive new truth.”’22 An interest in spiritualism had not been absent from earlier Tolstoyan enterprises. Kenworthy, for example, recalled sitting ‘in circle’ with friends at Croydon and receiving communications that purported to be from Kenworthy’s brother and from Ralph Waldo Emerson. The serious interest of leading Tolstoyans in spiritualism created ructions within the movement, however – partly because of Tolstoy’s staunch opposition to it and partly because Tolstoyans, like Tolstoy, prided themselves in their faith in logic and reason. Kenworthy’s enthusiasm for the spirit world, which began as the Purleigh colony was falling apart, split the audience at the Edgware Road Tolstoyan meetings.23 By 1901, Kenworthy was speaking at meetings of the London Spiritualist Alliance, regularly visiting a medium and practising automatic writing. He believed himself to be in touch with William Morris, John Ruskin and the ancient philosopher Iambichus. Kenworthy felt his belief in a spirit world strengthened his commitment to his cause – it helped him to feel that the Kingdom of God was not a forlorn hope, but ‘a practicable reality to be brought about by entering into relationship with the spirit world’.24 Chertkov argued relentlessly with Florence Holah about her interest in spiritualism. She regarded it not as a suspension of her ‘careful and rational attitude’ but rather the opposite: ‘Certain phenomena present themselves to my notice – I cannot disregard them – they seem to me good and I seek to account for them in the most reasonable way possible.’ For Holah, spiritualism connected perfectly naturally with her Tolstoyan principles. Man was a spiritual being. The more spiritual individuals were constantly helping and educating others – she had received spiritual help from Tolstoy, from Chertkov and from Kenworthy. Why should God not use the agency of the spirit, reabsorbed after death into a universal whole, to educate those who were less advanced and ‘still encumbered by the body’?25 The Daniels, in their publications, actively promoted vegetarianism and wider food-related issues. Besides her frequent contributions

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to The Crank, The Open Road and Focus on ‘food reform’, Florence Daniel published volumes (through her husband’s publishing firm) on healthy eating, on preventing disease through nutrition and on womanhood and motherhood.26 Arnold Eiloart also wrote on health through nutrition, rather than modern medicine.27 Tolstoyans had always placed much emphasis on education and they continued to engage in discussion of new educational theories. Mary Everest Boole (whose emphasis on enjoyment and flexibility in learning was not a world away from Tolstoy’s) received a lot of space in The Open Road, for example. Jacob van Rees rescued the Blaricum colony school and reinvented it as a ‘humanitarian school’, where the principles of innovative educationalist Jan Ligthart (also influenced by Tolstoy) were put into practice.28 Several Tolstoyans were brought into activism in the area of penal reform by their belief in non-resistance and their experience in prison as conscientious objectors. In the 1890s, the Humanitarian League had also engaged in efforts to ameliorate prison conditions and eliminate corporal punishment.29 While working at the Midland Herald in the early 1900s, Arthur St John published a series of reports of miscarriages of justice. In a 1904 publication entitled Crime and Common Sense, St John brought these reports together and penned his own polemic on the solution to the problems of the contemporary prison system. He firstly called attention to the weaknesses of the justice system: the propensity of officials and bureaucrats to avoid trouble; the inclination of the police to accumulate only evidence that incriminates an individual; the system of paid solicitors and advocates, which favoured ‘the longest purse’; the false position of judges, who were led to believe they were above their fellow men; and juries who knew little about the life or circumstances of the accused. Each step in this process was flawed and inefficient, but even if better and more efficient systems for investigating and judging could be put in place, the treatment of those deemed to be guilty was still counterproductive. The present system educated criminals as criminals, and made them worse, not better.30 St John’s solution to the failings of the existing criminal justice system lay in the maxims of the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Judge not’

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and ‘Resist not evil’. ‘We have no business to judge our fellow-men’, St John told his reader, ‘and we have no business to punish them’. How then should we protect the victim and induce the criminal to change his ways? ‘By surrounding him with kindly, sympathetic, cheerful, strong-minded, persistent, industrious, and knowing people, who will make a useful life desirable and possible to him. That is all you want.’31 Prisons should be transformed into educative establishments or hospitals – ‘large tracts of land, perhaps, industrial settlements occupied, or supervised, by the most humane, industrious, and intelligent individuals.’32 Definite periods of confinement should be abolished. Criminals should be regarded as people whose education had been neglected, and society should strive to make up for that neglect. At the same time – although St John considered this took him beyond the remit of his present topic of discussion – we might reconsider our ideas about crime itself, about those practices and ways of treating people that were considered criminal, and those that were sheltered by the law or indeed formed the basis of the economic and political system.33 St John’s solutions were explicitly Tolstoyan, despite the fact that they involved working within existing social and political institutions. In 1907, St John helped establish the Penal Reform League and he acted as its secretary in its early years. The League was set up as an alternative to the existing Howard Association, which was regarded as too sympathetic to the establishment, but the two bodies merged in 1921. The League’s objectives, as set out in 1908, were ‘to obtain and circulate information concerning criminals and their treatment’, ‘to promote a sound public opinion on the subject’ and ‘to help bring about a more complete and effective cooperation between the public and public servants for the reclamation of criminals by a curative and educative system’.34 St John was not the only penal reform activist who had been influenced by Tolstoy, as A. G. Rose points out – as a result of his experiences as a conscientious objector during the First World War, Stephen Hobhouse contributed to a report on the state of English prisons which concluded that:

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in our prisons we put away men for our own convenience, and for the sake of financial economy, control them by mechanical methods which not only deteriorate their own characters and dissipate their inheritance in humanity, but in the majority of cases ensure that if we release them we shall have to put them away again, and continue the process of their destruction till nothing but animal life can be said to remain of them.35 I do not mean to suggest by this discussion that Tolstoyism had a defining impact on any of these spheres of thought. But in its later applications, as well as its immediate ones, Tolstoy’s thought – as it was put into practice by his followers – fed into a broad range of contexts.

Tolstoy and Peaceful Protest: From Non-resistance to Non-violent Resistance Tolstoy’s understanding of non-violence would become the steppingstone to strategies of peaceful protest in the twentieth century. The most notable and most direct example is his influence on Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi corresponded with Tolstoy in the year before Tolstoy’s death, interacted with members of the international Tolstoyan movement as well as their broader ‘cranky’ contexts and established two separate ‘Tolstoyan’ communal experiments – the Phoenix Settlement and Tolstoy Farm.36 Although Gandhi described himself as a ‘devoted follower’ of Tolstoy’s, the degree to which Tolstoy can be regarded as the ‘founder of Gandhism’ has been much debated.37 Gandhi owed to Tolstoy (at least in part) his adherence to the ‘law of love’, his belief that a man must earn bread by labouring with his own hands and his preference for sartorial simplicity. Tolstoy’s ‘Letter to a Hindoo’, an exchange with Indian revolutionary Taraknath Das, bolstered Gandhi’s arguments against the elements of the nationalist movement that condoned violence.38 But Tolstoy and Gandhi differed in their attitudes to the state and the nation, and in his philosophy of non-violent resistance Gandhi took an important step away from the Tolstoyan philosophy of nonresistance to evil by violence.39 In The Kingdom of God is Within You,

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the text which most influenced Gandhi, Tolstoy advocates civil disobedience – Kathryn Tidrick points out that ‘every individual act of resistance to injustice described in the book possesses the significance of revolt’.40 Nevertheless, the emphasis in Tolstoy’s thinking was on individual conscience, on the morality of the action and on obligations, not rights. Refusal to comply with the state should be undertaken because the individual believed compliance to be wrong, not in order to achieve a particular end. In 1902, British non-conformists led by Baptist minister John Clifford opposed the Education Act (and denominational religious teaching in schools) by refusing to pay taxes. H. E. Hare countered this kind of ‘passive resistance’ campaign with an explanation of his belief in non-resistance. Passive resistance as a strategy, he argued, was about fighting for rights. As a non-resister, Hare believed Christ’s teaching ‘categorically forbade fighting for rights, and insisted on the performance of duties instead’. When Hare became a non-resister, he embraced the duty to regulate his own life, and lost ‘the imaginary right of regulating other people’s’.41 Gandhi’s non-violent resistance, or satyagraha, was a force ‘infinitely more active’ than the Tolstoyan position.42 For Gandhi, non-violence meant ‘an ocean of compassion, it means shedding from us every trace of ill-will for others. It does not mean abjectness or timidity, or fleeing in fear. It means, on the contrary, firmness of mind and courage, a resolute spirit.’ While non-violent resistance often meant a refusal to comply with the state, it also meant using peaceful strategies to actively campaign for change. This philosophy was similar to that developed by Dutch anti-militarist Bart de Ligt, who advocated civil disobedience, boycotts, strikes and the refusal of taxes, as well as the collective refusal to serve in the army as a means of combating war.43 The philosophy of non-violent resistance descended from Gandhi to Martin Luther King and ‘furnished the method’ for the Montgomery bus boycott.44 Here, the link between Tolstoy and King was an indirect one, but Stephen Marks points out that the Tolstoyan philosophy of non-violence influenced King’s antecedents in the civil rights movement. Booker T. Washington corresponded

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with Tolstoy, and W. E. B. DuBois wrote about him. King therefore received an ‘echo’ of Tolstoy’s philosophy from Gandhi and from his domestic context.45

Tolstoyans and the World Wars At the outbreak of the First World War, secular ‘patriotic pacifists’ across Europe chose to support their governments in their prosecution of the war. This left ‘absolute’ pacifists who refused to serve on grounds of conscience more isolated, but also in a more prominent position. In Britain, Welsh Baptists and Primitive Methodists (which both had a strong pacifist history) came round to support the war after the German invasion of Belgium. Thirty-three per cent of Quakers of military age had enlisted by the end of the war.46 Some individuals who had been influenced by Tolstoy – Stephen Hobhouse, for example – joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a group largely made up of Quakers and unorthodox clergymen of various denominations, which was founded in Cambridge in 1914. The founding statement of this organization included the declarations that ‘in order to establish a world-order based on love, it is incumbent upon those who believe in this principle to accept it fully . . . and to take the risks involved in doing so in a world which does not as yet accept it . . .’ and that ‘as Christians, we are forbidden to wage war, and . . . our loyalty to our country, to humanity, to the Church Universal, and to Jesus Christ, our Lord and Master, calls us instead to a life service for the enthronement of love in personal, social, commercial and national life’.47 Tom Ferris, still keeping the Leeds Brotherhood Church going with a small number of members, wrote and self-published many anti-war pamphlets: ‘The Sanctimonious Crime’, ‘The Will of God in Hell’, ‘Liars and Fools’ and ‘For the Defence of the Realm – an Open Letter to his Insensate Majesty, King George V’. In December 1915, Ferris and Sidney Overbury (another Brotherhood Church member) were prosecuted under the Defence of the Realm Act for ‘having spread reports and made statements warranted to prejudice recruiting, training discipline, and the administration of his Majesty’s forces’.

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Lilian Ferris was also prosecuted for distributing her husband’s leaflets.48 Speaking at his trial, Ferris expressed his surprise at: the moral defection of those who were considered to be the stalwarts of peace. Prominent men in anti-military circles had gone over to the side of prosecuting the war with the greatest energy. Though I do not criticise them, it had become clearly evident that only those with great depth of moral conviction were at all likely to stand out against the appeal of their country to become combatants.49 Isabella Fyvie Mayo died in May 1914. George Ferdinands believed that the brutality of the war would have killed her had she lived. ‘She was so earnest in her methods, that I know her advocacy of peace would have landed her in jail.’50 In Switzerland, the Tolstoyans were left in relative peace. Biriukov, for example, was still delivering lectures on Tolstoy in 1916. He returned to Russia after the revolution.51 Jeno¨ Henrik Schmitt moved to Berlin in 1908 at the behest of a group of followers of his Gnostic philosophy. He died there in the autumn of 1916. Although he continued to write on religion and philosophy and to publish the works of Tolstoy, there is no evidence of active opposition to the conflict in the final years of his life.52 Ernest Crosby died in 1908, but Bolton Hall was engaged in anti-war activism at the outbreak of war. Clarence Darrow, on the other hand, ‘recovered’ from his pacifism and his Tolstoyism ‘in the twinkling of an eye’ after the German invasion of Belgium.53 When the British Government brought in conscription under the Military Service Act in January 1916, provision was made for the exemption of conscientious objectors and this exemption was open to all those who objected on grounds of conscience, not simply members of particular religious sects. In this respect, Gilbert Murray regarded the influence of Tolstoy as more important, though perhaps not so well-appreciated, as the numbers of Quakers, Christadelphians and Plymouth Brethren who would object. In his view, ‘almost every young man and woman in

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Europe who possessed any free religious life at all had been to some extent influenced by Tolstoy’.54 In practice, local administration of this clause made its application patchy. Complete exemption had been granted to only 400 individuals by July 1917.55 Russian citizens in Britain were also obliged (as allies) to enlist or return to Russia to fight. Ludwig Perno’s appeal for exemption was heard in Bournemouth in the autumn of 1917.56 For Tolstoyans, as for many (although not all) other conscientious objectors, service in the non-combatant corps was also contrary to their conscience. Indeed, some objected to obeying the instructions of a government-instituted tribunal at all. At Whiteway, there were a range of responses to conscription. Of the young men eligible for the army, two went to fight – Fred Howarth died (of dysentery) and Jack Howarth lost his leg. Nellie Shaw tells us that the others, who objected on grounds of conscience, were exempted on the condition that they do ‘land work’ – not a difficult condition for them to fulfil.57 Whiteway’s later biographer, Joy Thacker, records the refusal of several Whiteway residents. Harry and Bill Clements and Fred and George Kenworthy were all exempted from military service for farm work or market gardening. Jim Allen refused to serve, got no exemption and served two terms of imprisonment, one in Wormwood Scrubs and the other in Gloucester. Will Cole returned his calling-up notices ‘with thanks’, but escaped from Horfield Barracks in Bristol and spent the war years in Ireland.58 Frantisˇek Sedlak was interned for four weeks as an enemy alien, but released on the testimony of two respectable and sympathetic citizens of Stroud.59 Some conscientious objectors refused to accept alternate service on the grounds that it meant other agricultural labourers being sent to the army. The Brotherhood Church members in Leeds refused to register as conscientious objectors at all, on the grounds that the authorities had no right to conscript others. The Ferrises’ house in Beeston became a safe haven and a meeting point for clandestine conscientious objectors – they hid men who had been refused exemption and endured repeated police raids on their house.60 Stephen Hobhouse, now a Quaker, also took an absolutist stance,

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refusing to accept any form of alternative service specified by a tribunal since this ‘weakened our protest as disciples of Christ against the law which was compelling men to take part in organised killing and our protest against the crime of war as a whole’.61 He spent the latter part of the war in prison, first at Wormwood Scrubs and later doing hard labour in Exeter prison. Harold Bing, son of Fred Bing of the Croydon group, shared his family’s pacifist convictions and spent three years in prison.62 Bing was an important link between the Tolstoyans and the peace movement of the later twentieth century. A conscientious objector like his father, he was chair of War Resisters International between 1949 and 1966. He corresponded with Valentin Bulgakov and the younger Vladimir Chertkov, and was in close touch with Ludvig Perno, the last manager of Tuckton House. Through their contact with the Tolstoyans, WRI became the ultimate custodian of funds originally intended by the elder Chertkov for the publication of Tolstoy’s works in Britain.63 While Tolstoy the artist was drafted into the service of both the British and Soviet Governments during the Second World War, Tolstoy the philosopher retained an importance for pacifist opponents of the conflict. Ruth Fry’s introduction to The Inevitable Change, translated by Ludvig Perno and published as one of Fry’s ‘Peace Pamphlets’ in 1937, spoke of the importance, in a time of world crisis and the apparent ascendancy of violence, of rethinking our social system. ‘In this mood, the writings of that great thinker, Leo Tolstoy, have an especial value for us. It is believed that the following essay has never been published in England, and it seems very pertinent to the problems of today.’64

Literary Legacies During the First World War, the output of Tuckton House slowed practically to a standstill.65 Nevertheless, Chertkov spent these years working with the Librarian of the London Library Hagberg Wright on plans for a projected English language ‘works of Tolstoy’, to accompany the Russian language edition that he was also embarking upon. Tuckton House would be turned over to work on the project,

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Figure 6.1 Ludvig Perno, the last manager of Tuckton House, in 1965. Photograph by Allen White, 39 Wick Lane, Christchurch. [Courtesy of Manuscripts and Special Collections, The University of Nottingham (MS486/3/3/10/1), and with permission of Christchurch History Society]

which would use translators who really understood Tolstoy’s work. Chertkov would personally oversee the project, as he considered his understanding of Tolstoy to be unparalleled.66 Chertkov was aware that Aylmer Maude was planning something similar, and intended

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his edition to compete. After 1917 however, most of the funds associated with this project were withdrawn to Russia. Aylmer Maude spent the late 1920s engaged in an effort to produce a high-quality collected works of Tolstoy. He was aiming at a ‘reliable, reasonably arranged and approximately complete’ edition, which would appeal to public libraries.67 Maude was very critical of the manner in which so much of Tolstoy’s material had been made available by the Tolstoyan publishing houses, including compilations of letters and drafts. He believed that Tolstoy had wanted to be judged only by his published writings, and that these numerous poor quality editions made other publishers unwilling to touch Tolstoy’s works.68 As early as 1899, Crosby had reported that it was difficult to place manuscript articles by Tolstoy for money in America, because ‘so much has been published in his name, and much of it in such unfashionable journals, that it is no longer looked upon as an attraction’. The only option was to give the material to ‘some struggling reform magazine’.69 Maude complained that 49 different American and English publishers had tried to produce a complete edition of Tolstoy, but most had stopped after only a couple of volumes and many were badly translated.70 To this end, Maude launched a Tolstoy Society in 1925, to which he hoped to attract not only ‘admirers of Tolstoy’s novels and plays’ but also those who were interested ‘in his advocacy of peace and temperance, and in the stand he made on behalf of undogmatic religion’, who should also sympathize with the effort to get a ‘readable and reliable’ edition of his books into public libraries.71 The idea was to take advantage of the centenary of Tolstoy’s birth in 1928, to gain publicity for and make possible the launch of such an edition. He eventually reached agreement with Oxford University Press for the production of a 21-volume series, with 14 more volumes if there were enough subscribers for the first set.72 Both literary enthusiasts and those interested in the social and religious aspects of Tolstoy’s work contributed introductions – Jane Addams, for example, for What Then Must We Do?. The Tolstoy centenary also saw Maude’s Tolstoy Society engage in a vigorous campaign to have Tolstoy’s plays performed in British

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theatres. They were ‘not only stock pieces in Russia’, Maude told theatre managers, ‘but have been successful in Paris, Berlin, Vienna and elsewhere’.73 The response was mixed. William Armstrong of the Liverpool Playhouse told him that Tolstoy’s plays were ‘too tragic and not obvious enough’ for his audience.74 The theatre company at the Century Theatre in Westbourne Grove were keen enough to ask for scripts.75 Maude even considered funding a version of the Power of Darkness at the Everyman Theatre, but nothing seems to have come of this.76 Newcastle’s People’s Theatre, which had originated as a radical enterprise intended to ‘bring culture to the masses’ and which took pride in the international nature of its programme, gave the first performance of The Fruits of Enlightenment in England in March 1928.77 Maude gave a lecture on Tolstoy to Newcastle’s Literary and Philosophical Society to coincide with the performances, and was hosted for a talk on ‘The Religion of Tolstoy’ by the minister of the city’s Unitarian church, who urged Maude that it would be ‘a pleasure to place my pulpit at your disposal for such a theme’.78 He also arranged for the sale of Tolstoy’s plays and of his picture at the performances. The Garrick Theatre hosted performances by the Moscow Art Theatre of The Power of Darkness and The Living Corpse (as well as The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya and The Brothers Karamazov) when they came to London in 1928.79 Maude was one of the trio that administered the ‘Resurrection Fund’, which dispensed the continued remittances the Maudes received from the publication of their translation of Tolstoy’s Resurrection.80 In 1901, Tolstoy had instructed him that, since the Doukhobors were well off in Canada and there was some money allocated to their aid that had not yet been required, he should ‘dispose of the money as God puts into your heart’.81 The Resurrection Fund was intended: To aid the publication of any writing of Tolstoy which . . . cannot otherwise find a publisher . . . To assist people in distress who have suffered loss by taking part in what has been called the ‘Tolstoy movement’ . . . To assist the movements in favour

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of peace, law reform, and penal reform, or other movements making in the direction of brotherhood among men.82 The fund sponsored such diverse enterprises as a lectureship in Fossil Botany at University College London and the Tolstoy Settlement, a

Figure 6.2 Programme for ‘The Fruits of Enlightenment’ at the People’s Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne. [Courtesy of the People’s Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne]

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holiday home for disabled children, which opened in 1905. It gave donations to the International Arbitration and Peace Association and to the Hull House settlement in Chicago.83 In 1913, when the Fund’s resources were considerably diminished, its assets were handed back to Maude in exchange for £50, which was used to finance the production of a peace play written by John Galsworthy and to pay the expenses of Resurrection Fund trustees G. H. Perris and J. F. Green in attendance at peace congresses and lectures.84

Portraits of the Tolstoyan Movement Tolstoyans also had their own literary legacy, in the representations of their movement written by their own membership, by sympathizers and by critics. In Belinda the Backward: A Romance of Modern Idealism, Salome Hocking (the wife of Arthur Fifield, sometime manager of the Free Age Press) set down her impressions of the movement with which she had been, through her husband, intimately involved. After the death of her parents, Belinda finds herself thrust into the mysterious world of Mr Kovalevsky (Vladimir Chertkov) and his circle of Tolstoyan and revolutionary acquaintances. ‘Is it possible’, one of this number asks at the first meeting Belinda attends, ‘in these days of cheap Tolstoy pamphlets, that there is anyone who has not read that great and luminous writer on the utter immorality of all parasites?’85 Hocking’s portrayal of Chertkov/Kovalevsky and life at ‘Seadown House’/Tuckton House occupies a central place in the book. Kovalevsky is charming, and consciously or not exerts a powerful influence over his acolytes, being able to ‘warm into enthusiasm even stolid Englishmen’.86 His speech ‘resembled nothing so much as a mountain torrent’, and every task he allocates to his helpers appears to be of immediate importance, yet might later be forgotten. Belinda finds herself conscious only of a ‘strenuous desire to do the work he asked of me’, yet his erratic moods alienate helper after helper: As long as he desired their help and would exert himself to retain their allegiance, they were his willing slaves. It was only when he tired of them, or indulging in a fit of temper put no

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restraint on that fatal fluency of speech . . . [and] allowed himself to say whatever anger or contempt suggested to him, that the spell was broken . . . once their intelligence freed from the spell he had exerted over them, they often went to the other extreme and became his severest critics.87 Fifield believed that his wife genuinely feared Chertkov, but she insisted that her portrait of him was not malicious – she could not draw it other than according to her own impressions.88 Chertkov was not the only one given this treatment in Belinda the Backward, however. At Kovalevsky’s behest Belinda joined Strangeways colony, an amalgam of the characteristics of Purleigh and Whiteway, where she encountered a variety of colony types – Frank Mordaunt, the ‘hut-and-nut man’, who does not believe in eating cooked food; Archibald Hunter, ‘the philosopher’; and Conrad Beresford (Arnold Eiloart), the third party in the destruction of the free union of Maggie and Donoghue (May and William MacDonald), which causes a scandal. Mr Wallace Glacier (Aylmer Maude) lives in a comfortable house not far from the colony and hosts meetings and parties for its residents – his sentences as ‘calculated and evenly balanced as a barrister’s’, he was ‘as unmoved as is the rock over which the torrent pours’. He was the ‘immovable obstacle’ to Kovalevsky’s ‘irresistible force’.89 This is not an unsympathetic portrait. Belinda finds herself (much like Hocking) susceptible to the passionate articulation of the Tolstoyans’ views, if drawn back by her naturally conservative nature. For the purposes of the narrative, she is a blank canvas. At one point, Belinda tries to temper the disillusionment of another character with the colonists’ failure to live up to their ideals or her standards, by reminding her that ‘the people who never disappoint us, on the other hand seldom raise our hopes. People who are sitting down do not fall, neither do they climb mountains. You have to stand up to do that’.90 One of the common characteristics of these novels is their representation of Tolstoyism as very much of a particular moment; representative of a particular period of thought and activity. The heroine of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage was ‘very much of her

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time’ – ‘indeed one feels she could have lived at no other era’. Richardson’s ‘stream of consciousness’ novel introduces us to ‘the world of the ferment of ideas, of advanced thought . . . of London from the nineties to 1914’ and shows us ‘what it felt like to be a young woman, ardent, aspiring, fiercely independent, determined to live her own life in the profoundest sense, at that time’.91 Richardson (a regular contributor to The Crank in 1910s) dedicated the chapters which included her portrait of Tolstoyan activity in London to Florence Worland. In them she brought to life the chaos of the meetings of the London Tolstoyan Society, with countless views competing to be heard – Worland’s experimental cookery and Charles Daniel’s ‘unanswerable’ and ‘deep-rooted’ individualism. ‘And you know when I hear all these convincing socialists planning things that really would make the world more comfortable’, the heroine tells us, ‘they always in the end seem ignorant of humanity . . . It’s individuals who must change, one by one’.92 Likewise, in Malcolm Ross’s The Man Who Lived Backward, the hero’s encounter with a ‘Christian Commune’ is one incident in a long trajectory of historical encounters that range from the siege of Paris in 1871 to the wreck of the S.S. Portland off the New England coast in 1898. The protagonist, Mark Selby, is caught in a curious kind of time travel, living each day in order from morning to night, but waking each morning to the previous day. Born in 1940, he dies (at the beginning of the book) in an unsuccessful attempt to save the life of Abraham Lincoln. Selby learns of the Christian Commune while in London in 1898. The colony’s attempt at communal life has brought it to the attention of Tolstoy and ‘British intellectuals have been following its fortunes with deep concern’.93 By this time, the colony is already falling apart, has become a limited corporation and is suffering from a typhoid epidemic and an outbreak of Marxism. Keen to discover that ‘America is more than pleasant people, watering places, theatres and restaurants, and the stock market’, the hero determines to visit the colony – its foundation three years earlier gives him plenty of time. He finds Hugh Cotton (Ralph Albertson) contemplating his own failings and those of the experiment, having handed over to the local

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sheriff a resident who tried to burn down one of the colony barns. He has restricted the membership of the colony and faces a challenge to his leadership from the ‘anarchist’ Swiggart, who ‘wants to abolish private property with his Marxist head, not with his Tolstoyian heart’.94 Selby is aghast at the dismal food on offering at the commune – his stomach growling ‘its dissent from gastronomical brotherhood’ – and he curses the Brits from whom he heard of the commune and their ‘passion for American social experiments as seen through pipe smoke in a warm London pub’.95 Selby has access to unlimited cash through his habit of trading in stocks and shares, the future of which he already knows. He considers giving Cotton’s community hundreds of thousands of dollars, but realizes that the gift of unearned money would wreck the ideal towards which the colonists were striving. The novel also addresses the issue of moral force, when Cotton refuses to counter a sermon by Swiggart which preaches violent revolution, hatred as a weapon and the discarding of the Christian elements of colony life. Ross’s account ties the Commonwealth into a range of (poorly understood and articulated) twentieth century concerns, but, based on the account provided to him in Albertson’s unpublished memoir, it also touches on many details that Albertson himself was sensitive about, right down to the ownership of his wife’s piano. Ford Madox Ford’s contribution to this literature, in his early novel (published under the name Daniel Chaucer) The Simple Life Ltd, allows the ‘simple life’ enthusiasts few redeeming features. The novel is based on Ford’s life with Constance and Edward Garnett and their circle of Fabian and anarchist friends – including revolutionary terrorist Sergei Stepniak – at Limpsfield in Surrey. This was a world Ford was much involved in, and the portraits, hostile or sympathetic, contain aspects of his own as well as his friends’ personalities and experiences.96 The book’s characters are ‘a group of silly fanatics filled with ideas borrowed from Tolstoy, Edward Carpenter, William Morris, and H. G. Wells’.97 While vehemently proclaiming the various articles of their belief system, they contradict them both in words and actions, in

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contrast to the kindly, pragmatic and sensible actions of those characters not living the ‘simple life’. Two young people are at the heart of the story: the children of Mr Brandson (‘apostle of the simple life’) and Mr Gubb (his chief disciple). These leaders wear rational dress, oppose marriage (but are married), have never consumed ‘flesh meat’ or alcohol and are compiling a book entitled Health Resides in Sandals.98 Brandson: drops heavy platitudes about beauty and truth and not eating vegetables and the pride of the craftsman, and Gubb snaps them up as they fall from his mouth and writes them down. And they’re set up in type by Brandson’s daughter and printed on the handpress by occasional disciples who can be pressed into turning the lever and they’re spread abroad to astonish the world.99 Ford’s characters and ideals are clearly an amalgam, but contemporary Tolstoyans reacted strongly. In The Open Road, Edgar Saxon complained that only a self-made financier and a lazy landowner appeared in Ford’s book as anything other than ‘vulgar frauds or sickly sentimentalists’. For Saxon, Ford’s novel satirized: not only vegetarianism and votes for women, but non-resistance and the No Corset League, communal cookery and churlish children, Whitmaneque poems and garden suburbs, Turkey twill curtains and the Celtic temperament, Maypole dances and vegetable manure, wideawake hats and drowsy philosophers, unfired foods and red brick floors, mead and genetics, sandals and scandals, alien refugees and home-made clothes, drinking horns and penny pamphlets, clay pipes and homeopathic pilules. One passage in particular, Saxon felt, targeted a periodical very like The Open Road: The Mare’s Tail, the organ of the Simple Life, was being printed in London by Messrs Blickers and Bickers. It had enlarged its scope and its size as well as its circulation, and it no longer limited itself

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to publishing the work of inhabitants of the colony. It had, on the contrary, now established a section called ‘Outsiders’ Views by Sympathisers’, in which it published articles by such gentlemen as Canon Scott Holland on the Church and Social Movements; Mr G. K. Chesterton on Authority and the Gentlemanly Habit; by Mr Edward Carpenter on Suitable Costumes; Mr Galsworthy on Menus of Modern Prisons; and Mr H. G. Wells on the Economics of the Simple Life. Indeed in one number there was printed a letter of congratulation from Count Tolstoy himself.100 The Tolstoyans of the 1890s would have been even less flattered by the description of ‘The Mare’s Tail’ in its earlier incarnation: It consisted of sixty pages of the selected sayings of Mr Brandson and his disciples, the four remaining pages of a sheet of sixty-four being taken up by the two pages of the cover, one page of advertisements of hygienic jam manufactured by Mrs Driver of Crow’s Nest, near Frog’s Cottages, Court Street, Kent, and the other by advertisement setting forth the virtues and the humanitarian of vegetable leather sandals as worn by Mrs Lee of the Summit in the same parish and county.101 At the end of the novel, Cyril Brandetski, an e´migre´ revolutionary, goes crazy, tries to shoot one of the characters and then sets the Simple Life colony on fire – an incident Ford’s biographer describes as not uncharacteristic of the ‘volatility, frenzy and absurdity’ of the world Ford based the book on.102 No doubt Ford had many such currents in mind, but it is easy to see why those who had been through the Tolstoyan movement felt particularly affronted.

Physical Legacies A recent archaeological survey of the Christian Commonwealth site revealed little physical trace of the hundred or so people who had lived on this spot for three to four years.103 The houses at Commonwealth were salvaged after the sale of the land and the

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remains of only a few structures are visible. Ironically, the site now lies within the Fort Benning military reservation. In Blaricum, the colony houses, the bakery and the Vrede publishing house are identifiable, and there is a street named after Jacob van Rees.104 In Britain, both the Whiteway colony and the Brotherhood Church at Stapleton are still – at the time of writing – occupied by descendants of the original settlers, although at Whiteway the communal principle was abandoned as early as 1901. The colonists had never set down any creed or expected members to subscribe to their beliefs – Nellie Shaw told a women’s group at Croydon that ‘a desire to be with us, to base life on a footing of “goodwill” to all men’ was the only requirement. Nevertheless, she acknowledged the influence of Tolstoy’s thought on the colonists and regarded those who were ‘strong on “no force”’ – Sinclair, Protheroe and Eiloart, for example – as representative of ‘what is good and right among us’.105 After the break-up of communal life at the colony in 1901, the residents hired out their labour locally and sold their produce (milk, bread, jam and vegetables) externally, but also to each other.106 By the time she wrote her account of the colony in 1935, Shaw had concluded that the application of non-resistance encouraged a kind of fatalism – the encouragement of greed and laziness amongst others, and acquiescence in tyranny and injustice. The Tolstoyan principles she still adhered to, and believed that Whiteway represented, were those of ‘free land’ – that land should belong to the people and be used by any who desired to earn their livelihood in that way – and bread labour – ‘the duty of everyone to produce something useful’. For Whiteway’s residents, this was now ‘the prime essential in Tolstoy’s teaching’.107 Shaw regretted that by the thirties the influx of persons engaged in trade or handicraft meant that in some cases the land went uncultivated or was neglected. In her view, there was ‘no better, safer title to land than to use it’.108 In 1955, the colony found itself in the spotlight when the colonists (including Sudbury Protheroe, Tom Wolfe and Mary Roberts) contested an attempt by Emma Wexham to register her land and bungalow with the land registry. Eugene Gaspard Marin, the guiding spirit of the colony in this period of its life, felt that their victory in this case brought the ‘old Whiteway’

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back to life.109 But this incident, and the way it was understood and narrated by Whiteway residents, demonstrates how far they had really come from their original Tolstoyan ideals. This was the same decision Albertson had taken all those years earlier, to contest the dissolution of Commonwealth in court, and which had demonstrated the failure of his experiment. When quizzed by journalists about the colony’s ethos, Marin explained that ‘we believe in the right to live our lives exactly as we choose’.110 He described Tolstoy’s teachings as ‘no money, no property, no marriage, communal living, a vegetarian diet’ . . . ‘Now tolerance is the keynote – we want to be brothers, that is all . . . Communists, Socialists, Tories – we have everything here!’111 In the same article, Tom Wolfe reported that ‘We DO believe that ownership of land should not be possible. That is why we fought this case’.112 While they retained the inclusiveness and eclecticism characteristic of the Tolstoyism of the 1890s, the unifying principle of non-resistance was no longer at the centre of their beliefs and actions. Tom Ferris and the small group of families who had moved from Leeds to Purleigh and back again in the early 1900s retained the name ‘Brotherhood Church’. Certainly it was in use in 1912– 13, when Arthur Taylor and Alfred Kitson were prosecuted for refusing to send their children to school. In the 1910s and throughout the First World War, these families lived closely together in Beeston, Leeds, making a living through a cottage knitting industry. Their permanent ‘return to the land’ was effected in 1921, when Lilian Ferris used some money she inherited from an aunt to purchase part of an estate that was being broken up at Stapleton, near Pontefract. Here Sidney Overbury and his family, the Ames family, the Ferrises, the Higginses and others made their home over the next few years. The settlers built their homes entirely without reference to local planning regulations, initiating a long history of friction with the local authorities. The house built by Alfred Higgins in 1926 was summarily pulled down the following year. The community refused to pay taxes and tithes and to send their children to state schools. Much of the uncompromising tone of these exchanges was attributable to Tom Ferris. Although Sidney Overbury signed a

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letter to Pontefract Rural District Council in May 1921 describing the council as ‘an association of violent and cruel men who, under pretence of good management, are ready to imprison me, or to steal my goods, if I find I can get on better without their interference’ – it was Ferris who had written it. They would be better employed, he told them, ‘in considering how to escape the damnation of hell, – for that is the judgement awaiting you, if you continue to bully and persecute honester men than yourselves.’113 Ferris was also the author of a 1929 letter to the agency acting for the collection of tithes, which instructed them that the Brotherhood Church would never: of its own free-will, pay one penny of tithe towards the upkeep of a pseudo-Christian Church that gets its livelihood by force and fraud. If other Churches are too timid and faithless to challenge the impudent dishonesty of your proceedings and the flagrant partiality of the laws to which you appeal, the Brotherhood Church is not.114 After Ferris’s death in 1936, these exchanges became a little less strident. Alfred Higgins and Sidney Overbury, for example, told the tithe collectors in 1937 that they could not owe the church money, ‘for they have rendered us no goods or services which would counterbalance such a claim’. The claim was ‘an unwarrantable legal fiction’. At the same time, however, they appealed to Canon Whittington, the Vicar of Darrington, enclosing a publication ‘which will be of interest and support to you’ and pointing out in the gentlest of terms the value of a group of Christians working out the solution to social problems ‘quietly and effectively’.115 In the 1960s, Len Gibson (a mechanic from London who joined the Stapleton community in 1959) initiated the operation of a mobile film van, sponsored by the Peace Pledge Union. From the early sixties until the late eighties, the van toured the UK in the summers, parking in town centres and visiting agricultural shows, and showing

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10– 15 minute peace films. The aim was to reach beyond the already sympathetic audiences who normally turned up for peace marches and gatherings and to bring peace films to the people.116 The van visited the Netherlands in 1976 for the WRI triennial conference, and did a tour of the whole island of Ireland in 1981. A strawberry tea, organized at the brotherhood church by Len and his wife Hilda (Alf Higgins’s daughter) each July, raised funds to buy films for the van and provided an opportunity for several hundred peace activists to meet and network. In the sixties, the community began to operate a ‘wayside pulpit’, a message board at the entrance to the settlement which engaged with current political and economic events from a Christian anarchist point of view. The pulpit has lapsed, but the residents intend to reinstate it. In 2005, to coincide with the G8 summit, it displayed the following message: They are the most powerful nations on earth Their aim is to make money (‘economic growth’) They meet in private They have no rules They don’t invite anyone else They control the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and the WEF If you think they are a group of benevolent philanthropists, you have a problem with logic117 At the time of writing, Hilda Gibson and her son, Bracken, along with his partner, Jo, still live on the site, aim at self-sufficiency and try as far as possible to avoid engagement with capitalist society. The original buildings survive and are repaired with recycled materials. The Gibsons keep chickens and bees and grow their own vegetables, purchasing additional necessities (for example, flour) from local providers or the co-op. Their focus is principally on environmental issues. Their attitude to the authorities is pragmatic – they pay their car tax, for example – and is based on the principle that one should choose what it is worth going to jail for.118

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The Brotherhood Church website, produced by Jo and maintained until around 2007, acknowledges both Bruce Wallace and Kenworthy as forerunners of the Leeds movement, but also recognizes the Church’s Quaker heritage. Their current statement of beliefs emphasizes living ‘by following our principles in deeds as well as thought’, and acting on one’s beliefs even where they conflict with the law. ‘We believe everybody can and should participate in making this world a better place. They should demonstrate what they believe by acting on it.’119 While these principles are a direct inheritance from the original Brotherhood ideal, the religious emphasis is all but gone. Some sympathizers in the 2000s were atheists. As there was no organized emphasis on religion in Bracken’s childhood, he found it fairly natural to drop the religious outlook while retaining the anarchist, anti-authoritarian, pacifist and environmental inheritance.120 Tolstoy’s teachings on all these issues connect directly to contemporary concerns associated with the

Figure 6.3 The entrance to the Brotherhood Church, Stapleton. [Photograph q Bill Henderson]

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environmental movement (self-sufficiency and the use of local produce) and with campaigns for individual action against economic and social inequality. In 1933, Arthur Fifield heard from his friend Morton, who was ‘still alive and is still a Tolstoyan on his farm in Western Australia’. Morton was ‘the only man (or woman)’ Fifield knew ‘who remained loyal to that faith in practice as well as in theory’. For himself, Fifield said, he accepted his day and generation, which were here for some purpose, and tried simply to ‘live well with my fellows and understand them’.121 Few Tolstoyans in Western Europe and the United States managed to follow Morton’s example. Some remained involved in publishing or propaganda enterprises – like Felix Ortt, whose rural cottage served as a publishing centre in the Tolstoyan cause.122 Arnold Eiloart continued to cast around for propaganda projects, suggesting amongst other things ‘a travelling van which would distribute Tolstoyan and other literature’.123 Others followed Fifield’s example, seeking simply to apply Tolstoy’s principles as best they could in their interaction with others. G. D. Lawrie, a retired railway official at Carlisle, wrote to Aylmer Maude in 1913 that ‘Tolstoy is still foremost in my estimation as a teacher of the true life. His advice in practical affairs of life is always right I think’. Maude replied that: There is nothing which can alter a man’s firm convictions except actual experience. As long as you live in your present surroundings, I do not think it likely that you will modify your views. I should never have modified mine had I not for some years gone right out of business and learnt what I could by close contact with the Tolstoy [movement].124 Maude had come to the conclusion that ‘we should use our prophets as we use our mines, seeking and valuing the veins of rich ore, and wasting as little time as possible on the sand and earth we find on our search’.125 Tolstoy had appealed to aspiring activists when they read him just because his solutions to life’s problems were so uncompromising – they resolved all doubts and allowed no room for half measures.

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But after trying to put the Tolstoyan ideal into practice many came to the conclusion that some kind of compromise was inevitable, indeed, essential. Petr Kropotkin regretted these compromises. He wrote to Maude that Tolstoy’s greatness lay: precisely in having come to the conclusions concerning life which he came to. Of compromises between a high ethics and philistinism we have only too many. Every philistine household and every 6/- novel is a commentary upon them. The question is, must these compromises go on unaffected, till mankind becomes all through a race of double-tongued sophists, and we go towards that, – or must we get hold of an ideal, and see whether there are not means to bring that ideal into life . . .126 By the time that the Tolstoyan movement experienced its rebirth in Russia after the revolution, there was little left of its counterpart in Europe and the United States. Some former Tolstoyans took an interest – Florence Holah, for example, received information on the Russian Tolstoyan movement from Perno at Tuckton House.127 Although its heyday was short-lived and its intensity and organization swiftly declined, the Tolstoyan movement was, Percy Redfern concluded, ‘no waste effort’. ‘It contributed to the rebirth of all forms of pacifism. And into organisations not professedly religious it sent individuals to work with hope and confidence in the meaning of life for themselves and their fellowmen.’128

CONCLUSION

In early 1943, BBC radio broadcast an adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace as part of a series of initiatives aimed at closer cultural understanding between Britain and Russia as allies. In his introduction to the broadcast, Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maisky spoke about the tremendous influence Tolstoy the artist had had on Russian literature and on the Russian people. He was their ‘pride and glory’ – a symbol of their ‘spiritual strength’. Of Tolstoy’s philosophy, on the other hand, Maisky was dismissive. The principle of non-resistance had been irrelevant to the struggle against tsarism in the nineteenth century, and it was irrelevant to the fight against Hitler in the twentieth. ‘Comparatively few individuals followed his gospel’, Maisky insisted. ‘Tolstoy as a philosopher never left a great impression on the minds of my people.’1 After the dismantling of Russia’s Tolstoyan communities in the 1930s, Tolstoyism was not acknowledged as a serious force by the Soviet authorities. Nevertheless, between the 1880s and the 1930s, Russia’s Tolstoyans had vigorously promoted Tolstoy’s philosophy, through their publishing enterprises, their agricultural colonies, their refusal to fight and their promotion of sympathetic causes like vegetarianism. Tolstoyism was an active force while the author was alive, but it also flourished in the revolutionary years after 1917, when all kinds of utopian experiments seemed possible. Tolstoy’s message was not applicable only in Russia. His international readers found themselves unable to attribute his

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concerns solely to the much-vaunted backwardness and barbarity of Russia’s autocracy. Tolstoy’s condemnation of all government and all violence broke through this paradigm. His books raised ‘unanswerable questions’ in every country in which they were read.2 Some of his adherents argued that in an autocracy, where the government was thoroughly discredited, the situation was in fact clearer. ‘Under constitutional governments, while landowning, capitalist, and military influences remain active and dominant’, Isabella Fyvie Mayo maintained, ‘the Press and public agencies, in boasting of their freedom, verily but the more delude the people to believe a lie; and must continue to do so, until human nature develops beyond the sphere of these influences’.3 Tolstoy’s philosophical tracts were translated and published abroad in part because of the interest of the literary world in his novels, and in Russian literature more broadly. Nevertheless, his philosophy rapidly found a readership. While many readers doubtless disliked, ignored or railed against Tolstoy’s religious outlook, for some earnest readers Tolstoy answered questions, solved contradictions and opened up a new world full of possibilities for thought and action. Arthur Voysey believed Tolstoy delivered the Christian message more powerfully than it had ever been delivered. The ‘true Christian force that with the aid of Leo Tolstoy is beginning to work on man’, he wrote, was not something that would ‘merely make a man’s habits a little less beastly, or that will make him sing more hymns, but it is a force that will arrest him absolutely in his present progress, turn him round and drive him in the opposite direction’.4 ‘True Christian’ traditions of the past – from St Francis of Assisi to the Diggers – were a rich source of inspiration for Tolstoy and his followers. So too was their conception of the future of their movement, in the manifestation of the Kingdom of God on earth. But their awareness that a reading of Tolstoy was bringing contemporaries in numerous countries to a new understanding of life heightened the sense that theirs was a vigorous, expanding international movement. It seemed they really were, as Tolstoy told them, on the cusp of a new stage in society. At first, only a few people

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would understand the Christian conception of life and put it into practice, but it would eventually become sufficiently widely diffused that public opinion would accept it comprehensively.5 Tolstoyan publishing houses, agricultural colonies and lecture societies proliferated in the 1890s and each had a role to play, either in demonstrating how the ideal society might operate or in propagating the Tolstoyan vision more widely. ‘If we could only get at all those good people whose subconscious minds are in tune with our ideas’, Charles Daniel told Isabella Fyvie Mayo, ‘there would be a revolution’.6 In all of these practical enterprises, Tolstoyans faced the complicated task of conducting their efforts in accordance with their beliefs. Tolstoyan colonists struggled to offer an example of brotherhood and bread-labour to society at large, while eschewing all organization. Publishing houses sought to disseminate their tracts widely and function effectively, while remaining unconcerned with profits, advertising or copyright. Their emphasis on achieving the widest possible distribution of Tolstoy’s works contrasted sharply with their attitudes to the strict and accurate representation of Tolstoy’s message. As part of the campaign to raise funds for the Doukhobor emigration, Ernest Crosby arranged for Cosmopolitan to serialize Tolstoy’s Resurrection. The magazine toned the story down to such a degree that Aylmer Maude asserted that ‘even the Russian Censor has hardly perverted and spoilt the story or taken such unwarranted liberties with it as the Cosmopolitan Censor’.7 Vladimir Chertkov was so appalled by the resulting version that he refused to send further instalments to the magazine. This antagonized the editor and eventually resulted in the advance being returned. Crosby struggled to understand Chertkov’s scruples on this issue. ‘It we are to give our coats and cloaks to the first asker’, he wrote to Tolstoy, ‘why not our manuscripts too?’8 Tolstoy’s philosophy fell on fertile ground in the late nineteenth century because it addressed social, religious and political questions that concerned numerous other reformist movements of the day. Tolstoy’s followers worked with vegetarians, peace activists and a host of other reformers, and they negotiated their understanding of Tolstoy’s teaching in relation to their own local concerns. While some

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aspects of his philosophy initiated heated debate (attitudes to money and to sex, for example), they took each element seriously and engaged with his philosophy both in theory and in practice. Tolstoy took Christ at his word, and likewise it was necessary to take Tolstoy at his word. Tolstoy offered his followers a complete worldview, an uncompromising answer to every question they might meet. The work of small societies engaged in particular spheres of reform was all very well, John Kenworthy argued. But all these people, ‘humanitarians, socialists, vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists, teetotalers, land-reformers, and all such seekers of human welfare’ needed to be aware that their efforts were ‘but a detail of the whole work of social regeneration; and that we cannot rightly understand and direct our own little piece of effort, unless we know it and pursue it, as part of the great whole’.9 The shades of cooperation that were possible depended on the character of other movements locally. Often, however, there was as much friction as cooperation. Their counterparts in the socialist movement were dismayed at what they regarded as the Tolstoyans’ counterproductive withdrawal from the political process or from the class struggle. Neither did other anarchists necessarily see them as a benign force. American anarchist Ben Reitman wrote to Bolton Hall that: the more I see of things the more I am satisfied that men of your type are an obstacle in the way of real progress. I understand your theory of non-resistance and have recently read Tolstoi’s book ‘My Confession’. I can see your point of view alright, but I fear that your logic is not better than Jesus Christ’s . . . all that stuff is responsible for much of the ignorance and poverty in the world today . . . no matter how true and how beautiful the teachings of Jesus Christ or Tolstoi may be, they will never succeed in emancipating the human race.10 Reitman believed that, on the contrary, ‘intelligent violence’ was the hope of humanity.

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Ultimately, many Tolstoyans also turned away from Tolstoyism. The inescapable logic of Tolstoy’s philosophy and the answers he offered in all spheres of life, had attracted readers across Britain, Europe and America. But the experience of trying to put Tolstoy’s solutions into practice convinced many of his adherents that some degree of compromise was essential. The movement bankrupted some and seriously affected the mental health of others. Some sacrificed their opposition to coercion and joined the socialist movement. Others moved into new spheres of practical reform – penal reform, food reform or educational reform. A small number continued their struggle against war and all forms of government in isolation, and a larger number continued to quietly follow their Tolstoyan beliefs in their own lives as far as they could. By the outbreak of the First World War, there was little recognizable trace of the Tolstoyan movement outside Russia. However, it passed on legacies to pacifism, peaceful protest and environmentalism. The Tolstoyan movement was very much a phenomenon of its time, and the Tolstoyan philosophy offered the most uncompromising answers to the problems of the day, wherever it was read.

NOTES

Introduction 1. Leo Tolstoy, What is Religion? And Other New Articles and Letters (New York: Thomas Crowell and Company, 1902), pp. 144– 5. 2. Vladimir Chertkov, ‘If Tolstoy were tsar’ Brotherhood 5:6 (October 1897), p. 63. 3. The Tolstoyan (February 1903), p. 121. 4. Lodewijk van Mierop, ‘Geen Tolstoyaan maar Christen’ Vrede 2:15 (15 May 1899), p. 109 5. Ernest Crosby to Tolstoy, 28 May 1899, Gosudarstvennyi Muzei L. N. Tolstogo [hereafter GMT], TS 211/25. 6. Sofia Tolstoy, The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy (Richmond, Surrey: Alma Books, 2009), p. 73. 7. W. T. Stead, The Truth About Russia (London: Cassell, 1888), p. 393. 8. See, for example, Francis Gribble, ‘Tolstoy and the Tolstoyans’ The Fortnightly Review (September 1908), pp. 383– 93; Charles Daniel, ‘Tolstoy and the Tolstoyans’ The Open Road 3:3 (September 1908), pp. 113– 35, in which Daniel asserts that ‘we have. . . only [Mr Gribble’s] word for it that there are such people as Tolstoyans, and that Tolstoy really has any teaching peculiar to himself’, but then vigorously defends the position of both against Gribble’s attack; and Arthur St John, ‘The Doukhobors and their friends’ The Crank 9:3 (September 1905), p. 275, in which Arthur St John responds to criticisms of the Tolstoyans in Aylmer Maude’s A Peculiar People: The Doukhobors (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1904). St John expresses relief that by Maude’s definition he is not a ‘Tolstoyan’, but proposes ‘on this occasion to associate

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

NOTES TO PAGES 4 –7 myself with the “Tolstoyans”, whoever they be, [and] place myself with them under the search-light of criticism which Maude has turned on them’. Aylmer Maude, A Peculiar People: The Doukhobors (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1904), pp. 219– 20 n. William Edgerton, ‘The artist turned prophet: Leo Tolstoj after 1880’, American Contributions to the Sixth International Congress of Slavists 2 (The Hague, 1968), pp. 61 – 85. Arthur St John, ‘The Doukhobors and their friends’ The Crank 9:3 (September 1905), p. 275. Charles Daniel, ‘Tolstoy and the Tolstoyans’ The Open Road 3:3 (September 1908), p. 114. Isabella Fyvie Mayo, ‘Leaves torn from letters’, The Open Road 7:5 (November 1910), p. 287. Jose Harris makes this point about followers of Ruskin. However indebted to him they were, they argued with him and critiqued him as they applied his ideas within their own contexts. Jose Harris, ‘Ruskin and social reform’, in Dinah Birch (ed.), Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 31. ‘Some impressions of Purleigh’ The New Order (July 1898), p. 59. Stuart Eagles, After Ruskin: The Social and Political Legacies of a Victorian Prophet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), Introduction. Michael Robertson, Worshipping Walt. The Whitman Disciples (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Here I am following Stuart Eagles’ excellent discussion of influence and discipleship in his After Ruskin, pp. 16 – 21. William Edgerton, ‘The social influence of Lev Tolstoj in Bulgaria’, in Jane Gary Harris (ed.), American Contributions to the Tenth International Congress of Slavists (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1988), p. 128. Edgerton: ‘The Social Influence of Lev Tolstoj in Bulgaria’, pp. 124– 7. Ibid. Armo Nokkala, Tolstoilaisuus Suomessa (Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtio¨ Tammi, 1958), p. 424. Nobori Shomu and Akamatsu Katsumaro, The Russian Impact on Japan: Literature and Social Thought: Two Essays (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1981), pp. 98 – 102; Claus M. Fischer, Lev N. Tolstoj in Japan (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1969), pp. 89 – 140. F. W. J. Hemmings, The Russian Novel in France 1884–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 192; Thaı¨s Lindstrom, Tolstoi en France 1886– 1910 (Paris: Institut d’e´tudes slaves de l’Universite´ de Paris, 1952), p. 88. John Coleman Kenworthy, Tolstoy: His Life and Works (London: Walter Scott, 1902), p. 20. M. J. de K. Holman, ‘The Purleigh Colony: Tolstoyan togetherness in the late 1890s’, in Malcolm Jones (ed.), New Essays on Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 194.

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27. ‘Tolstoy and the nonviolent imperative’ in Stephen Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World, from Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 102– 39. 28. Edgerton: ‘The artist turned prophet’, pp. 61 – 85. 29. Edgerton: ‘The social influence of Lev Tolstoj in Bulgaria’; William Edgerton (ed.), Memoirs of Peasant Tolstoyans in Soviet Russia (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993). 30. Peter Brock, ‘“A light shining in darkness”: Tolstoi and the imprisonment of conscientious objectors in Imperial Russia’ Slavonic and East European Review 81:4 (October 2003), pp. 683– 94; ‘Russian sectarian pacifism: The Tolstoyans’ Pacifism in Europe to 1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 442– 70; [with John Keep] (ed.) Life in a Penal Battalion of the Imperial Russian Army: The Tolstoyan N. K. Izumchenko’s Story (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2001); ‘Tolstoyism and the Hungarian peasant’ Slavonic and East European Review 58:3 (July 1980), pp. 345– 69; ‘Tolstoy and the Sˇkarvan case’ Tolstoy Studies Journal 13 (2001), pp. 1 – 7; Life in an Austro-Hungarian Military Prison: The Slovak Tolstoyan Albert Sˇkarvan’s Story (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2002); ‘The Sˇkarvan case: The trial and imprisonment of a Slovak Tolstoyan’, in Brock, Against the Draft: Essays on Conscientious Objection from the Radical Reformation to the Second World War (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2006), pp. 172– 87; and ‘Adela and Albert: A Tolstoyan love story’ Canadian Slavonic Papers 45:3/4 (September – December 2003), pp. 395– 408. See also his Freedom from War: Nonsectarian Pacifism 1814– 1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), which includes information on Tolstoyans in chapters on Russia, AustriaHungary and a brief chapter on Bulgaria and the Netherlands. 31. A. S. Prugavin, O L’ve Tolstom i o tolstovtsakh: ocherki, vospominaniia, materialy (Moscow: I. D. Sytin, 1911); Mark Popovskii, Russkie muzhiki rasskazyvaiut: posledovateli L. N. Tolstogo v Sovetskom Soiuze 1918– 1977 (London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1983); A. B. Roginskii, Vospominaniia krest’iantolstovtsev 1910– 1930-e gody (Moscow: Kniga, 1989). 32. Holman: ‘The Purleigh Colony’; ‘Translating Tolstoy for the Free Age Press: Vladimir Chertkov and his English manager Arthur Fifield’, Slavonic and East European Review, 66:2 (April 1988), pp. 184– 97. See also M. J. de K. Holman, ‘L. N. Tolstoy’s Resurrection: Eighty years of translation into English’ Slavonic and East European Review 61:1 (January 1983), pp. 125– 38; ‘Half a life’s work: Aylmer Maude brings Tolstoy to Britain’ Scottish Slavonic Review 4 (1985), pp. 29 – 53; and ‘British Tolstoyans, The New Order and the Doukhobors in the later 1890s: Solidarity in word and deed’, in Andrew Donskov, John Woodsworth and Chad Gaffield (eds), The Doukhobor Centenary in Canada: A Multi-disciplinary Perspective on Their Unity and Diversity (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2000), pp. 131– 48. 33. S. M. Price, ‘Reception and influence of Leo Tolstoi in England, 1870– 1910’ unpublished MA thesis, University of Manchester (1936).

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34. Rudolf Jans, Tolstoj in Nederland (Bussum: P. Brand, 1952); Nokkala: Tolstoilaisuus Suomessa; Antonella Salomoni, Il pensiero religioso e politico di Tolstoj in Italia 1886– 1910 (Firenze: L. S. Olschki, 1996). 35. Minna Turtiainen and Tuija Wahlroos (eds.), Maaemon Lapset. Tolstoilaisuus kulttuurihistoriallisena ilmio¨na¨ Suomessa (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2010). For details of the exhibition, see: www.gallen-kallela.fi/maaem onlapset/. 36. Natalia Velikanova and Robert Whittaker (eds.), Tolstoi i SShA (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2004). 37. For example, Thaı¨s S. Lindstrom, Tolstoi en France 1886– 1910 (Paris: Institut d’e´tudes slaves de l’Universite´ de Paris, 1952); Fischer: Lev N Tolstoj in Japan; Piotr Grzegorczyk, Lew Tolstoj w Polsce: zarys bibliograficzno-literacki (Warsaw: Pan´stwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1964); and Kristina Shtults, ‘Tolstoi v Germanii’, Georgi Konstantinov, ‘L. N. Tolstoi i Bulgaria’, and Basili Bialokoziovich, ‘Tolstoi v Pol’she’, all in Literaturnoe Nasledstvo 85:2 (Moscow: Nauka, 1965). 38. Maria W. J. L. Boersen, De Kolonie van de Internationale Broederschap te Blaricum (Blaricum: Historische Kring Blaricum, 1987); Surendra Bhana, ‘The Tolstoy Farm: Gandhi’s experiment in “Co-operative Commonwealth”’ South African Historical Journal 7 (1975), pp. 88 – 100; Louis C. Bourgeois, ‘The Tolstoy Colony, A Chilean utopian-artistic experiment’ Hispania (1963), pp. 514–18. 39. For example: Nellie Shaw, Whiteway: A Colony on the Cotswolds (London: C. W. Daniel, 1935); Salome Hocking, Belinda the Backward: A Romance of Modern Idealism (London: A. C. Fifield, 1905); Florence Worland, ‘Meetings and partings’ Focus 1:1 (January 1926), pp. 28 – 32; 1:2 (February 1926), pp. 97 – 107; 1:3 (March 1926), pp. 154– 61; 1:5 (May 1926), pp. 292–6. Aylmer Maude’s Life of Tolstoy 2 (London: Oxford University Press, 1930) contains many of Maude’s observations on the Tolstoyan movement.

Chapter 1 The Russian Context 1. Pavel Biriukov, The Life of Tolstoy (London: Cassell, 1911), p. 33; ‘The Cossacks’ in Leo Tolstoy, Tales of Army Life Tolstoy Centenary Edition 4 (London: Oxford University Press, 1932). 2. Karataev is often understood to represent lived religion, or folk wisdom. Inessa Medzhibovskaya disputes this interpretation – for her, if Karatev symbolises anything it is the ‘unreflecting black abyss separating God’s designs from human experience’. Inessa Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time: A Biography of a Long Conversion 1845– 1887 (Lanham; Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2008), p. 89. 3. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina Tolstoy Centenary Edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1937).

NOTES TO PAGES 12 –19

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4. On happiness and Tolstoy’s childhood, see ‘The green stick and the secret of happiness’, in E. B. Greenwood, Tolstoy: The Comprehensive Vision (London: J. M. Dent, 1975), pp. 8– 15. 5. Ernest Crosby, Tolstoy as a Schoolmaster (Chicago: Hammersmark Publishing, 1905), p. 9. See also: Adir Cohen, ‘The educational philosophy of Tolstoy’ Oxford Review of Education 7:3 (1981), pp. 241– 51; and Biriukov: Life of Tolstoy, pp. 57 – 66. 6. R. F. Christian (ed.), Tolstoy’s Diaries (London: Flamingo, 1994), p. 87. 7. Rosamund Bartlett, Tolstoy: A Russian Life (London: Profile, 2010), p. 252. 8. Bartlett: Tolstoy: A Russian Life, p. 287. 9. John Kenworthy, who facilitated the first publication of the Four Gospels Harmonised through the Walter Scott publishing house in 1895– 6, remarked to Vladimir Chertkov that ‘no one seems to dare or care even to attack it’. Kenworthy to Chertkov, 4 January 1897, Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva [hereafter RGALI] f. 552 op. 2 ed. khr. 415. 10. Arthur Baker to Aylmer Maude, 24 September 1903, MS 1380/267, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 11. E. B. Greenwood, ‘Tolstoy and religion’ in Malcolm Jones (ed.), New Essays on Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 162; Henry Gifford, Tolstoy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 45. 12. R. F. Christian, Tolstoy: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 216. 13. Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and the Gospel in Brief Tolstoy Centenary Edition 11 (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 4. 14. Tolstoy: A Confession and the Gospel in Brief, pp. 10 – 11. 15. Tolstoy: A Confession and the Gospel in Brief, p. 48. 16. Medzhibovskaya: Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time, p. xxvii. 17. Maude: Life of Tolstoy 1, p. 378. 18. Leo Tolstoy, What I Believe (Christchurch: The Free Age Press, 1902), p. 19. 19. Bartlett: Tolstoy: A Russian Life, pp. 295– 6. 20. Leo Tolstoy, What Then Must We Do? Tolstoy Centenary Edition 14 (London: Oxford University Press, 1934). 21. Leo Tolstoy, On Life and Essays on Religion Tolstoy Centenary Edition 12 (London: Oxford University Press, 1934). 22. Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You and Peace Essays Tolstoy Centenary Edition 20 (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 36. 23. Tolstoy: The Kingdom of God is Within You, p. 136. 24. Tolstoy: The Kingdom of God is Within You, pp. 157– 8. 25. Tolstoy: The Kingdom of God is Within You, p. 176. 26. Tolstoy: The Kingdom of God is Within You, pp. 222– 3. 27. The epilogue was written in response to the vigorous press debate and voluminous correspondence received by Tolstoy about The Kreutzer Sonata. See: Peter Ulf Møller, Postlude to the Kreutzer Sonata: Tolstoj and the Debate on Sexual Morality in Russian Literature in the 1890s (Leiden: Brill, 1988), pp. 185– 6.

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28. On Mennonite objection to military service, see: L. Klippenstein, ‘Otkaz ot voennoi slyzhby po motivam sovesti v mennonitskikh obshchinakh tsarskoi Rossii’, in T. A. Pavlova, Dolgii put’ rossiskogo patsifizma: Ideal mezhdunarodnogo i vnutrennego mira v religiozno-filosofskoi i obshchestvenno-politicheskoi mysli Rossii (Moscow: Institute of World History, Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997), pp. 150– 71. 29. Frederick C. Conybeare, Russian Dissenters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1921), pp. 289– 326. See also: Aleksandr Klibanov, History of Religious Sectarianism in Russia 1860s– 1917 (Oxford: Pergamon, 1982), pp. 151– 80. 30. Nicholas Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia’s Empire in the South Caucasus (New York: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 11 – 12. 31. See: Ethel Dunn (ed.), A Molokan’s Search for Truth: The Correspondence of Leo Tolstoy and Fedor Zheltov (Ottawa: Highgate Road Social Science Research Station, 2001). 32. Bartlett: Life of Tolstoy, p. 376; A. S. Prugavin, O L’ve Tolstom i o tolstovtsakh: ocherki, vospominaniia, materialy (Moscow: I. D. Sytin, 1911), pp. 35 –70. 33. The coining of the phrase is commonly attributed to the Orthodox Archbishop Amvrosii Serebrennikov of Ekaterinoslav; Svetlana Inikova traces the first use of the word ‘dukhobortsy’ to a report by Archbishop Nikofor of Slovenia to the Synod in March 1786. Svetlana A. Inikova, ‘Spiritual origins and the beginnings of Doukhobor history’, in Andrew Donskov, John Woodsworth and Chad Gaffield (eds.), The Doukhobor Centenary in Canada (Ottawa: University of Ottawa, 2000), p. 2. 34. For an account of Doukhobor history in this period, see: John Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, The Doukhobors (London: Faber, 1968), pp. 35 – 66. 35. The origins of the Doukhobor arms burning are explored in: Nicholas Breyfogle, ‘Rethinking the origins of the Doukhobor arms burning 1887– 1893’, in Donskov, Woodsworth and Gaffield (eds.), The Doukhobor Centenary in Canada, pp. 55 – 82; and in Joshua Sanborn, ‘Pacifist politics and peasant politics: Tolstoy and the Doukhobors, 1895– 1899’ Canadian Ethnic Studies 27:3, pp. 60 –5. 36. This point is made by both Peter Brock, ‘Russian sectarian pacifism: The Tolstoyans’, in Brock: Pacifism in Europe to 1914, p. 449; and Woodcock and Avakumovich: The Doukhobors, p. 20. 37. Paul D. Steeves, ‘Tolstoyans in Russia and the USSR’, in Joseph L. Wieczynski (ed.), The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History vol. 39 (New York: Academic International Press, 1985), pp. 115– 16; Alexei Zverev and Bruno Coppieters, ‘V. D. Bonch-Bruevich and the Doukhobors: on the conscientious objection policies of the Bolsheviks’ Canadian Ethnic Studies 27:3 (1995), p. 75. 38. D. Heinz, ‘Adventisty Sed’mogo Dnia i otkaz ot uchastiia v voennykh deistviiakh v Rossiiskoi Imperii’, in Pavlova: Dolgii put’, pp. 172– 6.

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39. Joshua Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics 1905– 1925 (DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), pp. 183– 4. 40. P. van den Dungen, ‘I. Blokh i Ia. Novikov – rossiiskie mirotvortsy na rubezhe stoletii’, in Pavlova: Dolgii put’, pp. 202– 14. 41. R. Ilukhina and D. Sdvizhkov, ‘Rossiiskii patsifizm i zapadnoe mirotvorchestvo v nachale XX v. (stanovlenie i deiatel’nost’ rossiiskikh obshchestv mira)’, in Pavlova: Dolgii put’, pp. 179–201; V. M. Khaytsman, ‘Gaagskaia konferentsia mira 1899 g. i idei patsifizma’, in Pavlova: Dolgii put’, pp. 225–40. 42. Maude: Life of Tolstoy 2, pp. 169– 71. 43. Daniel H. Shubin, A History of Russian Christianity 3 1795–1894 (New York: Algora Publishing, 2004), pp. 192– 3. 44. Bartlett: Tolstoy: A Russian Life, pp. 319– 20. Ernest Howard Crosby, ‘The plea of labour from the standpoint of a Russian peasant’ The Arena 17: 86 (January 1897), pp. 312–22. 45. Tolstoy: What Then Must We Do?, p. 320. 46. Tolstoy: The Kingdom of God is Within You, p. 2. 47. Velikanova and Whittaker (eds.): Tolstoi i SShA, p. 23. 48. Tolstoy to Lewis Wilson, 5/23 June 1889, in Velikanova and Whittaker (eds.): Tolstoi i SShA, pp. 456– 7. 49. William S. Heywood (ed.), Autobiography of Adin Ballou 1803– 1890 (Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1975), pp. 508–11. 50. Adin Ballou to Tolstoy, 14 January 1890, in Velikanova and Whittaker (eds.): Tolstoi i SShA, pp. 461– 4. 51. Stuart Eagles, Ruskin and Tolstoy (Bembridge, Isle of Wight: Guild of St George, 2010), p. 4, pp. 12 – 18. 52. See: Robert Edwards, ‘Tolstoy and Alice B. Stockham: The influence of tokology on the Kreutzer Sonata’ Tolstoy Studies Journal 6 (1993), pp. 87 – 104. Tolstoy’s correspondence with Alice Stockham is in: Velikanova and Whittaker (eds.): Tolstoi i SShA, pp. 306– 26. 53. Derk Bodde, Tolstoy and China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), pp. 13 – 26. See also: Pavel Biriukov, Tolstoi und der Orient (Zurich and Leipzig, Rotapfel-Verlag, 1925); Luigi Stendardo, Leo Tolstoy and the Baha’i Faith (Oxford: George Ronald, 1985); and Dragan Milivojevic, ‘Tolstoy’s Views on Buddhism’ Tolstoy Studies Journal 3 (1990), pp. 62 –75. 54. Bartlett: Tolstoy: A Russian Life, p. 308. 55. Alexander Fodor, A Quest for a Non-violent Russia: The Partnership of Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Chertkov (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989), pp. 31 – 5. 56. Chertkov did not write the kind of classic ‘conversion narrative’ typical of many Tolstoyans, but he recorded some aspects of his religious enlightenment in his memoir of his experiences on duty in a military hospital, written in 1909. Vladimir Chertkov, Stranitsa iz vospominanii: dezhurstvo v voennykh gospitaliakh (St Petersburg: M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1909).

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57. Pavel Biriukov, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi: Biografiia 2 (Moscow 1908), pp. 471–3. 58. Fodor: A Quest for a Non-violent Russia, p. 48; Georgii Orekhanov, Zhestokii sud Rossii: V. G. Chertkov v zhizni L. N. Tolstogo (Moscow: Pravoslavnyi SviatoTikhonovskii gumanitarnyi universitet, 2009). Alexandra Popoff is currently working on a new study of Chertkov’s relationship with Tolstoy. 59. Pavel Biriukov, The New Russia (London: The Independent Labour Party, n.d. [1919]), p. 4. 60. Alfred Erich Senn, ‘P. I. Biriukov: A Tolstoyan in war, revolution and peace’ The Russian Review 32:3 (1973), pp. 279– 80. See also: A. M. Biriukov, ‘P. I. Biriukov – pervyi biograf L. N. Tolstogo’ Voprosy istorii 2004: 2, pp. 137– 42. Both of these accounts are based on autobiographical notes written by Biriukov in 1922, in N. A. Rubakin’s papers in the Russian National Library in St Petersburg. 61. Senn: ‘P. I. Biriukov: A Tolstoyan in war, revolution and peace’, pp. 282– 4. 62. ‘Tolstoy and War’ MS 1381/635; and Alexander Sirnis to Azevedode Amarale, 5 November 1917, MS 1381/727, Brotherton Library, Leeds. Biriukov, his wife and three children were strict vegans who did not ‘touch milk, or animal products of any kind’. 63. Steeves, ‘Tolstoyans in Russia and the USSR’, in Wieczynski (ed.), The Modern Encyclopaedia of Russian and Soviet History 39, p. 114. 64. Vladimir Chertkov, Pokhishchenie dietei Khilkovykh (Christchurch: izdanie svobodnogo Slova: 1901). 65. Graham Camfield, ‘From Tolstoyan to terrorist: The revolutionary career of D. A. Khilkov 1900– 1905’ Revolutionary Russia 12:1 (1999), pp. 1 – 43. 66. Biriukov: Life of Tolstoy, p. 102. 67. Robert Otto, Publishing for the People: The Firm Posrednik 1885– 1905 (New York: Garland, 1988), p. 135. 68. Biriukov: Life of Tolstoy, p. 103. 69. W. T. Stead, The Truth About Russia (London: Cassell and Co, 1888), p. 454. 70. I. D. Sytin, Sovremenniki o I. D. Sytin (Moscow: Kniga 1985), p. 103. 71. Otto: Publishing for the people, p. 67, p. 74. See also: V. K. Lebedev, ‘Iz istorii sotrudnichestva knigoizdatel’stva ‘Posrednik’ i izdatel’skoi firmy ‘I. D. Sytin i Ko’ Russkaia Literatura 2 (1969), pp. 209– 12. 72. Otto: Publishing for the People, p. 74. 73. Gorbunov-Posadov became a Tolstoyan after reading Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief in 1884. In Posrednik he found practical work which accorded with his understanding of life. V. I. Sreznevskii, ‘Ivan Ivanovich Gorbunov-Posadov’, in N. N. Gusev and M. V. Muratov (eds), Sorok let sluzheniia liudiam: sbornik statei posviashchennykh obshchestvenno-literaturnoi i knigo-izdatel’skoi deiatel’nosti I. I. Gorbunova-Posadova (Moscow: Kooperativnoe izdatel’stvo, 1925), p. 7. 74. Pavel Biriukov, ‘Obrashchenie k’ chitaliam’ Svobodnoe Slovo 1 1898, p. 3. Biriukov had travelled to Geneva in 1891 to arrange the publication abroad of Tolstoy’s translation of the Gospels. Senn: ‘P. I. Biriukov: A Tolstoyan in war, revolution and peace’, p. 281.

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75. Thaı¨s S. Lindstrom, ‘From chapbooks to classics: The story of the intermediary’ American Slavic and East European Review 16:2 (1957), p. 195. 76. Edgerton (ed.): Memoirs of Peasant Tolstoyans, p. xii; Steeves: ‘Tolstoyans in Russia and the USSR’, p. 116. 77. Edgerton (ed.): Memoirs of Peasant Tolstoyans, p. xii. There had been a vegetarian restaurant in Moscow since 1894, its walls apparently decorated with portraits of Tolstoy. 78. Ronald D. LeBlanc, Vegetarianism in Russia: The Tolstoy(an) Legacy Carl Beck Papers 1507 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2001), pp. 7 – 8. 79. LeBlanc: Vegetarianism in Russia, p. 10. 80. LeBlanc: Vegetarianism in Russia, p. 12. 81. LeBlanc: Vegetarianism in Russia, p. 72. 82. Peter Brock, ‘A light shining in darkness: Tolstoi and the imprisonment of conscientious objectors in Imperial Russia’ Slavonic and East European Review 81:4 (2003), pp. 686– 7. 83. For a record of Olkhovik’s experiences, see: Pis’ma P. V. Ol’khovika, krest’ianina Khar’kovskoi gubernii, otkazavshegosia ot voinskoi povinnosti v 1895 godu (London: V Chertkov, 1897). 84. Another Tolstoyan activist, Evgenii Popov, wrote an account of Drozhzhin’s life and death which was published in Berlin in 1895, and later by Chertkov’s Free Age Press. Evgenii Popov, Zhizn’ i smert’ Evdokima Nikiticha Drozhzhina 1866– 1894 (Christchurch, Hants: Free Age Press, 1903). 85. Brock: ‘A light shining in darkness’, p. 693. 86. Brock: ‘A light shining in darkness’, p. 686. 87. Leo Tolstoy, The Law of Love and the Law of Violence (New York: Rudolph Field, 1948), pp. 71 –2. 88. Brock: ‘A light shining in darkness’, pp. 687– 91. 89. Dmitri Morgachev, ‘My life’, in Edgerton: Memoirs of Peasant Tolstoyans, p. 174. 90. Irina Gordeeva, ‘Kommunitarnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v poslednei chetverti XIX v’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Russian State University for the Humanities (2000), pp. 161– 2. 91. Gordeeva: ‘Kommunitarnoe dvizhenie v Rossii’, pp. 163– 6. 92. Gordeeva: ‘Kommunitarnoe dvizhenie v Rossii’, pp. 172– 5. 93. Gordeeva: ‘Kommunitarnoe dvizhenie v Rossii’, p. 176. 94. Steeves: ‘Tolstoyans in Russia and the USSR’, p. 114. 95. Edgerton: ‘The artist turned prophet’, p. 74. 96. Prugavin: O L’ve Tolstom i o tolstovtsakh, p. 195. 97. Bartlett: Tolstoy: A Russian Life, p. 386. 98. Prugavin: O L’ve Tolstom i o tolstovtsakh, p. 192. 99. Popovskii: Russkie muzhiki rasskazyvaiut, pp. 40 – 1. 100. Prugavin: O L’ve Tolstom i o tolstovtsakh, pp. 187– 95. 101. Pa˚l Kolstø, ‘A mass for a heretic? The controversy over Lev Tolstoy’s burial’ Slavic Review 60: 1 (2001), p. 78.

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102. Pa˚l Kolstø, ‘The demonised double: The image of Lev Tolstoi in Russian Orthodox Polemics’ Slavic Review 65: 2 (2006), p. 305. 103. Kolstø: ‘The demonised double’, pp. 314– 5; Vladimir Solov’ev, ‘A short story of anti-Christ’, in Vladimir Solov’ev, War Progress and the End of History (London, 1915). 104. Bartlett: A Russian Life, p. 392. 105. Robert Otto cites a letter from Petr Durnovo, the chief of the tsarist police, to Evgenii Feokistov, the chief administrator of the censorship, in which he urged Feokistov to call Sytin in and draw to his attention the danger of his association with the Tolstoyans. In the 1890s, Sytin was also brought in front of Pobedonostsev to account for his actions. An Orthodox pamphlet on ‘The books for the people published by the firm Posrednik’ urged clergymen to disrupt the distribution of these publications, as did a campaign waged by the Moskovskie tserkovnye vedomosti (Moscow Church News). Otto: Publishing for the People, pp. 83 – 4; pp. 179– 82. 106. Bartlett: A Russian Life, pp. 387– 9. 107. Dusˇan Makovicky´ recorded every detail of life in the Tolstoy household in the years he spent there (1904 – 1910) his copious ‘Yasnopolyanskie zapiski’ (Yasnaya Polyana notes), serialized in Literaturnoe Nasledstvo 90 (1979). 108. Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams, Cheerful Giver (London: Peter Davies, 1935), p. 81. Tyrkova-Williams was a novelist and liberal politician – a member of the central committee of the Constitutional Democratic Party – whose husband, Harold Williams, was an enthusiastic Tolstoyan in his youth. 109. Maude: Life of Tolstoy 2, p. 516. 110. Fodor: A Quest for a Non-violent Russia, pp. 160– 1. 111. The text of Popov’s appeal is reproduced in R. M. Ilukhina, ‘Antivoennoe vozzvanie tolstovtsev’, in Pavlova, Dolgii put’, pp. 243– 4. 112. Sanborn: Drafting the Russian Nation, pp. 186– 7. Sanborn recounts this story from the testimony in the court proceedings against Popov and other Tolstoyans involved, which are in Gosudarstvennyi muzei istorii religii [GMIR], f. 13, op. 1, d. 376. 113. Fodor: A Quest for a Non-violent Russia, pp. 162– 3. 114. Dmitri Morgachev, ‘My life’, in Edgerton (ed.), Memoirs of Peasant Tolstoyans, p. 123. 115. Dmitri Morgachev, ‘My life’, p. 128. 116. ‘From the papers of Yakov Dragunovsky’, in Edgerton (ed.), Memoirs of Peasant Tolstoyans, pp. 184– 209. 117. Sanborn: Drafting the Russian Nation, pp. 185– 6. 118. Zverev and Coppieters: ‘V. D. Bonch-Bruevich and the Doukhobors’, p. 79. 119. Sanborn: Drafting the Russian Nation, pp. 189– 92. 120. Vladimir Chertkov, Save Russia (London: C. W. Daniel, 1920). 121. Mrs Philip Snowden, Through Bolshevik Russia (London: Cassell and Co., 1920), pp. 129–30.

NOTES TO PAGES 39 – 47

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122. ‘From the papers of Yakov Dragunovsky’, pp. 209– 11. 123. Sanborn: Drafting the Russian Nation, p. 194. 124. ‘35-letnii iubilei “Posrednika”’ Istinnaya Svoboda 1 (April 1920), pp. 13 – 18; ‘Iz istorii otkazov ot voennoi sluzhby po religioznym ubezhdeniiam’ Istinnaya Svoboda 1 (April 1920), pp. 18 – 21. 125. Edgerton (ed.): Memoirs of Peasant Tolstoyans, p. 1. 126. Boris Mazurin, ‘The Life and Labour Commune’, in Edgerton (ed.): Memoirs of Peasant Tolstoyans, p. 32. 127. Bartlett: Life of Tolstoy, p. 423. 128. ‘From the papers of Yakov Dragunovsky’, p. 198. 129. Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 209– 10. 130. These materials are now in the Mark Aleksandrovich Popovskii collection at the Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, California. Popovskii’s book, Russkie muzhiki rasskazyvaiut, is based on these materials. 131. Roginskii: Vospominaniia krest’ian-tolstovtsev; Edgerton (ed.): Memoirs of Peasant Tolstoyans. 132. Mazurin: ‘The Life and Labor Commune’, p. 70. 133. Yelena Shershenyova, ‘The New Jerusalem Tolstoy Commune’, in Edgerton (ed.): Memoirs of Peasant Tolstoyans, p. 7. Shershenyova was the daughter of Fedor Strakhov. Her husband, Vasya Shershenyov, was elected chairman of the commune when Mitrofan Nechesov was persuaded to resign this position. 134. Shershenyova: ‘The New Jerusalem Tolstoy Commune’, pp. 12 – 14. 135. Shershenyova: ‘The New Jerusalem Tolstoy Commune’, pp. 15 – 16. 136. Mazurin: ‘The Life and Labour Commune’, pp. 31 – 3. 137. Mazurin: ‘The Life and Labour Commune’, p. 40. 138. Shershenyova: ‘The New Jerusalem Tolstoy Commune’, p. 8. 139. Shershenyova: ‘The New Jerusalem Tolstoy Commune’, pp. 16 – 17. 140. Shershenyova: ‘The New Jerusalem Tolstoy Commune’, p. 17. 141. Mazurin: ‘The Life and Labour Commune’, pp. 42 – 5. 142. Mazurin: ‘The Life and Labour Commune’, pp. 47 – 8. 143. Mazurin: ‘The Life and Labour Commune’, p. 50. 144. Morgachev: ‘My life’, pp. 142– 3. 145. Mazurin: ‘The Life and Labour Commune’, pp. 63–8; Morgachev: ‘My life’, p. 149. 146. ‘From the Papers of Yakov Dragunovsky’, p. 236. On the hand-farmers see also: Morgachev: ‘My life’, pp. 155– 6. 147. Mazurin: ‘The Life and Labour Commune’, p. 70. 148. Morgachev: ‘My life’, p. 177. 149. ‘From the papers of Yakov Dragunovsky’, p. 246. 150. Morgachev: ‘My life’, p. 180. 151. Mazurin: ‘The Life and Labour Commune’, p. 54. 152. Maruzin: ‘The Life and Labour Commune’, p. 108.

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Chapter 2 Translations and Conversions 1. Jane Addams, ‘A book that changed my life’ The Christian Century 13 October 1927, pp. 1196– 8. Also reprinted as the introduction to: Leo Tolstoy, What Then Must We Do? Tolstoy Centenary Edition 14 (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), pp. vii –xiii. 2. Tolstoy: What Then Must We Do?, p. xii. 3. F. W. J. Hemmings, The Russian Novel in France 1884– 1914 (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 30. 4. Anatole Leroy-Beulieu’s L’Empire des Tsars et des Russes was serialized in the Revue des Deux Mondes from 1873, and published in three volumes between 1881– 89. Hemmings demonstrates the cultural Russophobia prior to 1870 through the example of appointments to the chair of Slavonic Studies at the College de France. In the mid-nineteenth century, this position was held successively by a Polish poet (Adam Mickiewicz), a Cypriot expert on the Balkans and a Lithuanian philologist. Hemmings: The Russian Novel in France, pp. 4 – 8. 5. Eugene Melchoir de Vogu¨e´, Le Roman Russe (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1886), pp. vii– viii. 6. De Vogu¨e´: Le Roman Russe, p. 281. 7. Hemmings: The Russian Novel in France, p. 3, p. 20. 8. Elie Halperine-Kaminsky estimated that 20,000 copies of War and Peace were sold in 1885, compared to only 500 before that. Hemmings regards this figure as likely to be too high, however. Hemmings: The Russian Novel in France, p. 29. 9. R. Corniani, ‘Un romanzo e un romanziere russo “La Guerra e la Pace” di L. Tolstoi’ La rassegna nazionale 16 July 1886, pp. 201– 21. Anna Karenina. Romanzo (Torino: Gazzetta di Torino, 1886); La guerra e la pace. Romanzo stoico (Milano: Treves, 1891). See: Antonella Salomoni, Il pensiero religioso e politico di Tolstoj in Italia 1886 –1910 (Firenze: L. S. Olschki, 1996), p. 22. 10. William Hammer, ‘The German Tolstoy translations’ Germanic Review (January 1937), p. 51. 11. George Sampson, ‘Some Russian novelists’ The Bookman (October 1917); in MS 1381/483, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 12. Matthew Arnold, ‘Count Leo Tolstoi’, The Fortnightly Review (December 1887), pp. 783–99. 13. Delmar Gross Cooke, William Dean Howells: A Critical Study (London: Stanley Paul, n.d.), p. 30. 14. ‘Count Tolstoi’s Life and Works’ The Westminster Review (September 1888), p. 278. 15. De Vogu¨e´: Le Roman Russe, p. 336. 16. Arnold: ‘Count Leo Tolstoi’, p. 799. 17. De Vogu¨e´: Le Roman Russe, pp 338– 9.

NOTES TO PAGES 52 –56

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18. See, for example, William Dean Howells, My Literary Passions (New York: Harper & Bros, 1895), pp. 250– 2. 19. Jane Holah to Vladimir Chertkov, 14 November 1901, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 1065. 20. Vladimir Boutchik, La Litte´rature russe en France (Paris: Honore´ Champion, n.d. [1947]), p. 31. 21. Wim Coudenys, ‘Translation and the international dissemination of the novels of Tolstoy’, unpublished paper, p. 3. I am grateful to the author for providing me with a copy of this text. 22. Besides being an early publisher of Tolstoy, Walter Scott also produced the first English translations of Ibsen’s works. John R. Turner, ‘Title pages produced by the Walter Scott Publishing Co Ltd’ Studies in Bibliography 44 (1991), p. 323. 23. William Edgerton, ‘The artist turned prophet: Leo Tolstoj after 1880’, American Contributions to the Sixth International Congress of Slavists 2 (The Hague, 1968), p. 63. 24. For example: Lapsuus, poika-ika¨, nuoruus [Childhood, Boyhood, Youth] (1904– 5); Ylo¨snousemus [Resurrection] (Helsinki: Pa¨ilehden 1899– 1900); Hadshi-Murat [Hadji Murat] (1912). 25. See the notes of his contributions in: MS1381/575– 608, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 26. For example: Leo Tolstoi, Neue Erzahlungen und Legenden (Stuttgart: Franckh’ische Verlagshandlung, 1906), Leo Tolstoy uber die Wissenschaft (Heidelberg and Leipzig: L. M. Waibel, 1910). 27. Nobori Shomu and Akamatsu Katsumaro, The Russian Impact on Japan: Literature and Social Thought: Two Essays (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1981), pp. 34 – 8, 92 – 4. See also Claus M. Fischer, Lev N. Tolstoj in Japan (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1969), which contains a useful bibliography of Japanese Tolstoy translations. 28. Coudenys: ‘Translation and the international dissemination of the novels of Tolstoy’, p. 5; T. L. Motyleva (ed.), Khudozhestvennye proizvedeniia L. N. Tolstogo v perevodakh na inostrannie iazyki (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo vsesoiunoi knizhnoi palaty, 1961), p. 187. 29. Masoodul Hasan, ‘Some aspects of Tolstoyana in India’, in T. R. Sharma (ed.), Essays on Leo Tolstoy (Meerut: Shalabh Prakashan, 1989), pp. 1 – 23. 30. Maurice B. Line, Amrei Ettlinger and Joan M. Gladstone (eds), Bibliography of Russian Literature in English Translation to 1945 (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972), p. 49. 31. Aylmer Maude, ‘Reading and Translations’ A lecture given for the National Book Council at Mortimer Hall, London, 31 March 1927. MS 1380/21, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 32. Ernest Howard Crosby to Tolstoy, 17 September 1893, GMT, TS 211/25. 33. Aylmer Maude on On Life, MS1380/15, Brotherton Library, Leeds. Michael Denner and Inessa Mezhibovskaya are currently at work on a new translation of On Life.

248

NOTES TO PAGES 56 – 60

34. This did change in the early twentieth century with Walter Benjamin’s advocacy, in ‘The Task of the Translator’, of literal translation which retained the unfamiliarity of the original language. He argued that the text should not slip unobtrusively into the target language. See: Rachel May, The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian Literature in English (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1994), pp. 4– 8. 35. Vladimir Chertkov to Alexander Sirnis, ‘How to translate Tolstoy’, 26 October 1909 MS 1381/641, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 36. M. J. de K. Holman: ‘Translating Tolstoy for the Free Age Press: Vladimir Chertkov and his English manager Arthur Fifield’, Slavonic and East European Review, 66:2 (April 1988), p. 193. 37. Bolton Hall, What Tolstoy Taught (London: Chatto and Windus, 1913), pp. 7–8. 38. Bolton Hall to P. Sergeyenko, June 1926, Bolton Hall papers, New York Public Library. 39. Aylmer Maude, ‘On Life’, MS1380/15, Brotherton Library, Leeds. Tolstoy to Bolton Hall, 2 February 1897, in Natalia Velikanova and Robert Whittaker (eds), Tolstoi i SShA (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2004), p. 745. 40. Stephen Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World, from Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 114–15. 41. Romain Rolland, La Vie de Tolstoi (Paris: Hachette, 1911), pp. 1 – 2. 42. Marks: How Russia Shaped the Modern World, pp. 114– 15. 43. Howells: My Literary Passions, pp. 250– 2. See also Louis Budd, ‘William Dean Howells’ Debt to Tolstoy’ American Slavic and East European Review 9:4 (December 1950), pp. 293– 4. 44. Budd: ‘William Dean Howells Debt to Tolstoy’, p. 295. 45. Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (London: Jonathan Cape, 1951), pp. 39 – 40, 43, 51, 111. 46. Mohandas Gandhi, An Autobiography or the Story of My Experiment with Truth (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1940), pp. 114– 5, 133. 47. In her autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull House, Addams says that she first read this book immediately after leaving college, but as her biographer Louise Knight points out this would have been impossible, as the book was not published in English until several years later, in 1885. Louise W. Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 450 n. 48. Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: Macmillan, 1912), pp. 259– 60. 49. John Loflund and Rodney Stark, ‘Becoming a world-saver: A theory of conversion to a deviant perspective’ American Sociological Review 30:6 (December 1965), p. 862; Jerald C. Brauer, ‘Conversion: From puritanism to revivalism’ The Journal of Religion 58:3 (July 1978), p. 227. 50. On Ernest Crosby, see Leonard D. Abbot, Ernest Howard Crosby: A Valuation and a Tribute (Westwood, Mass.: The Ariel Press, 1907); Louis Filler, Crusaders for American Liberalism (Yellow Springs: Antioch Press, 1950), pp. 62 – 7; Peter

NOTES TO PAGES 60 – 68

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62.

63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

249

J. Frederick, ‘A life of principle: Ernest Howard Crosby and the frustrations of the intellectual as reformer’ New York History 54:4 (1973), pp. 397– 423; Peter J. Frederick, Knights of the Golden Rule: The Intellectual as Christian Social Reformer in the 1890s (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), pp. 185– 234; and Rory William Stauber, ‘Lifting the banner of Tolstoyan non-resistance in America: Ernest Howard Crosby’s lonely quest, 1894– 1907’ unpublished doctoral thesis, Drew University (1994). Ernest Crosby’s Russian Journal, 17 April 1896, Box 4, MS 218 (Ernest Howard Crosby papers) Michigan State University Library. Crosby’s Russian Journal, 17 April 1896, Box 4, MS 218, Michigan State University Library. Crosby’s Russian Journal, 23 April 1896, Box 4, MS 218, Michigan State University Library. Howard Crosby, ‘The dangerous classes’ The North American Review 136 (April 1883), pp. 345–52. Unidentified correspondent to Ernest Crosby. 12 August 1889, Box 1 Folder ‘Letters to EHC’, MS 218, Michigan State University Library. Ernest Howard Crosby to Tolstoy, 2 May 1891, GMT, TS 211/25. Ernest Howard Crosby to Tolstoy, 17 September 1893, GMT, TS 211/25. ‘Judge not’, in Ernest Howard Crosby, Broad-cast (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Co., 1905), pp. 78 – 9. William Opdyke to Ernest Howard Crosby, 21 November 1890, Box 1, Folder ‘Letters to EHC’; and Howard Crosby to Grace Crosby, 4 November 1890, and Howard Crosby to Edith Crosby, 5 December 1890, Box 4, MS 218, Michigan State University Library. Crosby’s Russian Journal, 26 May 1894, Box 4, MS 218. Ernest Howard Crosby to Tolstoy, 15 June 1894, GMT, TS 211/25. Armo Nokkala, Tolstoilaisuus Suomessa (Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtio¨ Tammi, 1958), pp. 423– 4. Arvid Ja¨rnefelt, Hera¨a¨miseni (Tampere: Kustannusosakeyhtio¨ Kirja, 1917), available via Project Gutenberg at www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14267, pp. 40 – 1. I am exceptionally grateful to Kaarina Noble for her help in reading this text. Ja¨rnefelt, Hera¨a¨miseni, pp. 48 – 54. Ja¨rnefelt’s conversion experience is also briefly described in John I. Kolehmainen, ‘When Finland’s Tolstoy met his Russian Master’ American Slavic and East European Review 16:4 (December 1957), p. 535. Tolstoy to Arvid Ja¨rnefelt, 1 February 1895, PSS 68, p. 23. Nokkala: Tolstoilaisuus Suomessa, p. 426. M. Gopaliengar to Ernest Crosby, 18 January 1905, Box 1 Folder ‘Letters to EHC’ MS 218, Michigan State University Library. Nokkala: Tolstoilaisuus Suomessa, p. 426. W. S. P., ‘Another Renunciation’ The New Order 3:2 (February 1897), p. 13.

250

NOTES TO PAGES 68 –72

69. ‘Founder of Free Love Colony has no regrets’, cutting from unidentified newspaper, D587/1, Gloucestershire Archives; John C. Kenworthy, ‘Every man’s problem’ The New Order 3:2 (February 1897), p. 9. 70. ‘Why I resigned’ The New Order 2:11 (November 1896), p. 3. 71. ‘Why I resigned’ The New Order 2:11 (November 1896), pp. 1 – 2. 72. ‘Why I resigned’ The New Order 2:11 (November 1896), p. 3. 73. Hubert Hammond, ‘Purleigh Colony’ The New Order 3:10 (October 1897), p. 79. 74. A. E., ‘A colonist’s defence’ The New Order New Series (5):13 (February 1899), p. 26. 75. ‘Aylmer Maude’s recent visit to America’ The New Order New Series (5):13 (February 1899), pp. 21 – 3. Maude was closely involved in the Tolstoyan movement in Britain in the 1890s, but his experiences caused him to rethink his commitment to the Tolstoyan philosophy. While he remained an important translator, writer and lecturer on all things Tolstoyan, he distanced himself from Tolstoy’s British followers and from the doctrine of nonresistance to evil. By the 1930s, in correspondence with S. M. Price, he recalled the movement with some bitterness, describing ‘the high-pitched moral demands these people made on others, combined with a tendency to sponge on those they denounced’. S. M. Price, ‘Reception and influence of Leo Tolstoi in England, 1870– 1910’ unpublished MA thesis, University of Manchester (1936), p. 348. 76. Nellie Shaw, Whiteway (London: C. W. Daniel Company, 1935), p. 20. 77. Percy Redfern, Journey to Understanding (London: Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1946), pp. 47 – 8. 78. Percy Redfern, Tolstoy: A Study (London: A. C. Fifield, 1907), p. 5. 79. Redfern: Journey to Understanding, p. 50. 80. Redfern: Journey to Understanding, p. 54. 81. John Coleman Kenworthy, My Psychic Experiences. Being an Address Given Before the London Spiritualist Alliance, in St James’s Hall, Piccadilly, on April 12th 1901 (London: Office of ‘Light’, 1901), p. 6. 82. William Morris to John Kenworthy, 6 November 1889, 17 February 1890, 25 March 1890, 17 October 1890, Box 1 Folder 2, TAM 420: William Morris Papers, Tamiment Library, New York University. On Kenworthy’s involvement with the Ruskin Society and the Guild of St George, see: Stuart Eagles, Ruskin and Tolstoy (Bembridge, Isle of Wight: Guild of St George, 2010), p. 19. 83. John Coleman Kenworthy: Tolstoy: His Life and Works (London: Walter Scott, 1902), pp. 12 –14. 84. Kenworthy: My Psychic Experiences, pp. 7 – 8. 85. Kenworthy: Tolstoy: His Life and Works, p. 14. 86. Kenworthy: My Psychic Experiences, pp. 7 – 8. 87. Kenworthy: Tolstoy: His Life and Works, p. 14. 88. Ernest Howard Crosby to Tolstoy, 15 June 1894, GMT, TS 211/25.

NOTES TO PAGES 73 –76

251

89. Sinet was described by Tolstoy as the ‘first religious Frenchman’ he had met. Sinet refused military service and subsequently escaped from a penal battalion in Algeria and made his way to Yasnaya Polyana. He later spent time with the Doukhobors in Canada. See Peter Brock, Freedom from War: Nonsectarian Pacifism 1814– 1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991) p. 221. On Sˇkarvan, see: Peter Brock, ‘The Sˇkarvan case: The trial and imprisonment of a Slovak Tolstoyan’, in Brock, Against the Draft: Essays on Conscientious Objection from the Radical Reformation to the Second World War (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2006), pp. 172– 87; Peter Brock, Life in an Austro-Hungarian Military Prison: The Slovak Tolstoyan Albert Sˇkarvan’s Story (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2002); and Peter Brock, ‘Tolstoyism, cultural nationalism and conscientious objection: A Slovak case study’ in Brock, Freedom from War. A small pamphlet by Michal Elia´sˇ on the two prominent Slovak Tolstoyans gives some biographical detail: Michal Elia´sˇ, Slovenski tolstojovci: Dusˇan Makovicky´ Albert Sˇkarvan (Martin: Matica slovenska´, 1986). Rudolf Chmel has published an edited version of Sˇkarvan’s prison memoir – Albert Sˇkarvan, Za´pisky vojenske´ho leka´ra (Bratislava: Tatran, 1991) – and a selection of snippets from Sˇkarvan’s memoirs and diaries – Zˇivot je za´pas: vnu´torna´ biografia Alberta Sˇkarvana (Martin: Osveta, 1977). On Van der Veer, see: Albert Sˇkarvan, ‘The Peace Movement in Holland’, The New Order 3: 13 (January 1898), p. 97; and Peter Brock, ‘War resisters in Bulgaria and the Netherlands’ in Brock, Freedom from War, pp. 225–29. On Sedla´k, see: Nellie Shaw, A Czech Philosopher on the Cotswolds (London: C. W. Daniel Company, 1940); and Francis Sedla´k, ‘My military experiences’ The New Order New Series (6):24 (February 1900), pp. 15– 17; New Series (6):25 (March 1900), pp. 34 – 6; New Series (6):26 (April 1900), pp. 46 – 8; New Series (6):27 (May 1900), pp. 81 – 3; New Series (6):28 (June 1900), pp. 87 –8; and New Series (6):29 (July 1900), p. 115. 90. Brock: ‘Tolstoyism, cultural nationalism and conscientious objection’, p. 232. 91. Brock: ‘Tolstoyism, cultural nationalism and conscientious objection’, p. 234. 92. Brock: ‘Tolstoyism, cultural nationalism, and conscientious objection’, p. 236. 93. Sˇkarvan: ‘The Peace Movement in Holland’, p. 97; Rudolf Jans: Tolstoj in Nederland (Bussum: P. Brand, 1952) p. 76. 94. Sedla´k: ‘My military experiences’ The New Order New Series (6):24 (February 1900), pp. 15 –17. 95. Sedla´k: ‘My military experiences’ The New Order New Series (6):25 (March 1900), pp. 34 –6. 96. Sedla´k: ‘My military experiences’ The New Order New Series (6):27 (May 1900), pp. 81 –3. 97. William Edgerton, ‘The social influence of Lev Tolstoj in Bulgaria’, in Jane Gary Harris (ed.), American Contributions to the Tenth International Congress of Slavists (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1988), p. 125. 98. Edgerton: ‘The social influence of Lev Tolstoj in Bulgaria’, p. 126.

252

NOTES TO PAGES 76 –81

99. Nokkala: Tolstoilaisuus Suomessa, p. 428; See also: Maija Salonius-Hatakka, ‘Tolstoilaiset veljekset Akseli ja Eelo Isohiisi’, in Minna Turtianinen and Tuija Wahlroos (eds), Maaemon Lapset. Tolstoilaisuus kulttuurihistoriallisena ilmio¨na¨ Suomessa (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2010), pp. 95 – 101. 100. Dugald Semple, ‘Introductory note’, in Arthur St John, Why Not Now? A British Islander’s Dream (London: C. W. Daniel Company, n.d. [1939]), p. 8. It is often asserted that St John resigned his commission. He sought to correct this impression in a letter to John Bruce Wallace’s newspaper, Brotherhood, printed in February 1897. In fact he retired with a gratuity, which he accepted in order to pay off his debts. Nevertheless, his Tolstoyan conversion was complete. ‘Coming out of the Old Order’ Brotherhood New Series 4:10 (February 1897), p. 112. 101. Jack White, Misfit: An Autobiography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1930), pp. 104– 7. 102. White, Misfit, pp. 130– 2, p. 145. 103. Elaine Kaye, C. J. Cadoux: Theologian, Scholar and Pacifist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988), pp. 1 – 2, pp. 10 – 11. 104. C. J. Cadoux to Arthur Cadoux, 5 November 1904, MS Cadoux 136, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 105. Kaye: C. J. Cadoux, pp. 14 – 15. 106. Kaye: C. J. Cadoux, p. 51. 107. Stephen Hobhouse, Forty Years and an Epilogue (London: James Clarke, 1951), pp. 57 – 9. 108. Hobhouse: Forty Years and an Epilogue, pp. 61 – 2. 109. Hobhouse: Forty Years and an Epilogue, p. 67. 110. Hobhouse: Forty Years and an Epilogue, p. 64. 111. Walter E. Conn, ‘Adult conversions’ Pastoral Psychology 34:4 (1986), pp. 225–6. 112. White, Misfit, pp. 130– 2. 113. See: William James’s definition of conversion as the process whereby a ‘self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right, superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities’. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans Green and Co, 1902), p. 189; and Max Heirich, ‘Change of heart: A test of some widely held theories about religious conversion’ American Journal of Sociology 83:3 (1977), p. 656. Heirich identifies three key explanatory themes used by social scientists: conversion as a solution to stress, parental influence or schooling and the impact of interpersonal relationships. 114. Lewis Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 1: Rambo does not rule out entirely the possibility of sudden, ‘all-in-an-instant’ conversion, but maintains that a drawn out process of conversion is much more typical. 115. John Morrison Davidson to Vladimir Chertkov, 29 November 1900, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 595.

NOTES TO PAGES 81 –87

253

116. Isabella Fyvie Mayo to Vladimir Chertkov, RGALI, 13 July 1905, f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 613. Here Mayo is talking not about Tolstoy but about her first reading of Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics (London: John Chapman, 1851) in 1876. 117. John Loflund and Norman Skonovd, ‘Conversion motifs’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 20:4 (1981), pp. 376– 7. The other ‘conversion careers’ they outline are mystical, experimental, affectional, revivalist and coercive. Although they describe intellectual conversion as a recent phenomenon aided by an explosion in the number of new religions and the role of ‘disembodied modes of religious communication’ – i.e. television and the internet – the definition more or less fits the cases under discussion here. 118. Conn: ‘Adult conversions’, pp. 225– 36. 119. Ronald Neeve to the Editor, One and All: The Journal of the National Adult School Union (July 1972), p. 7. 120. Anton Chekhov to A. S. Suvorin, 27 March 1894, in Louis S. Friedland (ed.), Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics by Anton Chekhov (London: Bles, 1924), pp. 208– 9. 121. Gareth Williams, The Influence of Tolstoy on Readers of his Works (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), p. 2. Promising as this book sounds, the author sets himself the task of ‘imagining’ the effect of the works of Tolstoy on a typical reader (himself), rather than looking at any reactions to Tolstoy’s work. 122. Stephen Yeo, ‘A new life: The religion of Socialism in Britain, 1883– 1896’ History Workshop Journal 7:1 (1979), pp. 10 – 13. 123. Frederik Van Eeden, Happy Humanity (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1912), p. 92. 124. Van Eeden: Happy Humanity, p. 91. 125. ‘More about coming out of the Old Order’ Brotherhood New Series 4:8 (December 1896), p. 89. 126. Rambo: Understanding religious conversion, p. 2. 127. John Morrison Davidson to Tolstoy, 25 June 1895, GMT, TS 231/19. 128. Redfern: Journey to Understanding, p. 90

Chapter 3

International Tolstoyism: Britain and Beyond

1. Nellie Shaw, ‘Some impressions of the Sermon on the Mount’ The New Order 2:2 (February 1896), p. 5. 2. Tolstoy to Hamilton Campbell, 27 January – 6 February, PSS 65, pp. 237– 8. 3. Tolstoy to Charles Andersen, 6 September 1890, in Natalia Velikanova and Robert Whittaker (eds), Tolstoi i SShA (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2004) p. 485. 4. Tolstoy to Jean Baptiste Coco, 1 August 1900, PSS 72, p. 419. 5. Tolstoy to D. A. Khilkov, 12 March 1895, in R. F. Christian (ed.), Tolstoy’s Letters 2 1880– 1910 (London 1978), pp. 515– 16, and PSS 68, pp. 45– 7.

254

NOTES TO PAGES 88 – 92

6. The Croydon and Purleigh groups have been the subject of studies by Michael Holman, ‘The Purleigh Colony: Tolstoyan togetherness in the late 1890s’, in Malcolm Jones (ed.), New Essays on Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 194– 222; and W. H. G. Armytage, ‘J. C. Kenworthy and the Tolstoyan communities in England’, in W. Gareth Jones (ed.), Tolstoi and Britain (Oxford: Berg, 1995), pp. 135– 51. 7. A. G. Higgins, A History of the Brotherhood Church (Stapleton: The Brotherhood Church, 1982), p. 2. An account of Wallace’s early career can be found in Patrick Smylie, ‘Socialism of a mild type: The political thought and action of Reverend J. Bruce Wallace and radical politics in Belfast 1884– 91’ unpublished MA Thesis, Queen’s University Belfast (2007). 8. John Coleman Kenworthy, My Psychic Experiences: Being an Address given before the London Spiritualist Alliance, in St James’s Hall, Piccadilly, on April 12 th 1901 (London: Office of Light’, 1901), pp. 5 – 7; John Coleman Kenworthy, Tolstoy – His Life and Works (London and Newcastle upon Tyne: Walter Scott, 1902) pp. 12 – 13. 9. John Bruce Wallace, Towards Fraternal Organisation: An explanation of the Brotherhood Trust (London: Brotherhood Trust, n.d. [1894]), p. 3. 10. ‘To Readers everywhere!’ The Croydon Brotherhood Intelligence 1:8 (August 1895), p. 1; 1:9 (September 1895), p. 1. 11. ‘The New Order’, The New Order 1:11 (November 1895), p. 2. 12. John Kenworthy, A Pilgrimage to Tolstoy. Being Letters Written from Russia to the New Age in January 1896 (Croydon: Brotherhood Publishing Co., 1896), pp. 1 – 2. 13. Kenworthy: A Pilgrimage to Tolstoy, p. 18. 14. Nellie Shaw, Whiteway: A Colony on the Cotswolds (London: Charles Daniel Company, 1935), pp. 29 – 30. A report in Brotherhood New Series 3:11 (March 1896), p. 134 noted that Kenworthy’s report on his experiences in Russia ‘severely strained the seating capacity of the church’. 15. John Kenworthy to Tolstoy, 10 January 1895, GMT, TS 223/78. 16. Kenworthy: A Pilgrimage to Tolstoy, p. 18. 17. Herbert Archer, ‘The Brotherhood Groups’, The Croydon Brotherhood Intelligence 1:7 (July 1895), p. 2. 18. ‘The Brotherhood Trust’ The Croydon Brotherhood Intelligence 1:1 (January 1895), p. 2. 19. The New Order 1:11 (November 1895), p. 8. 20. The New Order 1:6 (June 1895), p. 4. 21. ‘The Croydon Brotherhood Trust Store’ The New Order 2:3 (March 1896), p. 7. 22. Brotherhood New Series 4:3 (July 1896), p. 33 23. ‘Goodwill Dressmakers’ The New Order New Series (5):18 (July 1899), p. 104. 24. On Arthur St John’s influence and position amongst the Croydon group see: Shaw, Whiteway pp. 26 – 8. 25. Kenworthy: A Pilgrimage to Tolstoy, p. 24.

NOTES TO PAGES 92 –94

255

26. John Kenworthy, ‘A change of name’, The New Order 3:10 (October 1897), pp. 73 – 4; Kenworthy to Tolstoy, 25 June 1896, GMT, TS 223/78; Tolstoy to Kenworthy, 27 June 1896, PSS 69, pp. 107– 8. 27. John Bruce Wallace, ‘Coming out of the old order’, Brotherhood New Series 4:7 (November 1896), pp. 79 – 80, and Brotherhood New Series 4:10 (February 1897), pp. 113–4. 28. John Bruce Wallace, ‘Tolstoyism and its English parody’ Brotherhood New Series 5:6 (October 1897), pp. 63– 5; ‘If Tolstoy were tsar’, Brotherhood New Series 5:6 (October 1897), p. 63; John Kenworthy, ‘The basic Christian principle’ The New Order 3:11 (November 1897), p. 1. Bruce Wallace to Kenworthy – and response – printed in The New Order 3:12 (December 1897), p. 93; ‘Total abstinence from politics’, Brotherhood New Series 5:8 (December 1897), pp. 90 – 91; ‘Tolstoyism: Letter from a quakeress’ Brotherhood New Series 5:8 (December 1897), p. 93; John Kenworthy, ‘Non-resistance’ Brotherhood New Series 5:9 (January 1898), pp. 99 – 101. 29. On the Whiteway colony, see: Shaw, Whiteway, and Joy Thacker, Whiteway Colony: The Social History of a Tolstoyan Community (Stroud: J. Thacker, 1993). 30. D. B. Foster, Socialism and the Christ. My Two Great Discoveries in a Long and Painful Search for the Truth (Leeds: D. B. Foster, 1921), pp. 40 – 1. 31. D. B. Foster, ‘Notes from Leeds’, The New Order 4:5 (June 1898), p. 55. Kenworthy estimated that the audience for these meetings was around 150, but that many were there simply from ‘curiosity, or for amusement’. Kenworthy to Anna Chertkova, 10 April 1898, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 415. 32. Eliza Pritchard [Pickard], ‘Leeds notes’ The New Order 4:11 (December 1898), p. 127. 33. John Kenworthy to Vladimir Chertkov, 1 February 1898, RGALI, f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 415. 34. ‘The Blackburn Brotherhood’, The New Order New Series (5):19 (August 1899), p. 115. 35. Will Hopwood to the editor of the New Order, 25 November 1898, in The New Order 4:11 (December 1898), p. 126. 36. S. M. Price, ‘Reception and influence of Leo Tolstoi in England, 1870– 1910’ unpublished MA thesis, University of Manchester (1936), p. 469. Price draws here on information he received from both Morse and his wife on the Blackburn group’s meetings. 37. ‘Leeds Notes’, The New Order 4:10 (November 1898), p. 116. 38. Jack Goring, ‘Wickford Notes’ The New Order 4:7 (August 1898), p. 76. 39. Percy Redfern to Tolstoy, 4 August 1901, GMT, TS 235/54; F. E. W., ‘Meetings and partings II’ Focus 1:2 (February 1926), pp. 97 – 107. The Tolstoyan Society’s meetings are also described by Dorothy Richardson in Pilgrimage (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967) 3, pp. 373– 4. 40. Price: ‘Reception and influence of the works of Leo Tolstoi, pp. 497– l– n.

256

NOTES TO PAGES 94 –98

41. Imogen Gassert, ‘Charles Daniel: Maverick pacifist publisher in the First World War’ Publishing History 48 (2000), pp. 5 – 40. 42. Isabella Fyvie Mayo to Vladimir Chertkov, 31 March 1908, 22 May 1912 and 14 January 1914, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 613. Mayo and Kallenbach corresponded frequently, and Kallenbach visited her in September 1911. 43. Florence Holah to Vladimir Chertkov, 1 May 1904, 3 Feb 1906, RGALI, f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 1066. 44. Tolstoy to Kenneth Bond, 2 March 1897 PSS 70, pp. 42 – 3. 45. Tolstoy to Alexander MacDonald, 26 July 1895, PSS 68, pp. 123– 7. 46. Andra´s Bozoki and Miklo´s Su¨ko¨sd, Anarchism in Hungary: Theory, History, Legacies (Boulder: Social Science Monographs, 2006), pp. 79 – 80. There is also an account of Schmitt’s activities in: Peter Brock: ‘Tolstoyism and the Hungarian peasant’. Slavonic and East European Review 58:3 (July 1980), pp. 345– 69. 47. Schmitt to Tolstoy, 13 May 1892, GMT, TS 238/34/1. 48. Bozoki and Su¨ko¨sd: Anarchism in Hungary, p. 81. 49. Brock: ‘Tolstoyism and the Hungarian peasant’, pp. 346– 7. 50. Schmitt to Tolstoy, 13 May 1892. GMT, TS 238/34/1. 51. Bozoki and Su¨ko¨sd, Anarchism in Hungary, p. 81. 52. Schmitt to Tolstoy, 27 December 1894 GMT, TS 238/34/1. 53. Ohne Staat 1:2 (8 January 1897), p. 4. 54. Ohne Staat 1: 16 (August 1897), p. 4; 1:18 (October 1897), p. 4; 1:19 (November 1897), p. 4. 55. Tolstoy to Schmitt, 13 September 1896 PSS 69, p. 148. 56. ‘Die Durchfu¨hrbarkeit der Anarchie’ Ohne Staat 1:4 (22 January 1897), pp. 1–2; ‘“Ohne Staat” in Osterreich Verboten’ Ohne Staat 1:7 (12 February 1897), p. 1; Ohne Staat 1:9 (26 February 1897), p. 1. 57. ‘“Ohne Staat” in Osterreich Verboten’ Ohne Staat 1:7 (12 February 1897), p. 1. 58. Ohne Staat 1:11 (12 March 1897), p. 1. 59. ‘Ein Brief Leo Tolstoy’s’ Ohne Staat 1:13 (26 March 1897), p. 1. 60. ‘Brief von Leo Tolstoy’ Ohne Staat 1:15 (July 1897), p. 2. 61. Dusˇan Makovicky´ to Tolstoy, 15 April 1896, cited in Brock: ‘Tolstoyism and the Hungarian peasant’, p. 248. 62. Tolstoy to Schmitt, 1 February 1895, PSS 68, p. 26; and 29 September 1895, PSS 68, pp. 189– 90. 63. Tolstoy to Louis Bahler, 7 November 1897 PSS 70, pp. 183– 4; Tolstoy to Morrison Davidson, 10 September 1895, PSS 68, p. 164. 64. Tolstoy to Schmitt, 29 September 1895, PSS 68, pp. 189– 90; Tolstoy to Schmitt, 24 November 1896, PSS 69, pp. 212– 3; Tolstoy to Schmitt, 25 February 1898 PSS 71, pp. 295– 6. 65. ‘Correspondence: The movement in Austria’, The New Order 3:5 (May 1897), p. 38; Albert Sˇkarvan, ‘The State and the Gospel. Prosecution of the press – A Hungarian case’ The New Order 3:9 (September 1897), pp. 65 – 7. 66. ‘Christenthun und Militardienst’ Ohne Staat 1:19 (November 1897) pp. 1 – 3.

NOTES TO PAGES 98 –101

257

67. Vrede 1:6 (1 January 1898), p. 6; ‘Onze Wereldbeschouwing’ Vrede 1:7 (15 January 1898), p. 3. 68. Brock: ‘Tolstoyism and the Hungarian peasant’, pp. 350– 3. 69. Schmitt to Arnold Eiloart, printed in The New Order 3:5 (May 1897), p. 38. 70. Tolstoy regarded Schmitt as a kindred thinker, but regretted that he mistook complexity for profundity and had a tendency to express his ideas in rather convoluted ways. See Sˇkarvan to Tolstoy, 21 April 1896 GMT, TS 240/18; Tolstoy to Sˇkarvan, 2 May 1896, PSS 69, pp. 95–7. Jane Holah, who translated one of Schmitt’s pamphlets for Vladimir Chertkov, also commented that it was an ‘involved crabbed sort of German, very unlike Mr. Skarvan’s easy style’. Jane Holah to Vladimir Chertkov, 2 December 1897 RGALI f. 552 op. 2 ed. khr. 1065. 71. Ernest Howard Crosby, ‘The religion of the spirit’ The Arena 20:106 (September 1898), p. 525. 72. Rudolf Jans: Tolstoi in Nederland, (Bussum: P. Brand, 1952), p. 76. 73. Jans: Tolstoi in Nederland, p. 77. 74. Andre´ de Raaij, ‘A dead seed bearing much fruit: The Dutch Christian Anarchist movement of the international fraternity’, in Alexandre Christoyannopoulos (ed.), Religious Anarchism: New Perspectives (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), p. 74. 75. Albert Sˇkarvan, ‘The peace movement in Holland’ The New Order 3:13 (January 1898), p. 1. Also printed as ‘Christenthun und Militardienst’ in Ohne Staat 1:19 (November 1897), pp. 1 – 3. The meeting is described in Jans: Tolstoi in Nederland, p 78. 76. Jans: Tolstoi in Nederland, p. 77. 77. Van der Veer and Bahler to Tolstoy, 6 August 1897, GMT, 244/43. Andre de Raaij says that the Christian Anarchists did not feel sufficiently represented in the existing periodicals, and specifically wanted more room to devote to Tolstoy’s ideas. De Raaij: ‘A dead seed bearing much fruit’, p. 74. 78. ‘De eerste boodschap van “Vrede”’ Vrede 1:1 (18 October 1897), pp. 1 – 2. 79. H. W. W., ‘Among Christian Anarchists in Holland’, The New Order New Series (7):41 (August-September-October 1901), pp. 91 – 2. 80. H. W. W., ‘Notes from Holland and Germany’ The New Order New Series (7):40 (June-July 1901), p. 74. 81. See Chapter Four. Accounts of the colony can be found in Jan Bank and Maarten van Buuren, Dutch Culture in a European Perspective 3 1900: The Age of Bourgeois Culture (Assen and Basingstoke: Royal van Goricum and Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 407–22; Jans: Tolstoj in Nederland, pp. 99–108; Maria W. J. L. Boersen: De Kolonie van de Internationale Broederschap te Blaricum (Blaricum: Historische Kring Blaricum, 1987). Dirk Jan Verdonk, Het Dierloze Gerecht: Een Vegetarische Geschiedenis van Nederland (Amsterdam: Boom, 2009), pp. 100–13. 82. Felix Ortt to the editor, The New Order New Series (5):22 (November 1899), p. 171. 83. Tolstoy to Louis A. Bahler, 7 November 1897 PSS 70, pp. 183– 4.

258

NOTES TO PAGES 102 –106

84. ‘Tolstoy’s oordeel over Christelijke kolonies’ Vrede 1:15 (15 May 1898), p. 2. 85. ‘The peace movement in Holland’ The New Order 4:4 (May 1898), pp. 37 – 8. Van der Veer spoke to the colonists in German and his speech was interpreted to his audience (quite likely by Arnold Eiloart, who undertook translation of Schmitt’s correspondence for The New Order). 86. Sˇkarvan’s correspondence with Tolstoy, between 1895 and 1906, is full of the news and activities of the various European Tolstoyans with whom he corresponded. GMT, TS 240/18. He also wrote and translated material regularly for all the major Tolstoyan newspapers. In 1901, he reported on life at the colony at Ascona to the Dutch Tolstoyans. ‘Brieven van Geestverwanten. 1. Over de kolonie te Ascona’, Vrede 5:1 (15 October 1901), pp. 7 –8. On Ascona, see: Martin Green, Mountain of Truth: The Counterculture Begins – Ascona 1900– 1920 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1986). 87. Ernest Crosby, Trinity Church Tenements: The Cause of their Condition and their Cure (New York: Stirling Publishing Company, 1895). 88. Rory Stauber: ‘Lifting the banner of Tolstoyan non-resistance in America: Ernest Howard Crosby’s lonely quest, 1894–1907’ PhD thesis, Drew University (1994), p. 97. 89. Ernest Howard Crosby, The Absurdities of Militarism (Boston, Mass.: American Peace Society, 1901); Ernest Howard Crosby, Captain Jinks: Hero (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1902). 90. Ernest Howard Crosby to Vladimir Chertkov, 21 May 1895 and 2 Sept 1899, RGALI, f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 475. 91. Theodore Roosevelt to Bolton Hall, 18 March 1901, Bolton Hall papers, New York Public Library. See also Theodore Roosevelt to Ernest Crosby, 27 September 1901, Box 4, MS 218 Michigan State University Library. 92. The New Order 3:2 (February 1897), p. 11. 93. Diaries: 1904, 1905, 1906. Box 2, MS218, Michigan State University Library. 94. ‘Speaks of Tolstoi’ The Tech 2 March 1906, p. 1; Thomas van Ness to Tolstoy, May 1889, in Velikanova and Whittaker (eds): Tolstoi i SShA, p. 451. 95. Edward Braniff to Tolstoy, 5 September 1900, in Velikanova and Whittaker (eds): Tolstoi i SShA, p. 830. 96. See, for example: Church Bulletin, Westminster Church Buffalo, 7 January 1900; clippings from Atlanta Comet, 11 March 1902 and Columbus Enquirer, March 21 1902; all in box 5, folder 29, MS218, Michigan State University Library. 97. Ernest Crosby, ‘Count Tolstoy and his philosophy of life’, in The Liberal Club, Buffalo, Addresses delivered before the club during the three seasons 1900– 1903 (Buffalo: Hausauer, Son and Jones, 1904), p. 58. 98. Ernest Howard Crosby to Vladimir Chertkov, 2 January 1901, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 475. 99. Ernest Howard Crosby to William D. Howells, 18 November 1895, BMS Am 1784n(113), Houghton Library, Harvard University. 100. George Gibson to Tolstoy, 22 February 1898 GMT, BL 216/78.

NOTES TO PAGES 106 –108

259

101. Edward Everett Hale to Mrs Hale, 28 May 1887, in Edward Everett Hale Jnr. (ed.), The Life and Letters of Edward Everett Hale 2 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1917), pp. 327–8. 102. Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life (New York: Scribners, 1932), p. 210. 103. Louis W. Koenig, Bryan: A Political Biography of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Putnam, 1971), pp. 364– 5. 104. Bolton Hall to P. Sergeyenko, June 1926, Box 1, Bolton Hall papers, New York Public Library. 105. Ernest Howard Crosby, ‘The plea of Labour from the standpoint of a Russian peasant’ The Arena 17:86 (January 1897), pp. 312– 32; and Crosby: ‘The religion of the spirit’, pp. 511– 25. 106. ‘Side talks by the Editor’, The Papyrus [1907], p. 15, in box 1, folder ‘EHC obits, biography’, MS 218, Michigan State University Library. 107. ‘Ernest Crosby is an author’ The Daily Democrat 24 December 1906, p. 11. 108. Statement of account from the Tolstoy Depot, March 1903, Box 1 Folder 1, MS218, Michigan State University Library. 109. Ernest Crosby to Tolstoy, 15 June 1894, GMT, TS 211/25. 110. Tolstoy to Ernest Crosby, 4 January 1896, and Crosby to Tolstoy, 15 July 1896, in Velikanova and Whittaker (eds): Tolstoi i SShA, p. 514, pp. 529– 30. 111. Edith Crosby to Margaret Crosby, n.d. Box 4, MS 218, Michigan State University Library. Arthur St John had been expelled from Russia following a visit to the Doukhobors in 1897 (not particularly recently). 112. Ernest Howard Crosby to Tolstoy, 5 September 1900, GMT, TC 211/25. 113. James D. Hunt, ‘Gandhi at Tolstoy Farm “a center of spiritual purification and penance”’ in James D. Hunt, An American Looks at Gandhi. Essays in Satyagraha, Civil Rights and Peace (New Delhi and Chicago: Promilla & Co, 2005), pp. 26 – 9. See also: Bhana: ‘The Tolstoy Farm’; and James D. Hunt and Surendra Bhana, ‘Spiritual rope-walkers: Gandhi, Kallenbach and the Tolstoy Farm, 1910 – 13’ South African Historical Journal 58 (2007), pp. 174 – 202. 114. James D. Hunt, ‘Gandhi, Tolstoy and the Tolstoyans’ in Hunt, An American Looks at Gandhi, pp. 44 – 6. 115. On Kallenbach, see: Isa Sarid and Christian Bartolf (eds), Hermann Kallenbach. Mahatma Gandhi’s friend in South Africa (Berlin: Gandhi-Informations-Zentrum, 1997). 116. This correspondence – which was owned by Isa Sarid, Kallenbach’s niece in Israel – was recently sold to the National Archives of India, and I was unable to consult it for this study. James Hunt gives some glimpses of the correspondence in ‘Gandhi, Tolstoy and the Tolstoyans’, pp. 50–2. On Isabella Mayo, see: James Hunt, ‘The second life of Mrs Mayo’ in Hunt, An American Looks at Gandhi, pp. 220–7; and Lindy Moore, ‘The reputation of Isabella Fyvie Mayo: Interpretations of a life’ Women’s History Review 19:1 (February 2010), pp. 71–88. 117. Isabella Fyvie Mayo to Vladimir Chertkov, 22 May 1912, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 613.

260

NOTES TO PAGES 108 –111

118. The New Order New Series (5):20 (September 1899), p. 171; George Hodgson to Ernest Ames, 22 March 1909, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 1386. 119. On Williams, see: Charlotte Alston, Russia’s Greatest Enemy? Harold Williams an the Russian Revolutions (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007). 120. Arthur Fifield to Vladimir Chertkov, 10 October 1933, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 967. 121. John Kenworthy to Vladimir Chertkov, 31 August 1896, and 26 September 1896, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 415. 122. George Lensen (ed.), Revelations of a Russian Diplomat: The Memoirs of Dmitri I. Abrikossow (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), pp. 62 – 3. Abrikosov mentions Biriukov, ‘a middle aged man with a long beard and childish blue eyes. He always wore a long Russian shirt and walked in rubber shoes, because leather goods were made by killing animals’; Khilkov and his wife, and their battle over the confiscation of their children; and Sˇkarvan, who was nursed by Khrisanf in a darkened room in the Chertkovs’ house, but later ‘got better, grew fat, and married an Italian girl, becoming a normal human being’. There is also an account of a visit to the Chertkovs at Purleigh in S. Motilova, ‘Minuvshee’, Novyi Mir (December 1963). 123. Darya Protopopova, ‘Tolstoy’s translator Aylmer Maude and his correspondence on Tolstoy’ The Bodleian Library Record 22:1 (2009), pp. 49 – 73; Robert Henderson, ‘Vladimir Burtsev and the Russian revolutionary emigration: surveillance of foreign political refugees in London, 1891– 1905’ unpublished PhD thesis, Queen Mary University of London (2008), p. 172 n. 124. On the Russian revolutionary movement in Switzerland, see: Alfred Erich Senn, The Russian Revolution in Switzerland 1914– 1918 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971). 125. Florence Holah to Vladimir Chertkov, 17 November 1897, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 1066. 126. Arthur Fifield to Vladimir Chertkov, 9 August 1897, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 967. 127. Frank Henderson to Vladimir Chertkov, 18 January 1898, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 256. 128. ‘The Free Age Press – A brief statement of its work by A. C. Fifield’, MS1381/1238a, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 129. Florence Holah to Vladimir Chertkov, 30 November 1897, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr 1066; Arthur Fifield to Vladimir Chertkov, 8 December 1897, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 967. 130. Frank Henderson to Vladimir Chertkov, 22 February 1898, f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 256, RGALI. 131. Johannes Van der Veer to Chertkov, undated [1899], RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 218. 132. Arthur Fifield to Aylmer Maude, 24 November 1929, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 967.

NOTES TO PAGES 111 –114

261

133. Arthur Fifield to Aylmer Maude, 16 November 1929, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 967. 134. Alexander Fodor, for example, accuses Chertkov of engineering the downfall of the Purleigh community, as he ‘saw to it’ that the colonists handed over a large part of their funds to the Doukhobors. Alexander Fodor, A Quest for a Non-violent Russia. The Partnership of Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Chertkov (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989), p. 91. Alexandra Popoff, who is currently working on a study of Chertkov’s relationship with Tolstoy, describes him as an ‘obscure man of dubious character’: sophiatolstoy.com/ about.html [accessed 19 December 2012]. Aylmer Maude, who frequently clashed with Chertkov, has a great deal to say on the negative aspects of his character. He did not doubt Chertkov’s genuine devotion to Tolstoy or to the principles he proclaimed, but concluded that while ‘the denunciatory side of Tolstoy was well represented by him. . . the humble, forbrearing, patient, considerate and enduring side, was not’. Aylmer Maude: The Life of Tolstoy (London: Oxford University Press, 1930) 2, p. 358. Fifield found Maude’s portrait rather too hostile, and protested that he included ‘all of the bad and none of the good’. Fifield to Maude, 7 November 1929, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 967. 135. One and All: The Journal of the National Adult School Union (July 1972), p. 7. 136. ‘A talk with a Tolstoyan’ MS 1381/660, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 137. See, for example: Tolstoy to Schmitt, 30 Setpember 1896, PSS 69, pp. 161– 4; Tolstoy to Kenworthy 17/18 October 1896, PSS 69, pp. 173– 4; ‘The new cooperation news’, The New Order 3:2 (February 1897), p. 11. 138. Albert Sˇkarvan, Moi otkaz ot voennoi sluzhby: zapiski voennago vracha (Purleigh: V. Tchertkoff, 1898). 139. ‘Schicksale des russischen Lehrers Drozzin’ Ohne Staat 1:6 (5 February 1897), p. 3. 140. ’Letters of P. V. Olkholvik’, The New Order New Series (5):17 (June 1899), pp. 84– 5, New Series (5):18 (July 1899), pp. 102– 3, New Series (5):19, (August 1899), pp. 109– 11; Pis’ma P. V. Ol’khovika, krest’ianina Kar’kovskoi gubernii, otkazavshagosia ot voinskoi novinnocti v 1895 godu (London: Izdanie Vladimira Chertkova, 1897); Lettres de Pierre Olchowik, paysan du gouvernement de Kharkoff, qui a refuse´ de faire son service militaire en 1895 (Geneva: M. Fischer, 1898); Een Volgeling van Jezus: Peter Olchowik. Een jonge Russische boer (The Hague: Drukkerij Vrede, 1899). 141. Sˇkarvan: ‘The State and the Gospel’, pp. 65 – 7; Vrede 1:6 (1 January 1898), p. 6; ‘A Hungarian vegetarian at war’ The Vegetarian Messenger (New Series) 2:1 (January 1897), pp. 32 – 3. 142. The Social Gospel (October 1898), p. 23. 143. Rosamund Bartlett: Tolstoy: A Russian Life (London: Profile, 2010), p. 409. 144. Isabella Fyvie Mayo to Chertkov, 31 March 1908, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 613. 145. ‘Instead of an editorial’, The Open Road 3:2 (August 1908), pp. 57 – 9. 146. Tolstoy to George Gibson, 11 March 1898 PSS 71, pp. 29 – 30.

262

NOTES TO PAGES 114 –118

147. The Social Gospel (May 1898), pp. 29 – 30. 148. The Social Gospel (September 1898), pp. 29 –30. 149. Tolstoy to Ernest Crosby, 30 June 1898 PSS 71, pp. 397– 8; Tolstoy to C. F. Willard, 30 June 1898 PSS 71, pp. 396– 7. 150. Vladimir Chertkov, Christian Martyrdom in Russia (London: Brotherhood Publishing Company, 1897), p. 92, p. 100. 151. Chertkov: Christian Martyrdom in Russia, p. viii. 152. ‘The Doukhobortsi: Or, spirit wrestlers of the Caucasus’ The British Friend (August 1897), p. 227. 153. Despite the Austro-Hungarian currency reform of 1892, which introduced the gold krone, Ohne Staat still recorded contributions in florins. 154. Vrede 1:4 (1 December 1897), p. 8; 1:5 (15 December 1897), p. 8; 1:8 (1 February 1898), p. 8; 1:10 (1 March 1898), p. 8; 1:14 (1 May 1898), p. 8; 1:16 (1 June 1898), p. 8; 1:23 (15 September 1898), p. 8; 2:6 (1 January 1899), p. 9. 155. Ernest Howard Crosby to Tolstoy, 23 January 1899, GMT, TC 211/27. 156. ‘The Doukhobortzi’ The New Order 4:8 (September 1898), p. 80. 157. Ernest Crosby to Vladimir Chertkov, 25 April 1899, Chertkov to Crosby, 7 May 1899, Crosby to Tolstoy, 8 June 1899, and Crosby to Tolstoy, 17 October 1899, GMT, TC 211/27. 158. For example, when the Society of Friends tried to explain the Doukhobors’ ‘unwise rejection of lawfully constituted authority’ as a reaction to their persecution, their Doukhobor correspondents put them right, insisting that it was simply a result of their interpretation of Christ’s teachings, which ‘direct us to reject all authority that is founded on violence’. ‘The Doukhobortsy: Letters from the Transcaucasus’ The Friend (1 May 1896), pp. 277– 8. 159. Minutes of meeting of the Doukhobor Committee, 16 July 1897; 27 April 1898; 2 June 1898; 1 July 1898 and 18 July 1898; MS 02/4/1, Friends House Library. Minutes and Proceedings of the Yearly Meeting of Friends (London: Society of Friends, 1898), p. 35. 160. Report of the committee appointed by the Meeting of Sufferings to aid the emigration of the Doukhobortsi from Russia, in: Minutes and Proceedings of the Yearly Meeting of Friends (London: Society of Friends, 1899), p. 110. John Bellows to Jonathan Rhoads, 11 August 1898 MS 02/2, Friends House Library. The Birmingham Friends gave £400. John Bellows to Joseph Chamberlain, 15 July 1898, MS 02/2, Friends House Library. 161. Minutes of meeting of the Doukhobor Committee, 9 August 1898, MS 02/4/1, Friends House Library. 162. Kenworthy to Tolstoy, 7 August 1895, GMT, TC 223 78. 163. Tolstoy to John Kenworthy, 8 July 1894, PSS 67, pp. 165– 8.

NOTES TO PAGES 119 –122

Chapter 4

263

Tolstoyism in Practice: Communities, Societies and Publishing Enterprises

1. Dennis Hardy, Alternative Communities in Nineteenth Century England (London: Longman, 1979), p. 14. On the American communities of this period, see: Robert S. Fogarty, All Things New: American Communes and Utopian Movements 1860– 1914 (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2003). 2. On the Ruskin colony, see: W. Fitzhugh Brundage, A Socialist Utopia in the New South: The Ruskin Colonies in Tennessee and Georgia, 1894– 1901 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996). 3. Arthur St John spent some time at Starnthwaite in 1896. On Clousden Hill, see: Nigel Todd, Roses and Revolutionists: The Story of the Clousden Hill Free Communist and Cooperative Colony 1894– 1902 (London: People’s Publications, 1986). 4. Andre de Raaij: ‘A dead seed bearing much fruit: the Dutch Christian Anarchist movement of the international fraternity’, in Alexandre Christoyannopoulos (ed.), Religious Anarchism: New Perspectives (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), p. 75. 5. Surendra Bhana, ‘The Tolstoy Farm: Gandhi’s experiment in “Co-operative Commonwealth”’ South African Historical Journal 7 (1975), pp. 88 – 100; James D. Hunt and Surendra Bhana, ‘Spiritual Rope-Walkers: Gandhi, Kallenbach and the Tolstoy Farm, 1910– 13’ South African Historical Journal 58 (2007), pp. 174– 202; Louis C. Bourgeois, ‘The Tolstoy Colony, a Chilean utopianartistic experiment’ Hispania (1963), pp. 514– 18. Santivan and Ortiz de Zarate were in charge of the colony’s agricultural enterprises, while d’Halmar confined himself to ‘accompanying them with appropriate biblical readings’. After a failed harvest and illness, the Chilean colony broke down in 1905. 6. H. W. W., ‘Notes from Holland and Germany’ The New Order New Series 7:10 (June– July 1901), p. 74. 7. See, for example: Martin Slann, ‘Tolstoy and the beginnings of kibbutz ideology’ Judaism 21 (1972), pp. 333– 8. 8. Aylmer Maude, Leo Tolstoy (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1918), p. 180. 9. A. B. Goldenveizer, Talks with Tolstoi (London: The Hogarth Press, 1923), p. 173 10. Tolstoy to George Gibson, 11/23 March 1898, in Natalia Velikanova and Robert Whittaker (eds), Tolstoi i SShA, (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2004), pp. 760– 1. 11. See Chapter Three. 12. John Chipman, ‘A proposition’ The Kingdom 25 November 1895; George Gibson, ‘Communism again’ The Kingdom 17 January 1896; Ralph Albertson, ‘Selfish socialism’ The Kingdom 24 July 1896. See: James Dombrowski, The Early Days of Christian Socialism in America (New York: Octagon Books, 1977), pp. 135– 7.

264

NOTES TO PAGES 123 –128

13. Ralph Albertson, ‘Thy cloak also’, f. 94, unpublished MS in Folders 69 – 71, Box 6, MS 1752, Yale University Library. This unpublished novel is in essential details an account of Albertson’s own life, and also forms the basis of the account of Albertson in Malcolm Ross’s The Man Who Lived Backward – see Chapter Six. Graham Taylor was the founder of the Chicago Commons, a settlement established in 1894 on the model of Jane Addams’ Hull House. 14. George Gibson to Tolstoy, 21 April 1898, GMT, BL 216 /78. 15. Samuel Walker, ‘George Howard Gibson: A Christian Socialist amongst the Populists’ Nebraska History 55:4 (1974), pp. 553– 72. 16. George Gibson to Tolstoy, 22 February 1898, GMT, BL 216 /78. 17. Iaacov Oved, Two Hundred Years of American Communes (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1988), p. 276. 18. Albertson: ‘Thy cloak also’, ff. 65 – 6. 19. Alvertson: ’Thy cloak also’, ff. 75 – 6. In this fictionalized account, Albertson says that he also met Maude in Chicago in 1894, which is not possible as Maude would still have been in Russia – he was probably projecting backwards their meeting in Chicago in 1898, and this could also be true for the meeting with Crosby. 20. ‘A Brotherhood organization’ The Social Gospel 1 (February 1898), p. 21. 21. ‘How we organize’, The Social Gospel 1 (February 1898), p. 23. 22. ‘Fifty years after’, Folder 76, Box 8, MS 1752, Yale University Library. 23. ‘A Brotherhood organization’ The Social Gospel 1 (February 1898), p. 21, John O. Fish, ‘The Christian Commonwealth Colony: A Georgia experiment, 1896– 1900’, Georgia Historical Quarterly 57 (1973), p. 215. 24. ‘A Brotherhood organisation’, The Social Gospel 1 (February 1898), p. 22. 25. ‘Colony notes’, The Social Gospel 12 (January 1899), p. 26. 26. ‘Commonwealth Colony notes’ The Social Gospel 1 (February 1898), p. 24. 27. ‘Our present needs’, The Social Gospel 1 (February 1898), p. 28 28. ‘How we organize’ The Social Gospel 1 (February 1898), p. 23. 29. ‘Our Chicago trip’ The Social Gospel 11 (December 1898), p. 22. 30. ‘Cooperative colonies abroad’ Brotherhood 7:7 (November 1899), p. 109. 31. N. O. Nelson to George Gibson, 22 January 1898, printed in The Social Gospel 1 (February 1898), p. 27. 32. The Social Gospel 5 (July 1898), p. 27. 33. Albertson, ‘Thy cloak also’, ff. 224– 5. 34. For example: Tolstoy to Jeno¨ Henrik Schmitt, 25 February 1898, PSS 71, pp. 295–6; The Dutch Christian anarchists published Tolstoy’s letter to the Christian Commonwealth in Vrede 1:15 15 May 1898, p. 2; The New Order advertised The Social Gospel from 1899 onwards. 35. The Social Gospel 12 (January 1899), p. 29. 36. ‘A Brotherhood camp’ The Croydon Brotherhood Intelligence 1:3 (March 1895), p. 2. 37. ‘Looking to the fields’ The Croydon Brotherhood Intelligence 1:6 (June 1895), p. 1.

NOTES TO PAGES 128 –134

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38. ‘Brotherhood land and camp’ The Croydon Brotherhood Intelligence 1:7 (July 1895), p. 1. 39. ‘A community at work’ The New Order 2:3 (March 1896), p. 2. 40. ‘Brotherhood camp and farm colony’ The New Order 2:6 (June 1896), p. 1; ‘Our colony begun’, The New Order 2:11 (November 1896), p. 4. Arnold Eiloart gave £2000 that he had inherited to the colony project. Smaller sums (ranging between £10 and £230) were paid in by Maude, Sinclair, Kenworthy, Hammond, Protheroe, Henderson, Spratley and Marsland. Another 13 acres, adjacent to the original ten, were purchased in 1898. 41. ‘Purleigh Colony’ The New Order 3:11 (November 1897), p. 85. 42. ‘Purleigh notes’ The New Order 4:4 (April 1898), p. 19. The family were the Hones; the auctioneer was Sudbury Protheroe; the two bank clerks were Hubert Hammond and Joseph Burtt; and the chemistry lecturer was Arnold Eiloart. 43. See Chapter Two. 44. James Penstone to John Kenworthy, printed in The New Order 3:11 (November 1897), p. 86. 45. The New Order 4:6 (July 1898), p. 59 46. ‘Purleigh notes’ The New Order New Series (5):16 (May 1899), p. 74. 47. M. J. de K. Holman, ‘The Purleigh Colony: Tolstoyan togetherness in the late 1890s’, in Malcolm Jones (ed.), New Essays on Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 208– 11. 48. W. Hone, ‘A colonist’s thoughts’ The New Order 4:10 (November 1898), p. 112. 49. A. E. to the editor of The New Order 4 April 1899, The New Order New Series (5):19 (August 1899), p. 112. 50. Holman: ‘The Purleigh Colony’, p. 210. 51. Holman: ‘The Purleigh Colony’, p. 211; Nellie Shaw: Whiteway: A Colony on the Cotswolds, (London: C. W. Daniel Company, 1935), pp. 37 – 8. 52. Shaw, Whiteway, p. 35. 53. ‘Goodwill Dressmakers’ The New Order New Series (5):18 (July 1899), p. 104. 54. ‘Purleigh notes’, The New Order 4:8 (September 1898), p. 96. 55. Shaw: Whiteway, p. 58. 56. Shaw: Whiteway, p. 58. 57. Felix Ortt to the editor of the New Order, The New Order New Series (5):22 (November 1899), p. 171. The Herald of the Golden Age was the newspaper of the Order of the Golden Age, an international food reform and animal rights organization founded in 1896. 58. Bank and Van Buuren (eds), Dutch Culture in a European Perspective 3, p. 402. 59. Henriette Hendrix, Een Week in de Kolonie te Blaricum (Amsterdam: Cohen Zonen, 1901), p. 5. 60. Bank and van Buuren (eds), Dutch Culture in a European Perspective 3, p. 407.

266

NOTES TO PAGES 134 –137

61. Lodewijk van Mierop, ‘Het Groote Nieuws’ Vrede 3:1 (October 1899), pp. 2 – 6. 62. ‘Purleigh notes’ The New Order 4:5 (June 1898), p. 56; Maria W. J. L. Boersen, De Kolonie van de Internationale Broederschap te Blaricum (Blaricum: Historische Kring Blaricum, 1987), p. 92. 63. ‘Cooperative colonies abroad’, Brotherhood 7:7 (November 1899), p. 109. 64. H. W. W., ‘Among Christian Anarchists in Holland’ The New Order 7:41 (August– September –October 1901), p. 92. See: Charlotte Alston, Russia’s Greatest Enemy? Harold Williams and the Russian Revolutions, (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), pp. 26 – 7; pp. 33 – 6. 65. Dorothy Prescott, ‘Our Tolstoi club’ The Century Magazine 43:5 (March 1892), p. 762. 66. Annie Eccles to Edward Everett Hale, November 1889; Robert A. Woods to Edward Everett Hale, 26 January 1892; Roger Edmund Tileston to Edward Everett Hale, 15 January 1893. Folder ‘Tolstoi club 1886– 1893’, Box 1, Lend a Hand Society Records, Massachusetts Historical Society. Thomas van Ness to Tolstoy, May 1889, in Velikanova and Whittaker (eds), Tolstoi i SShA, p. 451. 67. Roger Edmund Tileston to Edward Everett Hale, 6 January 1892, Folder ‘Tolstoi club 1886 – 1893’, Box 1, Lend a Hand Society Records, Massachusetts Historical Society. 68. Roger Edmund Tileston to Edward Everett Hale, 19 January 1893, Folder ‘Tolstoi club 1886 – 1893’, Box 1, Lend a Hand Society Records, Massachusetts Historical Society. 69. Stuart Eagles, After Ruskin: The Social and Political Legacies of a Victorian Prophet 1870– 1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 148– 9. 70. Eagles: After Ruskin, p. 152. 71. F. E. W., ‘What are we going for to do? Meetings and partings II’ Focus 1:2 (February 1926), pp. 97 – 107. 72. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Revolving lights’ in Pilgrimage 3 (New York: Knopf, 1967), pp. 373–4. 73. Notices of the meetings of the London Tolstoyan Society appeared throughout 1899 and 1900 in Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper and in Reynolds’ Newspaper, in the lists of meetings and lectures for that week. 74. F. E. W., ‘A multitude of counsellors – Meetings and partings IV’ Focus 1:5 (May 1926), pp. 295– 6. 75. F. E. W., ‘The group of the disgruntled. Meetings and partings III’ Focus 1:3 (March 1926), pp. 154– 5. 76. Percy Redfern to Tolstoy, 4 August 1901, GMT, TS 235/54. 77. S. M. Price, ‘Reception and influence of Leo Tolstoi in England, 1870– 1910’ MA thesis, University of Manchester (1936), p. 497a –b. Other members included: Mrs Wolstencroft, Mrs Parry, Miss Walker, and Messrs Fell, Morton, Morrell, H. L. Overbury, Sutton, Mallon, Wood and Shone. Price’s discussion

NOTES TO PAGES 138 –144

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98. 99. 100. 101.

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of the Manchester Tolstoy Society is based on their minute books, which were lent to him by Percy Redfern. Price: ‘Reception and influence of the works of Leo Tolstoi’, pp. 497a – h. Percy Redfern to Tolstoy, 4 August 1901, GMT, TS 235/54. F. E. W.: ‘A multitude of counsellors’, p. 294. F. E. W.: ‘The group of the disgruntled’, p. 155. F. E. W.: ‘What are we going for to do?’, p. 103. C. D., ‘London Tolstoyan Society’ The New Order New Series (5):21 (October 1899), p. 152. Percy Redfern to Tolstoy, 4 August 1901, GMT, TS 235/54. C. D.: ‘London Tolstoyan Society’, p. 152. F. E. W.: ‘The group of the disgruntled’, pp. 155– 6. Price, ‘Reception and influence of the works of Leo Tolstoi’, p. 497c. F. E. W.: ‘What are we going for to do?’, p. 107. Imogen Gassert, ‘CW Daniel: Maverick pacifist publisher in the First World War’ Publishing History 48 (2000), p. 11. Jeremy Goring, ‘The centenary of a “crank” publisher. Charles William Daniel 1871– 1955’ (Ashingdon: C. W. Daniel, 1971), p. 12. Charles Daniel to Valentine Knaggs, 17 November 1937. File 14, Charles William Daniel Company Papers, IISG. The Crank, subtitled ‘a little thing that makes revolutions’, welcomed ‘questions and discussions of all kinds’ and refused to ‘weary the reader with explanations and anticipations’ about its content. ‘Instead of an editorial’ The Crank 1:1 (January 1904), p. 1. Goring: ‘The centenary of a “crank” publisher’, p. 11. Kenworthy asked Tolstoy for a list of everything he had published since 1881, in order of importance, so that he could work from this list. Kenworthy to Tolstoy, 27 June and 7 August 1895, GMT, TS 223 78. Kenworthy to Tolstoy, 24 March 1895, GMT, TS 223 78. Kenworthy to Tolstoy, 20 September 1895, GMT, TC 223 78. In 1907, for example, he wrote to Daniel to enquire how many subscriptions The Crank received, and wishing him ‘the greatest success to your work, so very necessary in our time’. Tolstoy to Charles Daniel, 22 Dec 1906/4 January 1907, File 22, Charles William Daniel Company Papers, IISG. M. J. de K. Holman: ‘Translating Tolstoy for the Free Age Press: Vladimir Chertkov and his English manager Arthur Fifield’ Slavonic and East European Review 66:2 (April 1988), pp. 192– 3. Tolstoy to John Kenworthy, 4 February 1896, PSS 69, pp. 32 – 3. In this letter, Kenworthy thanked Chertkov for his consideration in procuring the letter. Kenworthy to Chertkov, 25 January 1896, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 415. Arthur Fifield to H. Johnston, RGALI 12 July 1900, f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 967.

268

NOTES TO PAGES 144 –147

102. In 1900, for example, Henderson issued a twopenny edition of The Slavery of Our Times after suggesting that the Free Age Press ought to price their edition at fourpence rather than threepence. Arthur Fifield to Vladimir Chertkov, 22 Nov 1900, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 967. 103. Tolstoy Depot Statement of Account, Box 1 Folder 1, MS 218, Michigan State University Library. 104. Holman: ‘Translating Tolstoy for the Free Age Press’, pp. 185– 6. 105. Holman: ‘Translating Tolstoy for the Free Age Press’, p. 189. 106. Anna Chertkova, Otchet knigoizdatel’stva “svobodnago slova” (Christchurch: A. Tchertkoff, 1902). 107. ‘The Free Age Press – A brief statement of its work by A. C. Fifield’, MS1381/1238a, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 108. Tolstoy to Fifield, 4/16 November 1900, and 24 December 1900, PSS 72, p. 493, p. 540. Holman: ‘Translating Tolstoy for the Free Age Press’, p. 193. This statement must have been solicited by Chertkov, as Tolstoy sent two versions of it – the second is slightly more clearly written and includes an additional sentence praising the absence of copyright on the publications. 109. Correspondence between Johannes van der Veer and Chertkov, 1898 and 1899, in RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 218; Correspondence with Pavel Biriukov, MS 1381/575 – 608, and ‘How to translate Tolstoy’, MS 1381/641, Brotherton Library, Leeds. Aylmer Maude commented that Chertkov had ‘a talent for obtaining strenuous and free, or cheap, service from Tolstoy’s sympathisers’. Aylmer Maude, Life of Tolstoy (London: Oxford University Press, 1930) 2, p. 395. 110. Arthur Fifield to Vladimir Chertkov, 6 February 1900, RGALI, f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 967. 111. ‘The Free Age Press – A brief statement of its work by A. C. Fifield’, MS1381/1238a, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 112. ‘The Free Age Press – A brief statement of its work by A. C. Fifield’, MS1381/1238a, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 113. Statement of Financial Position, Work Done, and Work in Hand, of the English Branch of the Free Age Press, May – Sept 1900, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 967. 114. Copy of Arthur Fifield to Aylmer Maude, 24 November 1929, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 967. This comment of Maude’s, which Fifield particularly objected to, does not appear in the published version of Maude’s Life of Tolstoy. Instead, he focuses on the decline in quality of Free Age Press publications after Fifield’s tenure had ended. Maude: Life of Tolstoy 2, pp. 393– 5; pp. 406– 8. 115. Arthur Fifield to Vladimir Chertkov, 13 December 1900, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 967. 116. Aylmer Maude to Frank Thompson, 3 August 1909, Frank Thompson Papers. A copy of this letter was kindly provided to the author by Gary Muir. On Thompson, see: Geoff Fernie and Gary Muir, Tolstoy to Tinglewood: The Case of

NOTES TO PAGES 147 –150

117. 118. 119.

120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133.

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Frank Skinner Thompson (Walpole: Geoffrey Fernie, 2001). ‘Zhook’ was V. P. Zhuk (or V. P. Maslov-Stokoz), see Chapter Three; Bontch-Brouevitch was V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, see Chapter One. MS 1381/429, Brotherton Library, Leeds. MS 1381/1079 – 1097; 1232– 1238; 1360– 1367. Isabella Mayo died in 1914, but Sirnis was in touch with her Tolstoyan lodger, Ceylonese doctor George Ferdinands. MS1381/1219– 1227, Brotherton Library, Leeds. The New Order’s list of books and pamphlets that represented ‘the best obtainable statements and discussions of our Beliefs’ included (besides the work of Tolstoy and Kenworthy) Edward Carpenter’s Civilization: its Cause and Cure, G. J. Holyoke’s Rochdale Pioneers, and Henry Salt’s Godwin’s Political Justice. The New Order 2:11 (November 1896), p. 4. Jeno¨ Schmitt corresponded with Tolstoy about his feature on books that were close to Tolstoy’s thought. Schmitt to Tolstoy, 21 April 1895, GMT, TS 238/34/3. In 1899, the list of literature available from the Vrede publishing house included not just the works of Tolstoy and pamphlets by Felix Ortt, Lodewijk van Mierop, Johannes van der Veer and Jeno¨ Schmitt, but also works on vegetarianism and antivivisection by Marie Jungius and Lawson Tait; and Dutch editions of: Paroles d’un Croyant, Fe´licite´ de Lammenais’ anti-authoritarian tract on brotherhood and the ideal life; Marie Corelli’s futuristic novel A Romance of Two Worlds; and Frank Hird’s expose of working conditions in British industry, The Cry of the Children. See, for example: Vrede 3:2 (1 November 1899), p. 16. ‘The New Order’ The New Order 1:11 (November 1895), p. 2. ‘A plan for a correspondence circle’ The New Order 2:8 (August 1896), p. 7. ‘Our news: A request’ The New Order 2:3 (March 1896), p. 3. ‘News of the movement’ The New Order 2:5 (May 1896), pp. 1– 3. ‘Brook Farm memoirs’ The Social Gospel 1 (February 1898), p. 28. John Morrison Davidson, Concerning Four Precursors of Henry George and the Single Tax (London; Glasgow: Labour leader publishing department: 1899). Morrison Davidson to Vladimir Chertkov, 29 November 1900, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 595. Albert Sˇkarvan, ‘Two kindred continental periodicals’ The New Order 4:2 (March 1898), pp. 11 – 12. ‘The New Order’, The New Order 1:11 (November 1895), pp. 1 – 2. ‘Geen Tolstoyann maar Christen’ Vrede 2:15 (15 May 1899), pp. 108– 10. ‘Ein Brief Leo Tolstoy’s’ Ohne Staat 1:13 (26 March 1896), p. 1; ‘Brief von Leo Tolstoy’ Ohne Staat 1:15 (July 1897), p. 2; Leo Tolstoy, ‘A letter to liberals’ The Candlestick 1 (31 January 1900), pp. 3 – 7. The New Order published a supplement every month during 1898 and serialized Ivan the Fool and What is Art? in this way. Ohne Staat 1:6 (5 February 1897), p. 4. The Social Gospel 6 (July 1898), p. 28. ‘De eerste boodschap van “Vrede”’, Vrede 1:1 (18 October 1897), p. 2.

270

NOTES TO PAGES 150 –153

134. In 1897, the paper carried a banner at the bottom of the front page of each issue which read ‘Genossen! Sorgt fu¨r die Verbreitung unseres Blattes!’ 135. ‘Commonwealth Colony notes’, The Social Gospel 1 (February 1898), p. 25; ‘Spread the social gospel’ The Social Gospel 1 (February 1898), p. 28. 136. James Dombrowski, The Early Days of Christian Socialism in America (New York: Octagon Books, 1977), p. 157. Howard Hopkins, a historian of the ‘Social Gospel’ movement in the Progressive era, credits this newspaper – as it became more popular and widely known – with making this term ‘the accepted name for Social Christianity’. Fish: ‘The Christian Commonwealth Colony’, p. 220. 137. George Gibson to Tolstoy, 22 February 1898, GMT, BL 216 /78; Fish: ‘The Christian Commonwealth Colony’, p. 220. 138. Enclosure in George Gibson to Tolstoy, 24 June 1899, GMT, BL 216/78. 139. The Tolstoyan 2:1 (May 1903), p. 1. 140. ‘How we print’, The New Order 2:2 (February 1896), p. 3. 141. ‘Shall we print at Purleigh?’ The New Order 4:9 (October 1898), p. 99. 142. ‘The progress of our work’ The New Order 2:3 (March 1896), p. 2; and ‘Shall we print at Purleigh?’ The New Order 4:9 (October 1898), p. 99. 143. Tolstoy to Johannes van der Veer, 10 November 1897, PSS 70, pp. 190– 1. 144. ‘Colony notes’ The Social Gospel 6 (July 1898), p. 26. 145. G. T. Sadler to the editor, 17 March 1898, printed in The New Order 4:3 (April 1898), p. 19. 146. ‘Editorial’ The New Order 4:4 (May 1898), p. 36. 147. The Croydon Brotherhood Intelligence 1:9 (September 1895), p. 2. The New Age was a progressive Christian journal, which aimed to ‘cultivate in individuals the spirit that pervades the Sermon on the Mount’, though in a much more moderate sense than Tolstoy or his British advocates. 148. Leo Tolstoy, ‘Thou shalt do no murder: An argument against military service’ The New Age 25 November 1897, pp. 120–1; Leo Tolstoy, ‘On marriage: An explanation of the Kreutzer Sonata’ The New Age 16 December 1897, pp. 173– 4; Leo Tolstoy, ‘Modern science’ The New Age 31 March 1898, pp. 413–4; Leo Tolstoy, ‘The Christian teaching’ The New Age 14 July 1898, pp. 217–20; 21 July 1898, pp. 235–8; 28 July 1898, pp. 250–2; 4 August 1898, pp. 265–9; 11 August, pp. 281–5; 18 August 1898, pp. 297–9. 149. Isabella Fyvie Mayo to Vladimir Chertkov, 17 January 1914, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 613. 150. Aylmer Maude to Percy Redfern, 1902, cited in Price: ‘Reception and influence of the works of Leo Tolstoi’, p. 497. 151. ‘Bilston and Politics’ The Midland Herald 5 April 1902, p. 4; ‘Robbing the poor’ The Midland Herald 19 April 1902, p. 4; ‘Peace’ The Midland Herald 7 June 1902, p. 4; ‘Under which king?’ The Midland Herald 21 June 1902, p. 4. This last article condemned all kings as ‘disastrously expensive puppets’ who were debarred from the opportunity for useful labour. It appeared in an issue of the paper which nevertheless carried advertisements for coronation

NOTES TO PAGES 153 –160

271

photographs and music. Kenworthy’s tenure at the paper was brief. The proprietor, James Dangerfield, had left him in charge while he travelled to the United States, but (although apparently a sympathizer with Kenworthy and St John’s views) was obliged upon his return to disavow Kenworthy’s editorials. Already under severe mental strain, Kenworthy’s increasingly extreme and self-aggrandizing articles (including an attack on local MP Henry Norman and an article questioning why the Royal Academy had not included his paintings in its summer exhibition) embroiled the paper in more than one lawsuit and aggravated the local community to the extent that they began to harass him at his home at night. ‘Recent events’, The Midland Herald 12 July 1902, p. 4. 152. ‘Are we alive?’ The Midland Herald 30 August 1902, p. 4; ‘The Boers on our conscience’ The Midland Herald 4 October 1902, p. 5.

Chapter 5 Contexts and Convictions 1. A reference to the saying attributed to the ancient Greek poet Archilochus: ‘the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’. Isaiah Berlin, The Hegdehog and the Fox (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953). 2. Nellie Shaw: Whiteway: A Colony on the Cotswolds (London: C. W. Daniel Company, 1935) p. 21. 3. James Gregory, Victorians and Vegetarians: The Vegetarian Movement in Nineteenth Century Britain (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), pp. 115– 6. 4. Percy Redfern to Tolstoy, 4 August 1901. GMT, TS 235/54. 5. ‘Difficulties as to non-resistance’ The New Order 2:4 (April 1896), pp. 4 – 5. 6. Jane Holah to Vladimir Chertkov, 12 March 1902, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 1065. 7. Adin Ballou to Tolstoy, 14 January 1890, in Velikanova and Whittaker (eds), Tolstoy i SShA, p. 461. 8. Aylmer Maude, Life of Tolstoy (London: Oxford University Press, 1930) 2, p. 439. 9. ‘Tolstoy and his aims’ MS1380/21, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 10. ‘Non-violence: some comments without a conclusion’ The Open Road 8:6 (December 1911), pp. 342– 4. 11. JHG, ‘Non-resistance: A conversational fragment’ The Candlestick 2 (31 March 1900), p. 17. 12. ‘Difficulties as to non-resistance’ The New Order 2:4 (April 1896), p. 5 13. ‘At the Crank’s table. Non-resistance’ The Crank 1:3 (March 1904), p. 133. 14. Arthur St John, ‘Non-resistance’ The Crank 2:1 (July 1904), p. 15. 15. ‘At the Crank’s table. Non-resistance’ The Crank 1:3 (March 1904), p. 135 16. St John, ‘Non-resistance’, p. 21.

272

NOTES TO PAGES 160 –163

17. St John, ‘Non-resistance’ The Crank 2:1 (July 1904), p. 23; ‘Debate on non-resistance’ The Crank 3:1 (January 1905), pp. 19 – 21. 18. ‘Debate on non-resistance’ The Crank 3:1 (January 1905), p. 22. 19. John Bruce Wallace, ‘New occasions, new duties’, Brotherhood 5:9 (January 1898), p. 101. 20. Isabella Fyvie Mayo to Vladimir Chertkov, 27 February 1905, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 613. 21. Florence Holah to Vladimir Chertkov, 21 January 1898, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 1066. 22. Vladimir Chertkov, ‘Total abstinence from politics’ Brotherhood 5:8 (December 1897), pp. 90 –1. 23. Vladimir Chertkov, ‘On Christian Anarchism’ The Crank 3:12 (December 1905), p. 366. 24. ‘Ernest Howard Crosby’, The Public 12 January 1907, p. 982. 25. George Frankland, ‘Non-resistance in daily life’ The Crank 2:6 (December 1904), pp. 205–10. 26. ‘Difficulties as to non-resistance’ The New Order 2:4 (April 1896), p. 5. Kenworthy further argued the case for complete adherence to truth and fact in an article on ‘Truth and falsehood and their values’ for The University Magazine and Free Review in May 1897. 27. Kenworthy to Tolstoy, 1 November 1896, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 415. 28. Jane Holah to Vladimir Chertkov, 18 February 1905, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 1065. 29. Jane Addams to Aylmer Maude, c. 30 July 1896, printed extract from the Humane Review (June 1902), pp. 216–7; Mary Lynn McCree Bryan et al., The Jane Addams Papers Microfilm (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1985– 6) Reel 3. See also: Aylmer Maude to Jane Addams, 16 October 1896; McCree Bryan et al., The Jane Addams Papers Reel 3; and Louise W. Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 374– 5. 30. Jane Holah, ‘Tolstoy and the churches’ The Open Road 2:1 (January 1908), p. 56. 31. Johannes Van der Veer to Vladimir Chertkov, n.d. [1899] RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 218. 32. ‘A plain issue for Christians’ The Croydon Brotherhood Intelligence 1:3 (March 1895), p. 1. 33. ‘Correspondence’ The New Order 3:1 (January 1897), p. 6. 34. W. C. Hart, Confessions of an Anarchist (London: Grant Richards, 1906), p. 39. 35. Ernest Howard Crosby to Vladimir Chertkov, RGALI 5 June 1901, f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 475. On Kropotkin, see: George Woodcock, The Anarchist Prince. A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin (London, New York: T. V. Boardman and Co., 1950). 36. Kenworthy to Tolstoy, 22 October 1896, GMT, TS 233/80. 37. Kenworthy to Tolstoy, 25 June 1896, 22 October 1896, GMT, TS 223/80.

NOTES TO PAGES 164 –167

273

38. Eliza Pickard, ‘What is Anarchism?’ The New Order 3:11 (November 1897), pp. 82 – 85. 39. Eugen Heinrich [Jeno¨ Henrik] Schmitt to Arnold Eiloart, printed in The New Order 3:5 (May 1897), p. 38. 40. ‘Brief von Leo Tolstoy’ Ohne Staat 1:15 (July 1897), p. 2. 41. Haia Shpayer-Makov, ‘British Anarchism 1881 – 1914: Reality and appearance’ Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of London (1981). 42. Wallace: ‘New occasions, new duties’, p. 101. 43. ‘Was wir Wollen’, Ohne Staat 1:1 (1 January 1897). 44. Eliza Pickard, ‘What is Anarchism?’ The New Order 3:11 (November 1897), pp. 82 – 5. 45. Chertkov, ‘On Christian Anarchism’, pp. 366–7. 46. See: Stephen Yeo, ‘A new life: The religion of socialism in Britain, 1883 – 1896’ History Workshop Journal 7:1 (1979), pp. 5– 56. 47. See: Mark Bevir, ‘The labour church movement 1891– 1902’ Journal of British Studies 38:2 (1999), pp. 217– 45. 48. ‘Lecture list for April’ The New Order 4:3 (April 1898), p. 20. 49. Price, ‘Reception and Influence of the Works of Leo Tolstoi’, p. 497e. 50. Reginald A. Beckett to John Kenworthy, 22 January 1898, printed in The New Order 4:2 (March 1898), p. 15. 51. D. B. Foster, ‘The Leeds Brotherhood Church’ Brotherhood 6:3 (July 1898), p. 46. 52. L. M. Ferris, ‘The Leeds Brotherhood’ The New Order New Series (5):14 (March 1899), p. 35. The Tolstoyans worked closely with the Society of Friends in the fundraising and logistics for the Doukhobor emigration. They were divided, however, by their attitudes to the state and to marriage. Lilian and her husband, Tom Ferris, were disowned by their Friends meeting after the conclusion of their ‘Free Union’ in 1898. 53. ‘The case of Hammond’ The New Order 3:3 (March 1897), p. 19. 54. John Bruce Wallace, ‘Tolstoyism and its English parody’ Brotherhood 5:6 (October 1897), p. 65. 55. John Bruce Wallace, ‘The politics of love’ Brotherhood 5:8 (December 1897), p. 92. 56. Nobori Shomu and Akamatsu Katsumaro, The Russian Impact on Japan: Literature and Social Thought (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1981), p. 101. 57. Nellie Shaw, ‘Some impressions of the Sermon on the Mount’ The New Order 2:2 (February 1896), p. 5. 58. Tom Ferris, Christ and the Unemployed (Leeds: Brotherhood Church, n.d. [1904]); and Tom Ferris, Christ and Your Vote (Leeds: Brotherhood Church, 1906), both in: ‘Leaflets and pamphlets by Tom Ferris (1900– 1931), compiled and edited by A. G. Higgins’ (Pontefract: Brotherhood Church, 1976), Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. 59. The Odd Man, ‘Some remarks on Socialism’ The Crank 4:11 (November 1906), p. 361. See also: D. M. Richardson, ‘The Odd Man’s remarks on

274

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

NOTES TO PAGES 167 –170 Socialism’ The Crank 5:1 (January 1907), pp. 30 – 3; Mary Everest Boole, ‘Socialism and the Odd Man’, and The Odd Man, ‘A reply to D. M. Richardson’ in The Crank 5:3 (March 1907), pp. 145– 52. C. W. Daniel, ‘Socialism: Its cause and cure’ The Open Road 2:5 (May 1908), pp. 225– 6. Shaw: Whiteway, p. 23. Aylmer Maude, ‘Tolstoy and political reformers’ The Crank 3:4 (April 1903), p. 118. John Spargo, ‘My visit to the “Tolstoyan Colony” Whiteway’ The Social Democrat (September 1901). On Spargo, see: Markku Ruotsila, John Spargo and American Socialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Ernest Howard Crosby, ‘Wrongs and remedies’ The Comrade 3:7 (May 1904), pp. 175– 6. See also: Alex Wight, ‘Ernest Crosby on Socialism’ The Comrade 3:6 (April 1904), pp. 133– 4. John Spargo, ‘Some reflections upon Mr. Crosby’s critique of Socialism’ The Comrade 3:7 (May 1904), pp. 176– 9. Sandi Cooper, Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 10. Cooper, Patriotic Pacifism, pp. 60–1; p. 128. Sandi Cooper gives two examples of the discussion of refusal to bear arms. In 1901, G. H. Perris urged the Universal Peace Congress to rethink its rejection of Tolstoy and to reconsider support of resistors to conscription, such as the Doukhobors. He said individual refusal to take up arms was particularly important in autocratic states. If governments refused to find a way of reducing the escalation of armaments, individual refusal would have to be considered. At the French National Peace Congress of 1904, similar proposals on individual refusal to bear arms were introduced by Paul Allegret, but they were rejected as unpatriotic and therefore incompatible with the obligations of French citizenship. Martin Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations 1854– 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 140– 1. See also Peter Brock, Varieties of Pacifism: A Survey from Antiquity to the Outset of the Twentieth Century (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), pp. 79 – 80. Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You and Peace Essays Tolstoy Centenary Edition 20 (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 177. ‘Appeal to the nations’ The New Order 4:6 (July 1898), p. 63. Leo Tolstoy to Bertha Von Suttner, 9 October 1891 PSS 66, p. 58. http://nobelpeaceprize.org/en_GB/about_peaceprize/. Rory Stauber, ‘Lifting the banner of Tolstoyan non-resistance in America: Ernest Howard Crosby’s lonely quest, 1894–1907’ PhD thesis, Drew University (1994), p. 124. Arthur St John, ‘The Diamond Jubilee’ The New Order 3:2 (July 1897), p. 50. Aylmer Maude, ‘Conscription’ The Candlestick 16 (31 December 1900), pp. 1– 4; Ernest Howard Crosby, ‘Militarism at home’ The Arena 31:1 (January 1904).

NOTES TO PAGES 171 –175

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76. Jane Holah to Miss Cooke, 7 February 1898, and Jane Holah to Vladimir Chertkov, 5 February 1898 and 10 February 1898, RGALI f. 552 op. 2 ed. kh. 1065. 77. On Stead and on opposition to the Boer War, see: Deborah Mutch, ‘“Are We Christians?”: W. T. Stead, Keir Hardie and the Boer War’, in Roger Luckhurst, et al. (eds), W. T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary (University of Chicago Press), pp. 133– 48; Stephen Koss, The Pro-Boers: The Anatomy of an Anti-war Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973); Arthur Davey, The British Pro-Boers 1877– 1902 (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1978). 78. Vladimir Chertkov, ‘The present peace demonstrations’ The Fortnightly Review (April 1899), p. 601. 79. ‘The czar’s rescript’ The New Order New Series (5):14 (March 1899), p. 39. 80. ‘F’ to the editor of the New Order, 13 March 1899, The New Order New Series (5):16 (May 1899), p. 75. 81. Florence Holah to Vladimir Chertkov, 20 February 1899, RGALI f. 552 op. 2 ed. khr. 1066. 82. Felix, ‘De oorlog in Zuid-Afrika’ Vrede, 3:2, (1 November 1899), pp. 9 – 11. 83. Arthur Fifield to Vladimir Chertkov, 27 January 1899, RGALI f. 552, op. 2 no. 967. 84. Vladimir Chertkov, ‘The League of Peace in relation to the Nazarenes and the Spirit-Wrestlers’ The New Order 4:1 (February 1898), p. 1. 85. Chertkov: ‘The League of Peace in relation to the Nazarenes and the SpiritWrestlers’, pp. 1 – 4. 86. Ernest Crosby to Tolstoy, 23 January 1899, GMT, TS 211/27. 87. Peter Brock: ‘Tolstoyism, cultural nationalism and conscientious objection: A Slovak case study’ in Brock, Freedom from War: Non-Sectarian Pacifism 1814– 1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), p. 237. 88. Gregory: Of Victorians and Vegetarians, p. 115. James Simpson, one of the most prominent vegetarians of the 1840s, was an early example of the multi-faceted reformer – although his principal cause was vegetarianism, he also campaigned for peace and temperance, against tobacco and capital punishment, promoted phonetics and the allotment movement, and was interested in spiritualism. Gregory: Victorians and Vegetarians, pp. 23 – 33. 89. On the Humanitarian League, see: Henry Salt, Seventy Years Among Savages (London: George, Allen and Unwin, 1921), pp. 121– 2; and Dan Weinbren, ‘Against all cruelty: The Humanitarian League, 1891– 1919’ History Workshop Journal 38:1 (1994), pp. 86 – 105. 90. Ian Miller, ‘Evangelicalism and the early vegetarian movement in Britain c. 1847– 1860’ Journal of Religious History 35:2 (2011), pp. 199– 210. 91. William Edgerton, ‘The social influence of Lev Tolstoj in Bulgaria’ in Harris, J. G. (ed.), American Contributions to the Tenth International Congress of Slavists (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1988), pp. 128– 9. 92. ‘Croydon Brotherhood industries’ The New Order 2:11 November 1896, p. 8; ‘The National Vegetarian Congress’, Brotherhood 7:6 (October 1899), pp. 91–2.

276

NOTES TO PAGES 175 –178

93. Hubert Hammond reported that the majority of the Purleigh residents did not eat meat, although some occasionally did; ‘Purleigh notes’ The New Order 4:3 (April 1898), p. 18. Frank Henderson reported that ‘A turkey joined the Colony’ at Christmas 1898 – ‘it came out of the competitive system. It will never go back again for a significant number gave it a hearty reception (though it must be said that others drew their skirts together, so to speak, and would have none of it). ‘Editorial’ The New Order 4:12 (January 1899), p. 12. 94. The Social Gospel 11 (December 1898), p. 27. 95. James Penstone to John Kenworthy, printed in The New Order 3:11 (November 1897), p. 86. 96. Edith Crosby to Margaret Crosby, n.d. [1899], Box 4, MS218, Michigan State University Library. 97. Charles Daniel to Denise Waltham, 14 Sept 1928, File 195, Charles William Daniel Company Papers, IISG. 98. Johannes van der Veer, ‘Tolstoyan asceticism’ The Social Democrat 5:6 (15 June 1901), p. 179. 99. Florence Holah to Vladimir Chertkov, n.d. [1899], f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 1066, RGALI. 100. Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), p. xix. 101. Ernest Howard Crosby, ‘The meat fetish’, in Ernest Crosby and E´lise´e Reclus, The Meat Fetish: Two Essays on Vegetarianism (London: A. C. Fifield, 1905), pp. 9 – 13. 102. Arthur St John, ‘An inconvenient visit to the Caucasus’ The New Order New Series (5):13 (February 1899), p. 18. 103. Crosby: ‘The meat fetish’, p. 12. 104. ‘The ills that the flesh is heir to’ The Candlestick 15 (30 November 1902), pp. 6 – 8. 105. Crosby: ‘The meat fetish’, pp. 11 – 16. 106. Gregory: Victorians and Vegetarians, pp. 80 –1. See also: James C. Whorton, ‘Muscular vegetarianism: The debate over diet and athletic performance in the progressive eria’ in Journal of Sport History 8:2 (1981), pp. 58 – 75. On the question of variety, Florence Worland sought to demonstrate that ‘the average meat-eater’s diet is far more monotonous than that of the average food-reformer’, by providing her readers with sample daily vegetarian menus. F. E. W., ‘First steps in vegetarianism’, The Crank 4:2 (October 1904), pp. 142–3; Florence Daniel, ‘Vegetarianism’ The Open Road 2:2 (February 1908), pp. 100–5. 107. Crosby: ‘The meat fetish’, p. 15. 108. Crosby: ‘The meat fetish’, p. 7. 109. John Kenworthy, ‘Man and the animals’, The New Order New Series (5):15 (April 1899), p. 56. 110. Crosby, ‘The meat fetish’, p. 12. 111. Kenworthy, ‘Man and the animals’, p. 57.

NOTES TO PAGES 178 –182

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112. George Lensen (ed.), Revelations of a Russian Diplomat: The Memoirs of Dmitri I. Abrikossow (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964) p. 62. 113. Crosby: ‘The meat fetish’, p. 18. Crosby refers to the energetic late nineteenth century campaign against footbinding in China – see: Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink (eds), Activists Beyond Borders. Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 60 – 6. 114. Herbert Archer, ‘Tidings of the Doukhobors’ The Candlestick 15 (30 November 1902), pp. 3– 5. 115. Jack White, Jack, Misfit: An Autobiography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1930) p. 131. 116. Gregory: Victorians and Vegetarians, p. 91. 117. Crosby: ‘The meat fetish’ pp. 5 –6. See also J. Oliver’s account of the transport and slaughter of cattle, and the impact on those who worked in slaughterhouses, in ‘Vegetarian cranks’, The Crank 2:1 (February 1904), pp. 72 – 80. 118. Crosby: ‘The meat fetish’, p. 7. 119. St John: ‘An inconvenient visit to the Caucasus’, p. 18. 120. Kenworthy: ‘Man and the animals’, p. 56. 121. P. Howard, ‘Bee-Keeping and the golden rule’ The Crank 8:3 (August 1905), pp. 247– 9; ‘Purleigh notes’, The New Order 3:4 (April 1897), p. 29. 122. Gregory: Victorians and Vegetarians, p. 98. 123. Salt: Seventy Years, p. 122. 124. Vladimir Chertkov, ‘Words to vegetarians’ The New Order 4:11 (December 1898), p. 118. 125. Chertkov: ‘Words to vegetarians’, p. 118. 126. Kenworthy: ‘Man and the animals’, p. 56. 127. Leo Tolstoy, ‘On marriage: An explanation of the Kreutzer Sonata’ The New Age 16 December 1897, pp. 173– 4. An editorial in the same issue regretted that Tolstoy failed to ‘comprehend the Christian idea of marriage’, and that he had not the experience of some of the more progressive Western Churches and ‘the great social work which is being done by our religious organisations’. Nevertheless, Tolstoy’s article was ‘really a powerful protest against sexual impurity, and even those who regard the author’s main position as untenable cannot fail to appreciate the earnestness and lofty idealism with which he tries to maintain it’. The New Age 16 December 1897, p. 165. 128. J. H. Goring to the editor, printed in The New Order 4:1 (February 1898), p. 7. 129. F. E. Worland, ‘The ideal of chastity’ The Crank 8:4 (August 1906), pp. 252– 3. 130. Arthur Fifield to Vladimir Chertkov, 30 November 1897 RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 967. On The Adult see: Anne Humphreys, ‘The journal that did: Form and content in The Adult (1897 – 1899)’ Media History 9:1 (2003), pp. 63 – 78. 131. John Kenworthy, ‘Marriage’ The New Order 4:6 (July 1898), pp. 57 – 8. 132. Kenworthy: ‘Marriage’, pp. 57 – 8. 133. Kenworthy: ‘Marriage’, p. 70.

278

NOTES TO PAGES 182 –186

134. On the reaction to Herron’s divorce and remarriage, see: Phyllis Ann Nelson, ‘George Herron and the Socialist Clergy 1890– 1914’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Iowa (1953), pp. 228–31. 135. Andre´ de Raaij, ‘A dead seed bearing much fruit: The Dutch Christian Anarchist movement of the international fraternity’, in Alexandre Christoyannopoulos (ed.), Religious Anarchism: New Perspectives (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), p. 77. 136. George Gibson to Ralph Albertson, 10 May 1904, Folder 81, Box 1, MS 1752, Yale University Library. 137. Alexander Kent to Ralph Albertson, 6 June 1904, Folder 118, Box 1, MS 1752, Yale University Library. 138. Untitled poem, Folder 43, Box 5, MS 1752, Yale University Library. 139. J. P. H., ‘Legal marriage and the taking of oaths’ The New Order New Series (5):19 (August 1899), pp. 105– 6. 140. Ernest Ames, ‘The Brotherhood Church’ The Tolstoyan 1:6 (April 1903), pp. 217– 25. 141. W. J. Carter, ‘Leeds notes’ The New Order 4:12 (January 1899), p. 11. 142. ‘The Blackburn Brotherhood’ The New Order New Series (5):19 (August 1899), p. 119. 143. A. G. Higgins, A History of the Brotherhood Church, (Stapleton: Brotherhood Church, 1982), pp. 12 –13. 144. Lilian Ferris, True Life and Free Love (Leeds: Brotherhood Church, 1900) in ‘Leaflets and pamphlets by Tom Ferris (1900 – 1931), compiled and edited by A. G. Higgins’, Brotherton Library, Leeds; Florence Worland, ‘Free love’ The Crank 5:2 (February 1907), pp. 61 – 8. 145. ‘A marriage’ The New Order 2:10 (October 1896), p. 7. 146. May and William MacDonald to Kenworthy, printed in The New Order 2:11 (November 1896), p. 7. Despite their insistence that there was no legal or religious ceremony, they were anxious to correct the date of the marriage which Kenworthy had wrongly given as 22 July. Pinnell apparently also chose to take her husband’s name, as did Lilian Hunt. 147. John Kenworthy to Vladimir Chertkov, 31 August 1896, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 415. 148. W. P. Swainson to the editor, printed in The New Order 2:12 (December 1896), p. 6. 149. ‘Affairs at Whiteway’ The New Order New Series (5):20 (September 1899), p. 130. 150. Ernest Crosby’s Russian Journal, Box 4, MS218, Michigan State University Library. 151. Florence Holah to Vladimir Chertkov, 30 November 1897, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 1066. 152. Jane Holah to Vladimir Chertkov, 16 October 1901 and 14 November 1901, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 1065.

NOTES TO PAGES 186 –190

279

153. Isabella Fyvie Mayo to Vladimir Chertkov, 22 May 1906, and 26 May 1906, RGALI f. 552, op. 2 ed. khr. 613. 154. F.E.W., ‘What are we going for to do? Meetings and partings II’ Focus 1:2 (February 1926), pp. 97 – 107. 155. Jane Holah to Vladimir Chertkov, 3 November 1897, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 1065. 156. Ernest Crosby’s Russian Journal Box 4, MS218 Michigan State University Library. 157. Frank Henderson, ‘Family ties, or may a man sacrifice his wife and children?’ The New Order 3:6 (June 1897), pp. 45 – 6. 158. ‘Correspondence’, The New Order 2:6 (June 1896), pp. 6 – 7. 159. Ernest Crosby, ‘The plea of labour from the standpoint of a Russian peasant’ The Arena 17:86 (January 1897), p. 321. 160. Isabella Fyvie Mayo, a note on the land question, n.d., RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 613. 161. Crosby, ‘The plea of labour from the standpoint of a Russian peasant’. Bellamy’s Looking Backward was a formative text also for Marxist socialists, and it was extremely popular in Russia during and after the revolution. Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 32. On Flu¨rscheim, see: Lyman Tower Sargent, ‘Michael Flu¨rscheim: From the single tax to currency reform’ Utopian Studies 21:1 (2010), pp. 139– 64. 162. Ernest Crosby, ‘The wealth of St Francis: A study in transcendental economics’ The Craftsman (October 1902). 163. John Coleman Kenworthy, The Anatomy of Misery: Plain Lectures on Economics (London: William Reeves, 1893). 164. Ernest Crosby, ‘The dangers of a university education; read before the faculty and students of the NY University in the Chapel, May 1896, Box 4, MS 218, Michigan State University Library. 165. The New Order New Series (5):18 (July 1899), p. 104. 166. Ernest Howard Crosby, Trinity Church Tenements: The Cause of their Condition and their Cure (New York: Stirling Publishing Company, 1895). The New Order 4:12 (January 1899), p. 12. 167. The Social Gospel 1 (February 1898), p. 16. 168. The Social Gospel 6 (July 1898), p. 27; Albertson, ‘The Christian Commonwealth in Georgia’, p. 131. 169. The New Order devoted considerable space to this issue in the summer of 1899, including a compilation of extracts from correspondence received on the topic: ‘Money, bargaining and work’ The New Order New Series (5):19 (August 1899), pp. 112–13. 170. Florence Holah, ‘Money – An instrument of compulsion’ The New Order 4:12 (January 1899), p. 5. 171. ‘Should I use money? Correspondence between X who uses it, and E who does not’ The New Order New Series (5):16 (May 1899), p. 70.

280

NOTES TO PAGES 191 –197

172. ‘Penniless pilgrimage. Extracts from the diary of a novice’ The New Order New Series (5):20 (September 1899), p. 129. 173. ‘Tramping to Gloucester’ The New Order 4:10 (November 1898), p. 114. 174. Ernest Ames, ‘The Brotherhood Church’ The Tolstoyan 1:6 (April 1903), pp. 217– 25. 175. Ames: ‘The Brotherhood Church’, p. 221. 176. Tom Ferris, ‘Blackburn notes’ The New Order New Series (5):19 (August 1899), p. 106. 177. Shaw: Whiteway, p. 120. 178. ‘The Blackburn Brotherhood’ The New Order New Series (5):19 (August 1899), p. 115. 179. Ames: ‘The Brotherhood Church’, p. 223. 180. Arthur St John, ‘Rational distribution’ The New Order New Series (5):14 (March 1899), p. 48. 181. ‘Rational distribution’ The New Order New Series (5):15 (April 1899), p. 64. 182. ‘Should I use money? Correspondence between X who uses it, and E who does not’ The New Order New Series (5):16 (May 1899), p. 70; Louise Maude, ‘The root of all evil’ The New Order New Series (5):17 (June 1899), p. 79; Florence Holah, ‘The root of all evil’ The New Order New Series (5):18 (July 1899), p. 101. The use of money was the subject of a vigorous discussion in Croydon in October 1898, in which Florence Holah lamented that ‘all the talent was on the other side’. Florence Holah to Vladimir Chertkov, 24 October 1898, privately she expressed her own doubts about carrying the no-money position to its fullest extent – if one were ‘not to shape one’s activities in such a way as to get money’ (Kenworthy’s expression), would it mean giving her Tolstoy translations, her correspondence with and visits to other sympathizers in the movement? Florence Holah to Vladimir Chertkov, n.d. (1898 or 1899), RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. kr. 1066. 183. Shaw: Whiteway, pp. 120– 3. 184. Price, ‘Reception and influence of the works of Leo Tolstoi’, p. 471. 185. Maude: ‘The root of all evil’, p. 79. 186. Holah: ‘The root of all evil’, p. 101. 187. Florence Holah to Vladimir Chertkov, 4 October 1898, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 1066. 188. T. F. to the editor of The New Order, 12 and 19 June 1899, The New Order New Series (5):19 (August 1899), pp. 112– 3. 189. Florence Holah, ‘Money – An Instrument of Compulsion’, p. 5. 190. ‘The no-money movement’ New Order 7:39 (May 1901), p. 5. 191. A. E., ‘A colonist’s defence’, The New Order (February 1899), p. 26. 192. F. J. Gould, ‘The reformation of reformers’ The Candlestick 15 (30 November 1902), p. 2.

NOTES TO PAGES 198 –202

281

Chapter 6 Tolstoyan Legacies 1. J. K. Van der Veer, ‘Tolstoyan asceticism’ The Social Democrat 5:6 (15 June 1901), pp. 177–80, and 5:7 (July 1901), pp. 200– 3. Van der Veer wrote for the Dutch socialist newspapers, and became London correspondent of the newspaper De Telegraaf. 2. A. G. Higgins, A History of the Brotherhood Church (Stapleton: Brotherhood Church, 1982), pp. 22– 3. Morse remembered there being ‘round about a dozen adults and five or six children’ in this second manifestation of the Purleigh colony. Their presence was apparently rather resented by the Hone family, who occupied a portion of the former colony land and farmed it themselves. The group unanimously refused to be vaccinated against the smallpox. S. M. Price: ‘Reception and influence of Leo Tolstoi in England, 1870– 1910’ MA thesis, University of Manchester (1936), pp. 471– 2. 3. Leon de Brabant to Ralph Albertson, 24 September 1904 and 30 December 1904, Folder 58, Box 1, MS 1752, Yale University Library; and Daniel T. Elliot and Tracy M. Dean, Commonwealth, Georgia Lamar Institute Publication Series Report Number 90 (Savannah: the LAMAR Institute, 2007), p. 15. 4. Leon de Brabant to Ralph Albertson, 24 September 1904, Folder 58, Box 1, MS 1752, Yale University Library. 5. Jan Bank and Maarten van Buuren, Dutch Culture in a European Perspective 3 1900: The Age of Bourgeois Culture (Assen and Basingstoke: Royal van Goricum and Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 422. 6. Nellie Shaw, Whiteway: A Colony on the Cotswolds (London: C. W. Daniel Company), p. 87. If the ‘light of Whiteway’ had gone out, G. G. Desmond observed, ‘it would be strange if its people could give so much to the country as they have, without losing something. When a cleansing agent does good work, it is itself made dull, and used up in its good work’. G. G. D., ‘Whiteway’ The Crank 1:1 (January 1904), p. 17. 7. Louis C. Bourgeois, ‘The Tolstoy Colony, a Chilean utopian-artistic experiment’ Hispania (1963), p. 517. 8. Shaw: Whiteway, pp. 68 – 9; pp. 115– 9. 9. Ralph Albertson, ‘The Christian Commonwealth in Georgia’, Georgia Historical Quarterly 29:3 (September 1945), pp. 140– 1. 10. John O. Fish, ‘The Christian Commonwealth Colony: A Georgia experiment, 1896– 1900’, Georgia Historical Quarterly 57:2 (1973), p. 222. 11. Albertson: ‘The Christian Commonwealth in Georgia’, p. 141. 12. Albertson: Thy Cloak Also, ff. 225– 6. 13. Andre´ de Raaij, ‘A dead seed bearing much fruit: The Dutch Christian Anarchist movement of the international fraternity’, in Alexandre Christoyannopoulos (ed.), Religious Anarchism: New Perspectives (Newcastle

282

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

NOTES TO PAGES 202 –205 upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), pp. 76 – 7; Bank and van Buuren: Dutch Culture in a European Perspective, p. 422. Henriette Hendrix, Een Week in de kolonie der Internationale Broederschap te Blaricum (Amsterdam: Cohen Zonen, 1901). John Coleman Kenworthy, My Psychic Experiences. Being an Address given before the London Spiritualist Alliance, in St James’s Hall, Piccadilly, on April 12th 1901 (London: Office of ‘Light’, 1901), p. 4. See also: John Coleman Kenworthy, ‘To our friends: For consideration’, The New Order New Series (6): 24 (February 1900), pp. 24 –6. Aylmer Maude, Leo Tolstoy (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1918), pp. 205– 6. George Howard Gibson, ‘Why commonwealth failed’ The Commons (January 1901), pp. 5– 6. M. J. de K. Holman, ‘The Purleigh Colony: Tolstoyan togetherness in the late 1890s’ in Malcolm Jones (ed.), New Essays on Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 217. Rudolf Jans: Tolstoj in Nederland (Bussum: P. Brand, 1952), p. 110. Alexander Sirnis to the British Socialist Party, 19 September 1917, MS1381/88, Brotherton Library, Leeds. George Ferdinands to Alexander Sirnis, 7 October 1917, MS1381/1222, Brotherton Library, Leeds. Holman: ‘The Purleigh Colony’, p. 217, p. 221n; Price: ‘Reception and influence of the works of Leo Tolstoi’, p. 476. In an undated note of 1900, Jane Holah reported that the previous Wednesday had been a very good meeting – Kenworthy had ‘kept off spiritualism almost altogether’. Jane Holah to Vladimir Chertkov, n.d., RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 1065. Kenworthy: My Psychic Experiences, p. 19. Florence Holah to Vladimir Chertkov, 29 August 1900, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 1066. Florence Daniel, Food Remedies (London: C. W. Daniel, 1908); The Healthy Life Cookbook (London: C. W. Daniel, 1908); Distilled Water (London: C. W. Daniel, 1909); The Cure of Chronic Catarrh (London: C. W. Daniel, 1911); Salt: A Cause of Disease (London: C. W. Daniel, 1911); The Treatment of Morbid Growths (London: C. W. Daniel, 1912); Are Women Monkey Minded? (London: C. W. Daniel, 1921); What to Eat and How Much (London: C. W. Daniel, 1925); The Expectant Mother (London: C. W. Daniel, 1925); Woman’s Mental Activity (London: C. W. Daniel, 1929); The Nursing Mother (London: C. W. Daniel, 1925); Of Babies (London: C. W. Daniel, 1925); Of Children (C. W. Daniel, 1925); Of Cottage and Cream Cheeses (London: C. W. Daniel, 1927); Life and Health of Mind and Body (London: C. W. Daniel, 1928). Arnold Eiloart, ‘The league against health’ The Open Road 2:3 (March 1908), pp. 150– 60; 2:4 (April 1908), pp. 195– 209. Bank and Van Buuren: Dutch Culture in a European Perspective, p. 422.

NOTES TO PAGES 205 –209

283

29. A. G. Rose, ‘Some influences on English penal reform 1895– 1921’ in W. Gareth Jones, Tolstoi and Britain (Oxford: Berg, 1995), p. 260. 30. Investigator and Arthur St John, Crime and Common Sense: Present Judicial Inefficiency and the Direction of Improvement The Efficiency Series 2 (London: C. W. Daniel, 1904), pp. 66 –70. 31. Investigator and St John: Crime and Common Sense, p. 71. 32. Investigator and St John: Crime and Common Sense, p. 71. 33. Investigator and St John: Crime and Common Sense, p. 72. 34. Rose: ‘Some influences on English penal reform’, pp. 264– 5. 35. Stephen Hobhouse and A. Fenner Brockway (eds), English Prisons Today: Being the Report of the Prison System Enquiry Committee (London: Longmans, Green 1922), p. 598. 36. See Chapters Three and Four. 37. A. Sergeenko, ‘Perepiska Tolstogo s M.J. Gandi’, Literaturnoe Nasledstvo 37–38 (Moscow: 1939), pp. 339–52. Gandhi’s personal secretary and biographer Pyarelal Nayyar believed that Gandhi’s thought was so deeply ‘impregnated with Tolstoy’s that the changes that took place in his way of life and thinking . . . can be correctly understood and appreciated only in the context of the master’s life and philosophy’. George Woodcock, on the other hand, argues that that Tolstoy’s influence on Gandhi is often exaggerated, and that he merely strengthened Gandhi’s existing convictions. Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: The Early Phase 1 (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1965), p. 628, p. 707; George Woodcock, Gandhi (New York: Viking Press, 1971), p. 25; see: Thomas Weber, Gandhi as Disciple and Mentor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 20, p. 39. 38. Weber: Gandhi as Disciple and Mentor, pp. 39 – 41. 39. James D. Hunt, ‘Gandhi, Tolstoy and the Tolstoyans’, in James D. Hunt, An American Looks at Gandhi. Essays in Satyagraha, Civil Rights and Peace (New Delhi and Chicago: Promilla & Co, 2005), pp. 39 – 40. 40. Kathryn Tidrick, Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), p. 50. 41. H. E. Hare, ‘Passive resistance or non-resistance’ The Crank 1:1 (January 1904), pp. 4– 10. 42. Tidrick: Gandhi, p. 52. 43. David Cortright, Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 75. 44. James Melvin Washington (ed.), A Testament of Hope. The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Harper Collins, 1986), p. 447. 45. Stephen Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World, from Art to Anti-semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 135. Martin Luther King does cite Tolstoy’s Confession in his sermon ‘The strength to love’ (1963). Washington (ed.), A Testament of Hope, p. 515. 46. Jill Wallis, Valiant for Peace: A History of the Fellowship of Reconciliation 1914 to 1989 (London: Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1991), p. 6.

284 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

NOTES TO PAGES 209 –214 Wallis: Valiant for Peace, pp. 7 –8. Higgins: A History of the Brotherhood Church, pp. 32 – 6. Higgins: History of the Brotherhood Church, p. 34. George Ferdinands to Alexander Sirnis, 7 October 1917, MS1381/1222, Brotherton Library, Leeds. Ludwig Berndl to Alexander Sirnis, 15 February 1916, and Pavel Biriukov to Alexander Sirnis, 18 January 1916, MS 1381/749– 884, Brotherton Library, Leeds. Andra´s Bozoki and Miklo´s Su¨ko¨sd: Anarchism in Hungary: Theory, History, Legacies (Boulder: Social Science Monographs, 2006), pp. 94 – 5; Peter Brock: ‘Tolstoyism and the Hungarian peasant’ Slavonic and East European Review 58:3 (July 1980), p. 366. Bolton Hall to Sinton, 5 November 1914, Bolton Hall papers, New York Public Library; Clarence Darrow: The Story of My Life, (New York: Scribners, 1932), p. 20. Gilbert Murray, ‘Introduction’ in Mrs Henry Hobhouse, I Appeal Unto Caesar: The Case of the Conscientious Objector (London: George Allen and Unwin), pp. v– vi. Hobhouse: I Appeal Unto Ceasar, p. 3. Alexander Sirnis to George Ferdinands, 2 November 1917, MS1381/1227, Brotherton Library, Leeds. Shaw: Whiteway, pp. 104– 5. Joy Thacker, Whiteway Colony: The Social History of a Tolstoyan Community (Stroud: J. Thacker, 1993), pp. 123– 7. Shaw: Whiteway, pp. 104– 5. Higgins: History of the Brotherhood Church, pp. 36 – 7. Stephen Hobhouse: Forty Years and an Epilogue (London: James Clarke, 1951), p. 152. Florence Holah to Vladimir Chertkov, 1 February 1920, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 1066. Joyce Runham Brown to Harold Bing, September 1964, MS 486/7/1, Nottingham University. Leo Tolstoy, The Inevitable Change (Thorpeness: Peace Pamphlets by Ruth Fry, 1937). Alexander Sirnis to Ernest Ames, 29 May 1917, MS1381/729, Brotherton Library, Leeds. Vladimir Chertkov to Alexander Sirnis, 29 October/11 November 1915, MS1381/904, Brotherton Library, Leeds. ‘The misrepresentation of Tolstoy’ MS1380/20; Aylmer Maude to Jane Addams, 29 March 1927, MS1380/162, Brotherton Library, Leeds. ‘The misrepresentation of Tolstoy’ MS1380/20, and Aylmer Maude to Pavel Biriukov, 27 September 1927, MS1380/353, Brotherton Library, Leeds. Ernest Howard Crosby to Vladimir Chertkov, 8 December 1899 and 12 December 1899, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 475.

NOTES TO PAGES 214 –219

285

70. Aylmer Maude to Pavel Biriukov, 27 September 1927, MS1380/162, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 71. MS1380/174, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 72. These further volumes were never prepared. Aylmer Maude to Jane Addams, 13 December 1927, MS1380/163, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 73. Aylmer Maude to William Armstrong, 10 February 1928, MS1380/213, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 74. William Armstrong to Aylmer Maude, 15 February 1928 MS1380/214, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 75. Lena Ashwell to Aylmer Maude, 13 February 1925, MS 1380/229, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 76. Correspondence between Aylmer Maude and Robert Atkins, September 1926– March 1928, MS1380/237– 254, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 77. See: Chris Goulding, The Story of the People’s (Newcastle upon Tyne: Newcastle upon Tyne City Libraries and Arts, 1991), p. 7; Norman Veitch, The People’s: Being a History of the People’s Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne 1911– 1939 (Gateshead: Northumberland Press, 1950), p. 105. 78. Correspondence between Aylmer Maude and Edith Bulwer, December 1927– February 1928, MS1380/410– 427. Herbert Barnes to Aylmer Maude, 15 February 1928, MS 1380/299, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 79. Correspondence between Aylmer Maude and Frank Gregory, April 1928, MS1380/1020– 1025, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 80. The others were G. H. Perris and J. F. Green. 81. Tolstoy to Aylmer Maude, 25 March 1901, Ms Coll\Tolstoy, Butler Library, Columbia University. 82. Darya Protopopova, ‘Leo Tolstoy’s translator Aylmer Maude (1858 – 1938) and his correspondence with Tolstoy: Holdings in the Bodleian Library and the Brotherton Library (University of Leeds)’ The Bodleian Library Record 22:1 (April 2009), pp. 59 –60. 83. MS1380/8, 28 – 32, 34, 37, 156, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 84. MS1380/34, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 85. Salome Hocking, Belinda the Backward: A Romance of Modern Idealism (London: Arthur C. Fifield, 1905), p. 49. 86. Hocking: Belinda the Backward, pp. 97 – 8. 87. Hocking: Belinda the Backward, pp. 57 – 8. 88. Arthur Fifield to Vladimir Chertkov, 1 October 1913, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 967. 89. Hocking: Belinda the Backward, p. 48. Copy of Arthur Fifield to Aylmer Maude, 16 November 1929, in RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 967. 90. Hocking: Belinda the Backward, p. 146. 91. Walter Allen, ‘Introduction’, in Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage 1 (New York: Knopf, 1967), p. 6. 92. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Revolving Lights’, in Pilgrimage 3 (New York: Knopf, 1967), pp. 371–4.

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NOTES TO PAGES 219 –228

93. Malcolm Ross, The Man Who Lived Backward (London: Victor Gollancz, 1951), p. 121. 94. Ross: The Man Who Lived Backward, p. 147. 95. Ross: The Man Who Lived Backward, p. 143. 96. Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 322– 3. 97. Arthur Mizener, The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford (London: The Bodley Head, 1971), p. 213. 98. Daniel Chaucer, The Simple Life Limited (London: John Lane, 1911), p. 17. 99. Chaucer: The Simple Life, pp. 25 – 6. 100. Chaucer: The Simple Life, p. 216; and Edgar J. Saxon, ‘The simple life again’ The Open Road (April 1911), pp. 290–7. 101. Chaucer: The Simple Life, p. 90. 102. Saunders: Ford Madox Ford, pp. 320– 3. 103. Elliott and Dean: Commonwealth, Georgia, p. 26. 104. See map in: Maria W. J. L. Boersen, De Kolonie van de Internationale Broederschap te Blaricum (Blaricum: Historische Kring Blaricum, 1987), inside back cover. 105. Shaw: Whiteway, pp. 58 – 9. See the earlier chapters of Shaw’s book for her discussion of Whiteway’s Tolstoyan heritage. 106. Shaw: Whiteway, pp. 95 – 9. 107. Shaw: Whiteway, pp. 218– 9. 108. Shaw: Whiteway, pp. 222– 4. 109. ‘Whiteway celebrates a great victory’ The Citizen 24 November 1955, p. 1. 110. ‘Law ends a row in utopia’ cutting from unidentified newspaper, D5847/1 Gloucestershire Record Office. 111. ‘Yes, this is paradise, say share-all colonists’, cutting from unidentified newspaper, D5847/1 Gloucestershire Record Office. 112. ‘Yes, this is paradise, say share-all colonists’, cutting from unidentified newspaper, D5847/1 Gloucestershire Record Office. 113. Higgins: History of the Brotherhood Church, pp. 56 – 7. 114. Higgins: History of the Brotherhood Church, p. 66. 115. Higgins: History of the Brotherhood Church, p. 67 – 8. 116. Peace Pledge Union Film Van: 21 years 1961– 82 (Stapleton: Brotherhood Church, 1982), p. 2. 117. www.thebrotherhoodchurch.org/pulpit.htm. 118. Conversation with Bracken Gibson, 7 October 2012. 119. thebrotherhoodchurch.org/believe.htm. 120. Conversation with Bracken Gibson, 7 October 2012. 121. Arthur Fifield to Vladimir Chertkov, 10 October 1933, RGALI f. 552, op. 2, ed. khr. 967. 122. Jans: Tolstoj in Nederland, p. 110. 123. Arnold Eiloart, ‘Time to act’ The Open Road 7:4 (July 1906), p. 229. 124. G. D. Lawrie to Aylmer Maude, 13 October 1913, and Maude to Lawrie, 15 October 1913; MS1380/1182– 1183, Brotherton Library, Leeds.

NOTES TO PAGES 228 –233

287

125. Maude: Leo Tolstoy, p. 199. 126. P. Kropotkin to Aylmer Maude, 18 November 1910, MS1380/1183, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 127. Alexander Sirnis to Florence Holah, 24 May 1916, MS1381/1360, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 128. Percy Redfern: Journey to Understanding (London: Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1946), p. 99.

Conclusion 1. Ivan Maisky, ‘Introduction’ in Tolstoy’s War and Peace: Introduction to the Series of Broadcasts (London: The British Broadcasting Corporation, n.d. [1943]). 2. Jane Addams, ‘A book that changed my life’ The Christian Century 13 October 1927, pp. 1196– 8, p. 1196. 3. Isabella Fyvie Mayo, ‘Constitutional government versus autocracy’ The Crank 3:5 (May 1905), pp. 139– 49. 4. Arthur Voysey, ‘Rapid conversion’ The Open Road (May 1909), pp. 238–40. 5. Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You and Peace Essays Tolstoy Centenary Edition 20 (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), pp. 299– 303. 6. Charles Daniel to Isabella Fyvie Mayo, 1911, cited in Imogen Gassert, ‘Charles Daniel: Maverick pacifist publisher in the First World War’ Publishing History 48 (2000), p. 9. 7. Aylmer Maude to William Dean Howells, 21 May 1899, bMS Am 1784 (639), Houghton Library, Harvard. 8. Ernest Crosby to Tolstoy, 28 May 1899, GMT, TS211/27. 9. ‘Man and the animals’ The New Order (March 1899), p. 43. 10. Ben Reitman to Bolton Hall, 21 May 1910, Bolton Hall papers, New York Public Library.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archival Collections Gosudarstvennyi muzei L. N. Tolstogo, Moscow. Letters to Tolstoy from Herbert Archer, Louis Bahler, Ernest Crosby, Morrison Davidson, George Gibson, John Kenworthy, Felix Ortt, Percy Redfern, Jeno¨ Henrik Schmitt, Albert Skarvan, Arthur St John and Johannes van der Veer. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI), Moscow. Vladimir Chertkov papers, f. 552. Internationaal instituut voor sociale geschiedenis (IISG), Amsterdam. Archives of the Charles William Daniel Company. Archive of Jacob van Rees. Michigan State University Library. MS 218 Ernest Howard Crosby Papers. Yale University Library. MS1752 Ralph Albertson papers. Butler Library, Columbia University, New York. Ms Coll\Tolstoy: correspondence between Aylmer Maude and Tolstoy. Tamiment Library, City University, New York. TAM 008 George Herron papers. TAM 420 William Morris papers.

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Houghton Library, Harvard University. BMS Am 1784n(113) William Dean Howells papers. Massachusetts Historical Society. Lend a Hand Society Records (Edward Everett Hale). New York Public Library. Bolton Hall papers. Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. MS1380 Aylmer Maude papers. MS1381 Tuckton House papers. Leaflets and pamphlets by Tom Ferris (1900– 31), compiled and edited by A. G. Higgins. Bodleian Library, Oxford. MSS Cadoux: papers of Cecil John Cadoux. Manchester Archives and Local Studies. GB127.MS f 091.5 Re1 Percy Redfern collection. Gloucestershire Archives. D5574 Nellie Shaw of Whiteway Colony, Miserden. D5847 Alan Maxfield of Whiteway Colony. Nottingham University Special Collections. MS 486 Harold Bing papers. British Library. Add. MS M6294 J. C. Kenworthy papers.

Newspapers and Periodicals The Arena Brotherhood The Candlestick The Crank The Croydon Brotherhood Intelligence Focus Istinnaya Svoboda The Midland Herald The New Age The New Order Ohne Staat The Open Road Seed Time

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The Social Gospel Svobodnoe Slovo The Tolstoyan Vrede The Whim

Books and Articles Abbot, Leonard D., Ernest Howard Crosby: A Valuation and a Tribute (Westwood, Mass.: The Ariel Press, 1907). Addams, Jane, Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: Macmillan, 1912). Addams, Jane, ‘A book that changed my life’ The Christian Century 13 October 1927, pp. 1196– 8. Albertson, Ralph, ‘The Christian Commonwealth in Georgia’, Georgia Historical Quarterly 29:3 (September, 1945), pp. 125– 42. Albertson, Ralph, A Survey of Mutualistic Communities in America (New York: AMS Press, 1973). Alston, Charlotte, Russia’s Greatest Enemy? Harold Williams and the Russian Revolutions (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007). Armytage, W. H. G., ‘J. C. Kenworthy and the Tolstoyan communities in England’, in Gareth W. Jones, Tolstoi and Britain, pp. 135– 51. Arnold, Matthew, ‘Count Leo Tolstoi’, The Fortnightly Review (December 1887), pp. 783– 99. Bank, Jan and van Buuren, Maarten, Dutch Culture in a European Perspective 3 1900: The Age of Bourgeois Culture (Assen and Basingstoke: Royal van Goricum and Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Barrow, Logie, ‘Socialism in eternity: The ideology of Plebian spiritualists 1883– 1913’ History Workshop Journal 9:1 (1980), pp. 37 – 69. Bartlett, Rosamund, Tolstoy: A Russian Life (London: Profile, 2010). Bellamy, Edward, Looking Backward 2000– 1887 (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1894). Berlin, Isaiah, The Hegdehog and the Fox (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953). Bevir, Mark, ‘The labour church movement 1891– 1902’ Journal of British Studies 38:2 (1999), pp. 217– 45. Bhana, Surendra, ‘The Tolstoy Farm: Gandhi’s experiment in “Co-operative Commonwealth”’ South African Historical Journal 7 (1975), pp. 88 –100. Biriukov, A. M., ‘P. I. Biriukov – pervyi biograf L.N. Tolstogo’ Voprosy Istorii 2004:2, pp. 137–42. Biriukov, Pavel, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi: Biografiia (Moscow: Tip. torgovago doma A.P. Pechkovskii, 1906– 1908). Biriukov, Pavel, The Life of Tolstoy (London: Cassell, 1911). Biriukov, Pavel, The New Russia (London: Independent Labour Party, n.d. [1919]). Boersen, Maria W. J. L., De Kolonie van de Internationale Broederschap te Blaricum (Blaricum: Historische Kring Blaricum, 1987). Bourgeois, Louis C., ‘The Tolstoy Colony, a Chilean utopian-artistic experiment’ Hispania (1963), pp. 514– 18. Boutchik, Vladimir, La Litte´rature russe en France (Paris: Honore´ Champion, n.d. [1947]).

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Bozoki, Andra´s, and Su¨ko¨sd, Miklo´s, Anarchism in Hungary: Theory, History, Legacies (Boulder: Social Science Monographs, 2006). Brauer, Jerald C., ‘Conversion: From puritanism to revivalism’ The Journal of Religion 58:3 (July 1978), pp. 227– 43. Breyfogle, Nicholas, Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia’s Empire in the South Caucasus (New York: Cornell University Press, 2005). Brock, Peter, ‘Tolstoyism and the Hungarian peasant’ Slavonic and East European Review 58:3 (July 1980), pp. 345– 69. Brock, Peter, Pacifism in Europe to 1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 449. Brock, Peter, Freedom from War: Non-Sectarian Pacifism 1814– 1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991). Brock, Peter, ‘Tolstoy and the Sˇkarvan case’ Tolstoy Studies Journal 13 (2001), pp. 1– 7. Brock, Peter, Life in an Austro-Hungarian Military Prison: The Slovak Tolstoyan Albert Sˇkarvan’s Story (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2002). Brock, Peter, ‘“A light shining in darkness”: Tolstoi and the imprisonment of conscientious objectors in Imperial Russia’ Slavonic and East European Review 81:4 (2003), pp. 683– 97. Brock, Peter, Against the Draft: Essays on Conscientious Objection from the Radical Reformation to the Second World War (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2006). Brock, Peter, and Keep, John (eds), Life in a Penal Battalion of the Imperial Russian Army: The Tolstoyan N.K. Izumchenko’s Story (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2001). Bruce Wallace, John, Towards Fraternal Organisation: An Explanation of the Brotherhood Trust (London: Brotherhood Trust, n.d. [1894]). Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, A Socialist Utopia in the New South: The Ruskin Colonies in Tennessee and Georgia, 1894– 1901 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996). Budd, Louis, ‘William Dean Howells’ debt to Tolstoy’ American Slavic and East European Review 9:4 (December 1950), pp. 292– 301. Burke, David, The Spy Who Came in From the Co-op: Melita Norwood and the Ending of Cold War Espionage (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008). Caedel, Martin, Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations 1854– 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Camfield, Graham, ‘From Tolstoyan to terrorist: The revolutionary career of D. A. Khilkov 1900 –1905’ Revolutionary Russia 12:1 (1999), pp. 1 – 43. Carpenter, Edward, Towards Democracy (Manchester: John Heywood, 1885). Carpenter, Edward, Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1891). Chaucer, Daniel [Ford Madox Ford], The Simple Life Limited (London: John Lane, 1911). Chertkov, Vladimir, Christian Martyrdom in Russia (London: Brotherhood Publishing Company, 1897). Chertkov, Vladimir, ‘The present peace demonstrations’ The Fortnightly Review (April 1899), pp. 593– 603. Chertkov Vladimir, Pokhishchenie dietei Khilkovykh (Christchurch: Izdanie Svobodnago Slovo, 1901).

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Chertkov, Vladimir, Stranitsa iz vospominanii: dezhurstvo v voennykh gospitalakh (St Petersburg: M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1909). Chertkov, Vladimir, Save Russia (London: C. W. Daniel, 1920). Chertkova, A., ‘Otchet knigoizdatel’stva “svobodnago slova”’ (Christchurch: A. Tchertkoff, 1902). Chmel, Rudolf (ed.), Zˇivot je za´pas: vnu´torna´ biografia Alberta Sˇkarvana (Martin: Osveta, 1977). Chmel, Rudolf (ed.), Za´pisky vojenske´ho leka´ra (Bratislava: Tatran, 1991). Christian, R. F., Tolstoy: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). Christian, R. F., ‘The road to Yasnaya Polyana: Some pilgrims from Britain and their reminiscences’ Slavonic and East European Review 66:4 (October 1988), pp. 526– 52. Christian, R. F., ‘Tolstoy and the first step’ Scottish Slavonic Review 20 (1993), pp. 7–16. Christian, R. F. (ed.), Tolstoy’s Diaries (London: Flamingo, 1994). Cohen, Adir, ‘The educational philosophy of Tolstoy’ Oxford Review of Education 7:3 (1981), pp. 241– 51. Conn, Walter, ‘Adult conversions’ Pastoral Psychology 34:4 (1986), pp. 225–36. Conybeare, Frederick C., Russian Dissenters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1921). Cooper, Sandi, Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Cortright, David, Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Coudenys, Wim, ‘Translation and the international dissemination of the novels of Tolstoy’, unpublished paper. Crosby, Ernest Howard, Trinity Church Tenements: The Cause of their Condition and their Cure (New York: Stirling Publishing Company, 1895). Crosby, Ernest Howard, ‘The plea of labour from the standpoint of a Russian peasant’ The Arena 17:86 (January 1897), pp. 312– 32. Crosby, Ernest Howard, ‘The religion of the spirit’ The Arena 20:106 (September 1898), pp. 511– 25. Crosby, Ernest Howard, The Absurdities of Militarism (Boston, Mass.: American Peace Society, 1901). Crosby, Ernest Howard, ‘The wealth of St Francis: A study in transcendental economics’ The Craftsman (October 1902). Crosby, Ernest Howard, Captain Jinks: Hero (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1902). Crosby, Ernest Howard, ‘Count Tolstoy and his philosophy of life’, in The Liberal Club, Buffalo, Addresses delivered before the club during the three seasons 1900– 1903 (Buffalo: Hausauer, Son and Jones, 1904), pp. 17 – 58. Crosby, Ernest Howard, Broad-cast (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Co., 1905). Crosby, Ernest Howard and Reclus, E´lise´e, The Meat Fetish: Two Essays on Vegetarianism (London: A. C. Fifield, 1905), pp. 9 –13. Crosby, Ernest, Plain Talk in Psalm and Parable (London: Francis Riddell Henderson, 1901). Crosby, Howard, ‘The dangerous classes’ The North American Review 136 (April 1883), pp. 345– 52.

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Fogarty, Robert S., All Things New: American Communes and Utopian Movements 1860– 1914 (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2003). Foster, D. B., Socialism and the Christ. My Two Great Discoveries in a Long and Painful Search for the Truth (Leeds: D. B. Foster, 1921). Frederick, Peter J., ‘A life of principle: Ernest Howard Crosby and the frustrations of the intellectual as reformer’, New York History 54:4 (1973), pp. 397– 423. Frederick, Peter J., Knights of the Golden Rule: The Intellectual as Christian Social Reformer in the 1890s (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976). Friedland, Louis S. (ed.), Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and other Literary Topics by Anton Chekhov (London: Bles, 1924). Galagan, Galina, ‘Tolstoy’s confession: The conception of a worldview’ Tolstoy Studies Journal 15 (2003), pp. 19 – 24. Gandhi, Mohandas, An Autobiography or the Story of My Experiment with Truth (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1940). Gassert, Imogen, ‘Charles Daniel: Maverick pacifist publisher in the First World War’ Publishing History 48 (2000), pp. 5 –40. George, Henry, Progress and Poverty (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tru¨bner & Co., Ltd., 1890). Gibson, George Howard, ‘Why commonwealth failed’ The Commons (January 1901), pp. 5 – 6. Gifford, Henry, Tolstoy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Goldenveizer, A. B., Talks with Tolstoi (London: The Hogarth Press, 1923). Gomide, Bruno, ‘A type of Isaiah: The reception of Tolstoy in Fin-de-Sie`cle Brazil’ Tolstoy Studies Journal 19 (2997), pp. 87 – 91. Goring, Jeremy, The Centenary of a ‘Crank’ Publisher. Charles William Daniel 1871– 1955 (Ashingdon: C. W. Daniel, 1971). Goulding, Chris, The Story of the People’s (Newcastle upon Tyne: Newcastle upon Tyne City Libraries and Arts, 1991). Gregory, James, Victorians and Vegetarians: The Vegetarian Movement in Nineteenth Century Britain (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007). Green, Martin, Mountain of Truth: The Counterculture Begins – Ascona 1900– 1920 (Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England, 1986). Greenwood, E. B., Tolstoy: The Comprehensive Vision (London: J. M. Dent, 1975). Gribble, Francis, ‘Tolstoy and the Tolstoyans’ The Fortnightly Review (September 1908), pp. 383– 93. Gross Cooke, Delmar, William Dean Howells: A Critical Study (London: Stanley Paul, n.d.). Gusev, N. N., and Muratov, M. V. (eds), Sorok let sluzheniia liudiam: sbornik statei posviashchennykh obshchestvenno-literaturnoi i knigo-izdatel’skoe deiatel’nosti I. I. Gorbunov-Posadova (Moscow: Kooperativnoe izdatel’stvo, 1925). Gustafson, Richard F., Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). Hale, Edward, The Life and Letters of Edward Everett Hale 2 vols (Boston: Little, Brown, 1917). Hall, Bolton, Life and Love and Peace (New York, 1909). Hall, Bolton, What Tolstoy Taught (London: Chatto and Windus, 1913). Hammer, William, ‘The German Tolstoy translations’ Germanic Review (January 1937), pp. 49 – 61.

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INDEX

Abrikosov, Dmitri, 109 Abrikosov, Khrisanf, 109, (260) n.122 Addams, Jane, 48, 59, 122, 127, 161, 214 Albertson, Ralph, 10, 98, 122– 4, 125, 127, 141, 150, 183, 190, 200, 219, 220, 224 Ames, Ernest, 94, 147, 183, 184, 193, 194, 199, 224 Ames, Jennie, 199, 224 anarchism, anarchist movement, 71, 97, 99, 162– 5, 233 Anna Karenina, 11, 51 – 3, 55 anti-vivisection, 99, 101, 174, 177, 178 Arbeiders’ Weekblad, 101 Archer, Herbert, 132, 147 Arnold, Matthew, 51, 52, 54 Baha’i faith, 25 Bahler, Louis, 98 – 101, 142 Baker, Arthur, 13, 80, 142, 148, 151 Ballou, Adin, 24, 25, 157, 169 Bellamy, Edward, 58, 83, 120, 188 Bing, Fred, 94, 212 Bing, Harold, 10, 212 Biriukov, Pavel, 26 – 9, 31, 39, 54, 109, 110, 114, 143, 145, 148, 178, 210, (242) n.62, (260) n.12

Blokh, Ivan, 23 Boer war, 153, 170, 171 Bolshevik party, 38, 39 Bonch-Bruevich, Vladimir, 23, 39, 147 Bondarev, Timofei, 23, 24, 106, 188 Boole, Mary Everest, 205 Boulanger, Pavel, 109 Bracher, Samuel, 93, 131, 132, 200 Brahmanism, 25 bread-labour, 24, 106, 120, 128, 188, 202, 207 Britain, Tolstoyans in, 2, 3, 7 –9, 13, 80, 85, 88 – 95, 107– 13, 120, 128–33, 136 –40 translation and reception of Tolstoy in, 51 –3 Brotherhood Church (Croydon), 86, 88– 93, 107, 109, 117, 128, 132, 142, 155, 167, 185 Brotherhood Church (Leeds), 93, 133, 166, 191– 3, 199, 209, 211, 224, (281) n.2 Brotherhood Church (Southgate Rd), 89, 92, 107, 134 Brotherhood Church (Stapleton), 223–8 Brotherhood Dressmakers, 132, 189

304

TOLSTOY AND HIS DISCIPLES

Brotherhood Publishing Company, 54, 114, 142– 4, 152 Brotherhood Store (Croydon), 90, 91, 128, 130, 174, 181 Bruce Wallace, John, 89, 92, 122, 134, 150, 160, 164, 166, 175, 227 Bryan, William Jennings, 106 Buddhism, 25 Bulgakov, Valentin, 36, 37, 40, 212 Bulgaria, Tolstoyans in, 6, 8, 45, 175 Cadoux, Cecil John, 77 – 8, 80, 81 Candlestick, The, 10, 94, 106, 138, 148, 149, 196 Carlyle, Thomas, 5, 135 Carpenter, Edward, 5, 83, 104, 220, 222 Chekhov, Anton, 82 Chertkov, Vladimir G., 2, 4, 7 – 9, 23, 26 – 32, 35 – 40, 43, 44, 55, 85, 92, 94, 105, 107, 109–12, 114, 134, 137, 143– 7, 150, 160– 1, 165, 170– 3, 175, 179, 203, 204, 212– 4, 217– 8, 232, (241) n.56, (261) n.134 Chertkov, Vladimir V., 212 Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, 53, 54 China, translation and reception of Tolstoy in, 54 Chipman, John, 122, 125, 201 Christian Commonwealth colony, 101– 2, 106, 113– 4, 120, 121–8, 134, 141, 150, 151, 175, 189– 90, 199– 202, 219– 20, 222– 4 Christian Teaching, The, 70, 71, 152 Christianity and Patriotism, 18 Circle of Reading, 25, 36, 43 Clousden Hill colony, 120, 128, 163 Congregationalists, 80, 89 Conscientious objection, refusal of military service, 32 – 3, 38 – 9, 73 – 6, 100, 168– 70, 195, 210– 11, (274) n.67 Cooperative movement, 152, 155, 162, 196

Cossacks, The, 11, 54 Crank, The, 94, 106, 141, 149, 157, 204, 219, (267) n.92 Crosby, Ernest Howard, 3, 10, 55 –6, 60– 3, 64, 66, 72, 80 – 2, 99, 102–7, 108, 114–6, 124, 127, 141, 144, 147, 157, 158, 161, 163, 168, 170, 173, 175– 9, 185, 187–9, 210, 214, 232 Daniel, Charles, 4, 54, 94, 108, 136, 137, 139– 42, 147, 149, 157, 167, 175, 199, 204– 5, 219, 232 Darrow, Clarence, 106, 210 Dole, Nathan, 55 Doukhobors, 20 – 3, 28, 31, 32, 35, 39, 45, 102, 109, 110, 113– 7, 133, 134, 137, 142, 170, 172, 173, 178–80, 194, 215, 232 Dragunovsky, Yakov, 38 – 40, 45, 46 Drozhzhin, Evdokim, 33, 112 Du Bois, W. E. B., 209 education, Tolstoyan attitudes to, 12, 108, 196, 205, 208 Eiloart, Arnold, 69, 80, 99, 131, 132, 185, 196, 205, 218, 223, 228, (258) n.85 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 119, 141, 204 Family Happiness, 53 Faye, Sue, 122, 126 Fellowship of Reconciliation, 78, 209 Ferdinands, George, 203, 210 Ferris, Lilian, 166, 184, 199, 210, 211, 224 Ferris, Tom, 93, 94, 184, 192, 193, 195, 199, 203– 4, 209– 10, 211, 224, 225 Fifield, Arthur, 85, 107, 108, 110, 111, 145– 8, 172, 175, 217, 218, 228 Finland, Tolstoyans in, 6, 9, 120 First Step, The, 18, 19, 174

INDEX First World War, 37, 38, 209– 12, 224, 234 Flu¨rscheim, Michael, 188 For Every Day, 25, 43 Foster, D. B., 93, 165 Four Gospels Harmonised, The, 13 France, Tolstoyans in, 7 translation and reception of Tolstoy in, 50 – 2 Free Age Press, 8, 9, 23, 28, 54, 55, 94, 105, 109, 111– 2, 138, 144– 7, 217 Free Word Press (Izdatel’stvo Svobodnago Slova), 28, 31, 144 Frey, William, 23 Fruits of Enlightenment, The, 20, 215 Gandhi, Mohandas, 54, 58 – 9, 108, 120, 207– 9, (283) n.37 Garnett, Constance, 52, 53, 220 Garnett, Edward, 220 Garrison, Francis and Wendell, 24 Garrison, William Lloyd, 24, 63, 104, 169 Ge, Nikolai, 26, 32 George, Henry, 25, 56, 63, 72, 83, 89, 120, 149, 188 Germany, translation and reception of T in, 51 – 4, 120 Gibson, George (Georgia, USA), 98, 106, 113– 4, 121– 3, 127, 134, 141, 183, 188, 201, 202 Gibson, George (Leeds), 93 Gibson, Len, 225, 226 God Sees the Truth But Waits, 29 Goldenveizer, Aleksandr, 121 Gorbunov-Posadov, Ivan, 31, 32, 40, 109 Goring, Jack, 94, 181 Gospel in Brief, The, 13, 58, 137 Gronlund, Laurence, 58 Hale, Edward Everett, 106, 135, 150 Hall, Bolton, 56, 57, 106, 170, 210, 233

305

Hammond, Hubert, 60, 68, 69, 82, 128 hand-farming, 34, 45 Hapgood, Isabel, 52 Hare, William, 94, 137, 148, 171 Hemmingway, Ernest, 57 Henderson, Frank, 90, 109, 111, 137, 143–4, 152, 185, 187, (268) n.102 Herron, George, 114, 120, 123, 124, 127, 149, 182 Higgins, Alfred, 224– 6 Hobhouse, Stephen, 78 –80, 85, 144, 206, 207, 209, 211, 212 Hocking, Salome (Fifield), 108, 148, 217, 218 Holah, Florence, 94, 110, 111, 145, 147, 171, 176, 186, 190, 194, 195, 204, 229 Holah, Jane, 52, 137, 145, 157, 161, 162, 170, 186, 187 Hone, William, 131 How Much Land Does a Man Need, 19 Howells, William Dean, 51, 52, 58, 106, 170 Hull House, Chicago, 48, 59, 124, 217 Humanitarian League, 155, 157, 174, 179, 205 Hungary, Tolstoyans in, 96 – 9, 164 If you neglect the fire, you don’t put it out, 53 Independent Labour Party (Britain), 70 Independent Labour Party (Hungary), 98 India, translation and reception of Tolstoy in, 54 – 5 Internationale Broederschap (the Hague and Blaricum), 101, 120, 133, 134, 182, 183, 199, 200, 202, 205, 223 Isohiisi, Akseli and Eelo, 6, 76 Israel, influence of Tolstoy in, 120 Istinnaya Svoboda, 40 Italy, Tolstoyans in, 9 Translation and reception of Tolstoy in, 51, 53

306

TOLSTOY AND HIS DISCIPLES

Ivakin, Ivan, 13 Ivan the Fool, 19, 129 Japan, Tolstoyans in, 6, 166 Reception and translation of Tolstoy in, 54 Ja¨rnefelt, Elisabeth, 6, 63 Ja¨rnefelt, Arvid, 6, 54, 60, 63 – 6, 81, 82, 87, 98 Jones, Samuel, 150 Kacarov, Dimitaˆr, 6, 76 Kallenbach, Hermann, 94, 108, 120 Kenworthy, John Coleman, 7, 55, 60, 63, 71, 72, 81, 82, 87 – 93, 95, 98, 104, 106, 107, 109, 111, 114, 115, 117, 122, 128, 137, 142– 4, 150, 152, 153, 157, 158, 161, 162, 164, 165, 167, 171, 174, 177, 179– 82, 185, 188, 202, 204, 227, 233, (270, 271) n.151 Khilkov, Dmitri, 22, 23, 26, 28, 33, 34, 87, 109, 110, 134, (260) n.122 King, Martin Luther, 208, 209, (283) n.45 Kingdom of God is Within You, The, 17, 33, 48, 53, 58, 67, 68, 73, 74, 76, 77, 81, 96, 142, 169, 207, 208 Koe, Anne de, 99, 100, 203 Kreutzer Sonata, The, 19, 72, 82, 180 Kropotkin, Petr, 83, 163, 164, 229 Kylstra, S. C., 99, 133, 134 Labour Church, 70, 165 Lao-Tzu, 25, 63 Lawrie, G. D., 94, 228 Lawrie, Thomas, 147 Law of Love and the Law of Violence, The, 36 League for Total Abstention (Netherlands), 156, 174 Life and Labour commune (Novokuznetsk), 45– 7

Life and Labour commune (Shestakovka), 41, 43 – 4 Ligt, Bart de, 208 Ligthart, Jan, 205 London Tolstoyan Society, 94, 136– 40, 204, 219 MacDonald, Alexander, 95, 117 MacDonald, May (Pinnell), 184, 218 MacDonald, William, 91, 184, 218 Madox Ford, Ford, 220– 1 Maisky, Ivan, 229 Malikov, Aleksandr, 20, 23, 27 Makovicky´, Dusˇan, 36, 37, 73, 98 Manchester Tolstoy Society, 71, 94, 132–40, 156, 165 Marin, Eugene Gaspard, 134, 223, 224 marriage, 18, 180– 7 Maude, Aylmer, 4, 10, 15, 55, 56, 57, 69– 71, 80, 111, 120– 1, 137, 146, 147, 153, 157, 158, 167, 171, 202, 213– 8, 224, 232, (250) n.75 Maude, Louise, 194– 5 Mavor, James, 115 Mayo, Isabella Fyvie, 4, 81, 94, 108, 112, 145, 152, 160, 186, 210, 231, 232 Mazurin, Boris, 40, 43, 44, 46, 47 Mennonites, 20, 23, 116 Molokans, 20, 21, 23 money, attitudes to, 190– 5, (280) n.182 Monte Verita colony, 103 Morgachev, Dmitri, 38, 45, 46 Morris, William, 5, 58, 72, 204, 220 Morrison Davidson, John, 81, 85, 87, 98, 149 Moscow Vegetarian Society, 31, 40, 42, 175–6 Muggeridge, Fred, 90 Murray, William, 93, 193 My Confession, 13 – 5, 51, 53, 55, 58, 60, 78– 80, 82, 144, 233

INDEX Nazarenes, 172 Netherlands, Tolstoyans in, 9, 74, 98, 99 – 102, 120, 133, 134, 171 New Jerusalem commune, 41, 42 –4 New Order, The (Croydon Brotherhood Intelligence), 10, 89, 94, 98, 101, 102, 106, 109, 110, 112, 115, 128, 133, 143, 148– 52, 157, 162, 185, 187, 190, 193, 194 Nobel peace prize, 66, 169– 70 non-resistance to evil by violence, 3, 4, 16 – 8, 20, 22, 24, 59, 64, 73, 89, 94, 108, 124, 137, 156– 62, 171, 196, 197, 200– 2, 207– 9, 224, 230, 233 Ohne Staat (A´llam Ne´lku¨l), 10, 96 – 9, 112, 115, 149, 150, 164 Olkhovik, Petr, 33, 112 On Life, 16, 17, 48, 53, 56 – 7, 60 – 2, 71, 82 Open Road, The, 94, 108, 112, 141, 158, 204, 220, 221 Orthodox Church, 12, 14, 23, 24, 34 – 6 Ortt, Felix, 60, 101, 133, 142, 171, 174, 224 Overbury, Sidney, 209, 224, 225 passive resistance (non-violent resistance), 58, 59, 207– 9 patriotism, 18, 19 Patriotism and Government, 144 Pavlovka community, 28, 34 peace movement, 23, 168– 73, 197 Peace Pledge Union, 225, 226 Penal Reform League, 206 penal reform, punishment, 12, 103, 108, 159, 160, 196, 205– 7 Penstone, James, 130, 175 People’s Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne, 215– 6 Perno, Ludvig, 81, 112, 147, 211– 3, 229 Perris, G. H., 217, (274) n.67

307

philanthropy, charity, 16, 24 Philippine war, 170 Phoenix settlement, 207 Pickard, Eliza, 92, 93, 164, 165, 170 Pobedonostsev, Konstantin, 35 Popov, Evgenii, 34, 43, 109 Popov, Sergei, 37 Popovskii, Mark, 8, 35, 40 Posrednik, 24, 27, 29 – 31, 36, 40 Power of Darkness, The, 20, 215 Prisoner in the Caucasus, A, 29 property, attitudes to, 187– 95 Protheroe, Sudbury, 66 – 8, 82, 132 Purleigh colony, Essex, 5, 8, 68, 71, 85, 88, 93, 102, 107, 109, 110, 115, 128– 32, 134, 139, 151, 163, 171, 175, 179, 180, 192, 193, 199, 202, 204, 218, 224, (281) n.2 Pyrikov, Ivan, Nikolai and Yelizar, 38 Rapoport, Sid, 55, 72 realism, 50, 51 Redfern, Percy, 10, 60, 70, 71, 82, 85, 108, 130, 137– 9, 144, 152, 153, 156, 196, 229 Reitman, Ben, 233 Religion des Geistes (newspaper and group), 87, 96 – 9, 101, 106, 148 Resurrection, 22, 54, 55, 77, 116, 134, 215, 232 Resurrection Fund, 215– 7 Richardson, Dorothy, 136, 218, 219 Right Relationship League, 201 Rolland, Romain, 57, 58 Roosevelt, Theodore, 104 Rowe, Bertie, 199, 203 Ruskin, John, 5, 25, 72, 89, 135, 136, 137, 204 Ruskin colony, Tennessee, 119, 149 Ruskin societies, 72, 136, 155 Russia, Tolstoyans in, 8, 26 – 35, 37– 47, 109– 2, 200, 229, 230 Russian Civil War, 28, 29

308

TOLSTOY AND HIS DISCIPLES

Sadler, T. G., 151, 189 Salt, Henry, 29, 147 Santivan, Fernando, 120 Satyagraha, 108 Schmidt, Maria, 26, 34 Schmitt, Jeno¨ Henrik, 60, 71, 87, 95 – 9, 103, 106, 107, 112, 115, 117, 142, 164, 210, (257) n.70 Sedla´k, Frantisˇek, 73 – 5, 112, 134, 211 Seventh-Day Adventists, 23 sex question, 19, 87, 137, 180– 7 Shaw, George Bernard, 157, 160 Shaw, Nellie, 70, 86, 91, 132, 133, 142, 155, 166, 167, 193, 194, 211, 223, 224 Shershenyov, Vasily, 44 Shershenyova, Yelena, 42 Simpson, W., 137, 140 Sinclair, William, 132 Sinet, Edouard, 73, (251) n.89 single tax on land, 25, 56, 63, 124, 188 Sirnis, Alexander, 112, 147, 203 Sirola, Yrjo¨, 66 Sˇkarvan, Albert, 54, 73, 74, 81, 98, 100– 3, 110, 112, 134, 147, 170, 173, (258) n.86, (260) n.122 Slavery of Our Times, The, 55, 144 Snowden, Ethel, 39 Social Gospel, The, 98, 106, 114, 115, 123, 128, 149–51, 188, 190 Socialism, socialist movement, 70, 162– 8, 199, 203, 219, 233, 234 Society of Friends (Quakers), 58, 80, 93, 116– 7, 166, 209– 11, 227, (273) n.52 Society of True Freedom in the Name of Leo Tolstoy, 40 Sopov, Georgi, 6, 76 South Africa, Tolstoyans in, 108, 120 Spanish-American war, 170 Spargo, John, 167, 168 Spirit of Christ’s Teaching, The, 48, 65, 82 Spiritualism, 196, 203– 5

St John, Arthur, 4, 76, 83, 84, 91, 92, 94, 98, 107, 122, 137, 153, 157– 60, 175, 176, 179, 187, 193, 205, (252) n.100, (259) n.111, (263) n.3 Starnthwaite colony, Cumbria, 120, 149 Stead, W. T., 3, 171, 172 Stepniak, Sergei, 220 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 58 Stockham, Alice, 25 Stundists, 35 Sutayev, Vasily, 23 – 4, 27 Suttner, Bertha von, 169 Svobodnayamysl’, 28, 148 Svobodnoe Slovo, 144 Sytin, Ivan, 30, 31, 36 Sytin, Sergei, 34 Tennyson, Alfred, 58 Theosophy, theosophists, 58, 149, 156, 157, 196 Thompson, Frank, 147 Thou Shalt Not Kill, 18 Tolstoi club, Boston, 135 Tolstoy, Lev attitude to Tolstoyism, 2, 120, 121, 134, 136, 138 centenary of birth of, 175, 214 early life, 11 death, 1, 36, 37 philosophy of life, 1, 13 – 20, 33, 96, 169, 180, 181, 207, 208, 231 spiritual crisis, 11 – 5 Tolstoy colony, Chile, 120, 200, (263) n.5 Tolstoy society, Britain, 1920s, 214–6 Tolstoy, Sofia, 3, 60 Tolstoy Farm, South Africa, 29, 94, 108, 120, 207 Tolstoyans, Tolstoyism communities, 33, 34, 41–7, 119–34, 153 conversion experiences, 3, 14, 48, 49, 59 – 85, 112 definitions of, 2 – 4

INDEX Tolstoyan, The, 3, 94, 141, 151 Topolobampo colony, 149 Tregubov, Ivan, 26, 114 Trevor, John, 165 Tuckton House, 9, 56, 111, 112, 144, 147, 203, 212– 4, 217, 229 Turgenev, Ivan, 50, 52, 135 Two Pilgrims, The, 53 United Council of Religious Communities and Groups (UCRCG), 39 United States of America Tolstoy in, 51, 53 translation and reception of Tolstoyans in, 103– 7, 122– 8 van der Veer, Johannes, 73, 74, 81, 100– 2, 110– 2, 115, 134, 142, 145, 147, 151, 162, 170, 171, 198, 199, 203, (258) n.85 van Eeden, Frederik, 83, 120, 133, 175 van Gogh, Vincent, 58 van Mierop, Lodewijk, 3, 101,134, 202 van Rees, Jacob, 99, 133, 182, 205, 223 veganism, 23, 42, (242) n.62 vegetarianism, and food reform, 18 – 9, 25, 26, 28, 29, 31, 32, 42, 101, 174– 80, 196, 204, 205, (276) n.93, n.106 Verigin, Petr, 22 Vogu¨e´, Eugene Melchoir de, 50 – 2 Voysey, Arthur, 80, 94, 178, 231 Vrede (group and publishing house), 54, 99 – 102, 112, 120, 133, 142, 223 Vrede (newspaper), 10, 100, 101, 112, 115, 134, 149– 51, 174 Walden colony, Bussum, 120, 133 Walk in the Light While There is Light, 19, 20 Wallace, Alfred Russell, 83 Walter Scott (publishers), 53, 141, 142

309

War and Peace, 11, 50, 51, 53 – 5, 57, 230 War Resisters International, 45, 212, 226 Washington, Booker T, 208 Wayland, Julius Augustus, 119 Wells, H. G., 220, 222 Wesleyans, 71, 80, 156 What I Believe (My Religion), 15 – 7, 25, 26, 51, 53, 58, 59, 72, 79, 82, 137 What is Art?, 19, 48, 70, 82, 196 What Men Live By, 19, 29, 53 What Then Must We Do?, 16, 24, 48, 51, 53, 58, 59, 72, 76, 82, 136, 178, 212 Whiteway colony, Stroud, 10, 76, 93, 108, 128, 131– 3, 137, 139, 167, 185, 189– 94, 200, 211, 218, 223, 224, (281) n.6 Whitman, Walt, 5, 104 White, Jack, 76, 77, 94 Why do Men Stupefy Themselves?, 18 Wickford colony, Essex, 94 Willard cooperative colony, 123 Williams, Harold, 101, 108, 109, 134, 175 Williams, Howard, 25, 174 Work While Ye Have the Light, 67, 68, 120, 121 Worland, Florence, 94, 138– 40, 181, 186, 198, 199, 204, 205, 219, (276) n.106 World Brotherhood community, Stalingrad, 41, 44, 45 Yasnaya Polyana, 11 – 3, 26, 27, 59, 106, 107, 112, 203 Zadruga (publishing house), 40 Zhuk, V. P., 110, 147 Zuyev, Ivan, 42, 44