While spending a little more time with Constance (and the Russian revolutionary community in London at the end of the nineteenth century), I kept coming across the names of Louise and Aylmer Maude who were also translators of Tolstoy’s work at roughly the same time.

Louise and Aylmer Maude were British expatriates in Moscow at the end of the nineteenth century.

Louise was the daughter of a family of Scottish jewellers working in Moscow, Aylmer had originally started out working for Muir and Mirrilees, a large Scottish owned department store in Moscow (which survives to this day under different ownership and is now known by it’s Soviet era name of ЦУМ (TsUM, tsentralni universalni magazin, the Central Department Store, not to be confused with GUM, gosudarstvenni universalni magazin, the State Department Store).

In time Aylmer branched out on his own, set up a successful carpet business, which he subsequently sold. The money allowed Louise and Aylmer to move back to England and devote themselves to the translation of Tolstoy’s works, including his more mystical religious books.

Both Louise and Aylmer had met Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, before they left Russia, and were obviously highly impressed with him, and initially lived in a quasi Tolstoyan commune in Essex outside of Chelmsford, and worked on producing the definitive translations of Tolstoy in English.

(Utopian Tolstoyan communes, such as the Stapleton Colony and the Whiteway Colony were surprisingly common and surprisingly long lived in early twentieth century England.)

While Constance Garnett had met Tolstoy on one of her visits to Russia, and had received his permission to translate his works, the Maudes concentrated on producing more technically accurate translations of his works. Some experts (and I am most definitely no expert) prefer the Maudes’ slightly dry translations over Constance’s at times slightly wooden translations, which might result from her really only knowing Russian as a written language, while the Maudes had of course lived and worked in Russia.

At the same time, some people continued to prefer Constance’s translations over the Maudes’ drier versions. The situation was further confused by Tolstoy waiving his rights to translations of his books, which meant there were various competing translations of his more popular novels around, including those translated at second hand from French and German translations.

Both Constance and the Maudes were members of the Fabian society, though I suspect, given their Tolstoyan views, the Maudes were more enamoured of William Morris faux medieval model of socialism with sturdy artisans producing goods and trading among themselves, than the more revolutionary model espoused by the exiled Russian revolutionaries in England.

Despite their Tolstoyan views, Aylmer Maude did serve as a translator with the British Empire forces (including some ANZACs) in North Russia during Churchill’s ill starred intervention on the side of the White forces during the Russian civil war, but seemed to be more interested in philosophy than the conflict itself, and perhaps identifying more with the people trying to simply bring about social change than with pure ideology.

Both Aylmer and Louise died in England in the late 1930s.