In 1896 the colony consisted of just three men, all anxious to chase the utopian dream of living off the plot of land that had been bought by the more affluent members of the Brotherhood Church, but their number had already risen to fifteen by the end of 1897, and there were a further thirty-five or so like-minded people living nearby. The Maudes contributed generously by donating two cows, providing meals and holding concerts at their farmhouse. It was in Essex that Aylmer Maude completed his translation of What is Art?, which was no small feat, as he himself has described in the biography of Tolstoy he started publishing in 1908:
As proof followed proof, each covered with fresh alterations, excisions, and additions, often very illegibly written, it required the closest attention to keep the text correct and to discriminate between changes made voluntarily, and changes made for the Censor which I was to disregard [for the English edition].85
Maude sent Tolstoy twenty-three long letters with detailed queries as he worked his way painstakingly through the text, which was finally published in full in 1898. The socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw, a didactic writer like Tolstoy who would enter into correspondence with him in his last years, was almost the only critic to write an enthusiastic review in England. There was a certain degree of mutual admiration between the two, but Tolstoy later chided Shaw for a lack of seriousness.86 In Russia most people shared the view about What is Art? expressed by the artist Isaak Levitan, who described it in a letter to his friend Chekhov in Nice as brilliant and ridiculous at the same time. Five thousand copies were sold in the first week.87
Tolstoy was glad to get aesthetics out of the way, as his major project in 1898 was to help persecuted sectarians. In 1897 some Molokans came from Samara to ask for his help and advice: police had raided their villages late at night and taken away their children in order to bring them up in the Orthodox faith at an orphanage. Tolstoy wrote a lengthy letter to Nicholas II, and then a few months later wrote again when there was no response. His second letter was also greeted with silence, as was the letter he published in the St Petersburg Gazette that October. The Molokan children were returned to their parents only after Tolstoy’s daughter Tanya succeeded in gaining an audience with Pobedonostsev in January 1898.88 That left Tolstoy free to concentrate all his energies on the mission to help the dukhobors, who finally learned that month that they were going to be allowed to settle abroad. Tolstoy had been tinkering since 1889 with a new novel, and this news gave him the impetus to finish it. He now decided he would make an exception and sell the rights, so that he could raise money to help pay for the dukhobors to emigrate. As it turned out later, the funds would go to pay their passage to Canada, the country which expressed a willingness to receive them.
Resurrection, as the novel came to be called, drew on a story Tolstoy had heard from a lawyer friend. A nobleman appointed as a jury member had recognised a defendant on trial for theft as a poor woman he had once seduced, and been overcome with remorse. When she was sentenced to exile in Siberia, he offered to marry her, but she had died before he could atone for his sins. Hearing the story aroused guilty feelings in Tolstoy, who could not help but remember having taken advantage of his sister’s servant girl Gasha Trubetskaya when he was a young man. He now combined the story he had heard from his lawyer friend with that of his own spiritual journey. Accordingly, the central character Prince Nekhlyudov breaks with his former life once he recognises in court his aunt’s former peasant girl Katyusha Maslova, whom he once callously seduced. After she is sentenced to hard labour in Siberia through a miscarriage of justice, Nekhlyudov gives his land away to his peasants and follows her to Siberia in the hope of expiating his sins. Sonya had found it hard enough to deal with her husband’s sanctimonious advocacy of chastity in The Kreutzer Sonata back in 1889, while still being forced to satisfy his apparently unquenchable sexual appetite. A decade later, when it was finally beginning to subside (when Masha had married in 1897, Sonya had moved into her bedroom at Yasnaya Polyana),89 she read with distaste her husband’s sensual description of the ravishing of Katyusha Maslova. But Resurrection was more than a love story and Bildungsroman, as Tolstoy suppressed the dictates of his artistic conscience to exploit another opportunity for lambasting all his favourite targets, namely the government, the Church and the judicial system, as well as private property and upper-class mores. Not all his readers would find the resulting mixture of intense lyricism, biting satire and moralising demagoguery terribly appealing, even if it was a compulsively readable narrative, like everything else that Tolstoy wrote, with flashes of brilliance.
Tolstoy worked on Resurrection throughout 1898, even on 28 August, his seventieth birthday. The government had forbidden the press from publishing any celebratory articles, but he received over a hundred congratulatory telegrams, and his picture appeared in shop windows in cities and towns all over Russia.90 By autumn, Tolstoy was ready to negotiate a contract for the publication of Resurrection, and in October he signed a record-breaking deal with Adolf Marx, a publishing magnate based in Petersburg. Marx was proprietor of the weekly illustrated family magazine The Cornfield, which was enormously popular. Tolstoy had been paid 500 roubles per printer’s sheet for his last novel, Anna Karenina, which appeared in an elite literary journal with a readership of a few thousand. For Resurrection, published in instalments in The Cornfield, which had 200,000 subscribers, Tolstoy received twice that, and a 12,000-rouble advance. The novel appeared throughout 1899, illustrated by Leonid Pasternak, and was a runaway success, being the first novel by Russia’s most famous writer in over twenty years. It was an exhausting year for Tolstoy, since it entailed checking weekly sets of proofs, dealing with savage cuts made by the censor and being in constant communication with Chertkov in England.
Since arriving in England in the spring of 1897, Chertkov’s main interest had been in propagandising Tolstoy’s works throughout the world. He had begun by collaborating with John Kenworthy’s Brotherhood Publishing Company, but very soon had set up his own Russian-language publishing operation which took up most of his time. The goal of the Free Word Press, which was established near to the house with the apple orchard he had rented for his family near Purleigh, was to publish everything by Tolstoy that was banned in Russia, as well as articles he and other Tolstoyans had written. Everything was primarily destined for readers in Russia.91 There were nine publications in 1897 alone, one of which was Tolstoy’s afterword to the earlier Tolstoyan brochure ‘Help! A Public Appeal Regarding the Caucasian dukhobors’.92 Chertkov now expanded his activities to act as Tolstoy’s literary agent by orchestrating the publication of Resurrection abroad, both in Russian and in translation. His authorised edition of the novel for the Free Word Press was also the only unexpurgated Russian version printed, and it was published in book form at the end of 1899 at the same time as the first separate edition issued by Adolf Marx in St Petersburg. The novel was reprinted five times in 1900,93 and was smuggled into Russia in enormous quantities. Chertkov also coordinated the British and American publication of Louise Maude’s English translation by the Brotherhood Publishing Company in 1900. The success of Resurrection was phenomenal and unprecedented. Once it had appeared in The Cornfield, all rights were waived, and there were soon forty different editions in print in Russia, while fifteen different editions appeared in France in 1900.94 The novel was read by literally hundreds of thousands of readers in the first few years of its publication. The Slovak translation was produced by Albert Škarvan, whom Chertkov had invited to Russia, and taken to Yasnaya Polyana to meet Tolstoy back in 1896.95