It is tempting to think that a longer book could be written about the person Reilly was not and the things he did not do, as opposed to who he really was and what he actually did. The following six appendices typically illustrate how such myths have arisen over the last century.
APPENDIX ONE
THE GADFLY
He was not at all angry when she later published a novel, much praised by the critics, which was largely inspired by his early life.
Published in 1897, The Gadfly was a great success in Britain and the United States, where it was actually first published, due to Heinemann’s fear that it might attract adverse public reaction due to the inflammatory emotions they believed it contained. The Daily Graphic reviewer said that ‘One does not often come across a story of as notable power and originality as The Gadfly’, while the Daily Chronicle hailed it as ‘a novel of distinct power and originality’.2 It was in Russia, however, that The Gadfly had its biggest success. Its anti-clerical and revolutionary theme appealed enormously to those who were opposed to the Tsarist regime and who later supported the Bolshevik revolution. It was subsequently translated into thirty languages worldwide. A dramatic version was staged in Moscow for many years from 1920, taking on a Mousetrap-like run. The Russians produced two full-length film versions of the book, the first in 1928 and the second, in colour in 1955, which won an award at the Cannes Film Festival. There have also been at least three operatic versions produced. By the time of Ethel Voynich’s death in 1960, at the age of ninety-six, the book had sold well over 5 million copies in Russia alone and over a million copies in China and Eastern Europe.
The Gadfly is set in Italy in the first half of the nineteenth century and tells the story of Arthur Burton who, unbeknown to himself, is the illegitimate son of Montanelli, an Italian priest, and Gladys Burton, an English woman. It bears a striking resemblance to the ‘Georgi’ story Sidney Reilly told George Hill and others in the 1920s. Before the death of his mother, Arthur like Georgi is under the spiritual care of his real father, who is in charge of a seminary in Pisa. The young man is gentle and devout and even has thoughts of entering the priesthood until he becomes involved in a conspiratorial group called the Young Italy Society, devoted to freeing Italy from Austrian rule. In Reilly’s story, Georgi is at university under the care of Dr Rosenblum, where he, likewise, becomes involved in the ‘League of Enlightenment’, a radical political group.
After Montanelli is elevated to a bishopric, Arthur confesses his association with the Young Italy Society to his father’s successor Father Cardi, who immediately betrays him to the authorities. He is imprisoned, and when released is shattered to learn for the first time that Montanelli is his real father. Reeling from the shock, he fakes suicide by throwing his hat into the water at the docks and stows away on a ship bound for Buenos Aires. Georgi, also reeling from the shock of being revealed as a bastard, fakes his suicide in Odessa Harbour and stows away on a ship bound for South America. Once in South America, Arthur wanders about aimlessly, his heart filled with hatred for everything and everybody. He allows himself to be maimed and mutilated and to suffer all kinds of indignity; stuttering horribly, he ends up as a hunchback in a travelling circus, a pathetic figure of tortured ridicule. He spends thirteen years in South America before returning not just to free Italy, which was his boyhood desire, but to rid her of priests in general whilst undertaking a vendetta against Montanelli in particular. Now involved in violent action he changes his name to Felice Rivarez. He is eventually arrested and finally confronts Montanelli, now a cardinal. Arthur tells Montanelli who he really is and presses him to choose between him and God. Montanelli chooses the latter, as he must, and Arthur is condemned to be shot.3 The whole affair, however, unhinges the cardinal’s mind and while carrying the host in solemn procession, he raises it then smashes it to the ground in a symbolic identification of himself with God the Father, sacrificing his only begotten son for the salvation of mankind.
Since the publication of Lockhart’s Ace of Spies in 1967, other authors and journalists have taken his assertions about The Gadfly as sacrosanct and have repeated them as received fact.4 First off the mark was Tibor Szamuely’s Spectator article,5 which appeared some months after the publication of Ace of Spies. ‘Is it possible to imagine’, asked Szamuely, ‘anything more weird than the fact of Soviet Russia’s most revered literary hero [Arthur Burton] being based upon the real-life character of their greatest enemy?’
Szamuely was not alone in being unable to resist this line in Cold War irony. The BBC World Service dedicated one of its Russian language programmes to The Gadfly.6 Not only did it feature the ‘sensation’ that the prototype of Ethel Voynich’s The Gadfly was none other than the famous spy Sidney Reilly, lynchpin of so many anti-Soviet plots, but went one step further. Reminding listeners that The Gadfly was the inspiration for the deeds of Pavka Korchagin, the hero of Nikolai Ostrovsky’s classic Civil War epic How the Steel Tempered, it took great delight in raising the spectre of the young fighter for the Soviet Republic in reality following the bitter enemy of Soviet power.
Desmond McHale’s 1985 biography of Ethel’s father, George Boole,7 also unquestioningly adopted the Lockhart line, although he did concede that Voynich never admitted any Reilly connection with the book or its central character.8 Tibor Szamuely, however, casts a shadow of doubt on the matter by implying that she had deliberately remained tight lipped on the issue of who Arthur Burton’s prototype was. He relates an episode in 1955 when a delegation of Soviet journalists was in New York for the first time since the onset of the Cold War. One morning a Russian diplomat burst into the hotel room of journalist Boris Polevoi. Almost incoherent with excitement he related that he had, that very morning, seen Ethel Voynich, assumed by the Russians to be long dead. The journalists commandeered a car and raced off to her home at 450 West 24th Street. Arriving unannounced on her doorstep, they proceeded to interview her about The Gadfly and the inspiration for Arthur Burton. Szamuely quotes her response to the Burton question as being, ‘No, I’m afraid I can’t remember… it was all so long ago’.
Szamuely’s source for this answer is unclear, as the quote certainly does not appear in Russian press stories which followed the 1955 publicity. In fact, both Boris Polevoi and Eugenia Taratuta corresponded at length with Ethel after the 1955 meeting in New York. Taratuta’s correspondence and interviews with her were a major contribution to her biography of Ethel Voynich,9 the only one to be published to date. As a result of the 1968 BBC broadcast, both Polevoi and Taratuta published their correspondence with Ethel Voynich in a rebuttal article published in Izvestia on the subject of Arthur Burton and the characters in The Gadfly.10 For example, in a letter to Taratuta, dated 25 April 1956, Voynich elaborates on the conception of the book:
For a long time in my youth I was imagining a man who voluntarily sacrificed himself to something. Partly, this image might have appeared under a strong impact of Mazzini’s11 life and activities. In autumn 1885, for the first time in my life I turned up in Paris and spent a few months there. In the Louvre’s Square Salon I saw a well-known portrait of a young Italian known as A Man in Black, ascribed to Francia, Fracabijo and Rafael. This is how The Gadfly story somehow took shape in me.