Off the back of my research into Constance Garnett, and her connections to both the Russian exile community in 1890’s London, I came across the story of her contempories, and competing translators, Louise and Aylmer Maude.
The Maudes were supporters of the Tolstoyan movement, a form of Christian Anarchism inspired by the religious and mystic writings of Leo Tolstoy, and which attracted a not insubstantial number of adherents in late 1890s Britain.
The Maudes initially lived in a Tolstoyan commune in Chelmsford, and were involved in other Tolstoyan groups in England, as well as helping the Dukhobors migrate from Russia to Canada.
And then I went down an internet rabbit hole.
The claim was that two members of the Purleigh commune suffered a crisis of faith and decided to ride their bicycles across Europe to Yasnaya Polyana to discuss matters of belief with Tolstoy in person.
It was such a completely mad story that I had to investigate.
Strangely, at first sight it didn’t seem impossible. Yasnaya Polyana is roughly 2500 km due east of the Hoek van Holland and across the north European plain.
From experience, you can easily ride between 80 and 100km in a day on flattish roads on an old style single-speed, or better, a three-speed bicycle, at an average speed of around 20 km/h, and the roads across the Netherlands would have been famously flat and doubtless the roads across the German empire would have been well maintained and gravelled.
Russia would have been a different case.
In the summer of1941, when the Nazis invaded, the roads were dirt, but the Nazi forces found them navigable as they had dried out to a firm surface. Autumn and winter were a different story.
I doubt that the roads would have been any better in Tsarist times, but were probably no worse, meaning that they would have been able to ride most of the way.
So, allowing them an average 60km a day, more or less, to account for punctures, breakdowns and rest days, they could probably have made the ride in under two months, and this could account for them turning up in late summer at Yasnaya Polyana in shorts – basically they would have spent the warm dry months riding across Europe.
It’s a great story, but it may well not be true.
My only source for the story is an article from an anarchist magazine about the origins of the Stapleton Colony, a Tolstoyan commune outside of Leeds.
The only other reference a websearch turns up is from the Cornwall family history magazine from someone who was researching the life of Bertie Rowe and his involvement in the anarchist movement at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Many of the details are the same including a friendship with Tom Ferris but the journey to Yasanaya Polyana is different.
Ferris and Rowe work their passage on a ship to Riga, and the ride freight trains by climbing into open box cars to Yasnaya Polyana, where they arrive wearing light summer clothing.
Which one is true?
I don’t know, but the cargo ship to Riga route was well used by Russian exiles and dissidents sneaking home, so it’s possible Rowe and Ferris asked for advice and were put in contact with people who could facilitate a clandestine journey to and from Russia.
And the clandestine nature of the journey may be the key.
While it’s true that before the first world war people could travel western Europe with little or nothing in the way of passports and permits, both Tsarist Russia and the Ottoman Empire required visitors to have passports and supporting documentation.
As anarchists, and Rowe and Ferris appear to have made an attempt to avoid the 1901 census, along with other members of the commune, making it unlikely that they would apply for passports and permits, and let’s face it, two penniless English anarchists wearing shorts and riding bicycles are unlikely to have been waved through border control by Tsarist officialdom.
So why the two stories?
Honest answer, I’ve no idea.
I could make up all sorts of scenarios, such as they actually tried to ride to Yasnaya Polyana, were turned back, and took the more clandestine route via Riga.
Tolstoy’s correspondence suggests that he met with Rowe and Ferris on 01 January 1903, which would have been the depths of the Russian winter.
Tolstoy, really wasn’t very interested in Ferris’s religious view but did courteously wish them a safe journey home on 19 January 1903.
This is still, of course the depths of winter, and makes the ship and box car route far more likely. It also explains Tolstoy’s gift of winter clothing to Rowe and Ferris.
Certainly, the did make it back to England. We can place Rowe in Leeds in August 1904 where he was arrested for protesting on behalf of the unemployed
The interesting thing about the court report is not his conviction but that he had previous convictions, one assumes for similar acts of protest.
Of Ferris, I can find no trace, he doesn’t appear in any of the sources I have access to.
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