“(A)musing, if no more profitable, were my adventures in
comradeship with the Tolstoyans, and my intimacy with Vladimir Tchertkoff,
Tolstoy’s greatest friend, with whom, it will be remembered, that mighty,
unstable intransigent finally left his home to die.
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| Vladimir Chertkof, from Wikipedia |
Once an officer in the Russian Imperial Guard, Tchertkoff
had been exiled for publishing a defence of that sect of Dukhobors which
claimed to follow literally, in social and individual conduct, the Christian
Beatitudes. Tchertkoff had to choose
between Siberia for a number of years and permanent exile with confiscation of
his estates. He preferred the
latter. His mother, however, was wealthy
and, though an “evangelical,” was, I take it, the support of that delightfully
absurd community of multifold dissentients, whether Siberian criminals, or
English extremists, which her son established and autocratically
controlled. I was happy in meeting this
lady once when on a visit to London. She
seized the opportunity for imploring me to rescue her son from his
free-thinking and the inevitable “wrath to come.” I tried to show her that, so far from being
an unbeliever, he was, in his own domain (known as Tuckton House, Christchurch,
Hants) following Christ’s teachings, even if he could not accept Church
dogmas. And I think she was in a measure
comforted.”
MacDonald describes visiting Chertkov at
Tuckton House, Christchurch:
“his religion was only ethical; and his numerous guests and
dependants had to repudiate all the customs and conventions generally thought
necessary to social happiness.
Vegetarians and teetotallers they must
be. All were equal, so long as they did
not entertain theories that clashed with their host’s. The only person unshackled by this
non-conformity was Madame Tchertkoff.
She had her boudoir, tastefully furnished, and a grand piano at which
she would gloriously sing to me passionate Russian peasant-songs. She took her meals alone, and, her invalidism
unquestioned, was allowed animal food.
The rest of us, English guests or Siberian refugees, of whom there was a
constant influx, fed in the kitchen.
Each filled his own plate from a dish of beans or the huge bowl of
vegetable soup which the cook constantly replenished from her stock-pot. The deal table was bare but clean. Yet the knives and forks needed no ill-bred
inspection to discover blemishes not quite insignificant. Nor was it obligatory to use those
substitutes for fingers: indeed, my host’s son – a lad of sixteen, enthusiastic
for Reform and the New Art – sucked his soup from the bowl with gibbous lips,
and so audibly offensive was his eating that I saw the wisdom of an evolutional
improving upon Nature’s providings.
“At my first meal I was certainly out of my element. While Vladimir Tchertkoff was lavish of his
transcendental philosophy, grandly and simply maintained, he failed to see that
I, too conventional to reach across my fellow-guests and grab at the beans, got
nothing to eat. Yet the cook,
fortunately English, understood my difficulty and kept me supplied.”
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| Tolstoy & Chertkov from Pinterest |
MacDonald then describes giving a speech to a group that
evening and feeling like “a fish out of water.
My subject was “The Evolution of Religious Instincts.” Tchertkoff was in the chair. One of the audience rose while I was still speaking,
and asked, in a voice trembling with passion, how I dared tell rationalists
like themselves things I knew to be false.
But the chairman smoothed away all friction with his tactful
eloquence…Later, my friend almost quarrelled with me, and his liking
waned. For in a subsequent talk, so
strenuously did I uphold the need to man of a personal God – not merely the
concept of God – if our religion was to help us through the anguish of life for
which He was responsible, that Tchertkoff’s philosophic anger, like the
working-man’s at the lecture, was set blazing.
Then I remembered what the knout had been to my friend’s forefathers,
and was glad not to be a Russian peasant….”
Greville writes “For at Tuckton he had installed a
printing-press; and the colony’s chief business was the reissue of Tolstoy’s
works on thinnest Indian paper. With the
Russian’s marvellous instinct for circumventing the law, my friend smuggled
into his beloved land millions of these censored books, distributing them among
the peasantry as free gifts. He even
wanted to translate and similarly issue my own little book on The Religious Instinct, and he
autocratically bowdlerized it for copy.
But after our quarrel the matter was dropped…
“With Tchertkoff all life was sacred: we had no more right
to destroy even the humblest inhabitant than, say, the Czar had any right to
compel his subjects to kill his enemies.
The subject cropped up at breakfast after the first occasion when I
addressed his followers. It had a
peculiarly personal interest for me, because a lively fellow-creature, with
convictions of its right to live upon others – hitherto Siberian convicts – had
chosen to share my bed and deny me sleep.
Without, of course, hinting at my discomfort, I asked my host if he
would have any compunction in circumventing a flea’s interference with a
child’s rest.
“Yes,” he replied in measured emphasis, “and no! for we
never kill even an insect. But in such a
case, I certainly catch the innocent thing – and I have satisfied myself that a
finger-and-thumb’s grip doesn’t damage or even hurt it.”
“And then?” I asked
“We keep a match-box, with a perch conveniently fixed, and
carefully put the flea in it. In the
morning we set it free in the garden.”
“But it’s not a
vegetarian,” I objected.
To which there was no response, unless this question
sufficed:
“But have you seen my son’s poultry yards?”
I was then conducted over the whole grounds; and the boy
showed me with justifiable pride an enclosure in which hundreds of magnificent
cocks were crowded, but no hens. They
kept poultry for the sake of the eggs; but, as a certain number of cockerels
were incontinently hatched out and must not be eaten, they were kept separate
and in perpetual conflict: this being sanctioned because not contrary to their
nature. I extorted the equivocal fact
that as soon as the cocks became too many they were sold; and, being
exceptional fine, thanks to careful cross-bred, they were supposed to be
ensured against roasting or boiling.”
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| Spot the Siberian convict? Original photographs from the Free Age Press and Tuckton House, Christchurch for sale on Abebooks here |
“..My last meeting with Tchertkoff was delightful, if
astonishing. I was once again lecturing
to his Brotherhood in Bournemouth, but as I had to leave early the next day
preferred staying at an hotel.” Although perhaps he preferred to not share a
bed with a Siberian convict!
“He was so far anxious to rectify our differences that,
although he had absented himself from the meeting, he brought a Russian peasant
to me in the early morning and allowed me to do a small operation on him. He then took breakfast with me, though the
patient was sent home. Tchertkoff’s
clothing must have amazed the hotel guests.
But that a certain grandeur of demeanour, in spite of shocking shoes,
the repudiation of a shirt, the home-spun, well-darned knickerbockers and a
pullover for a jacket, proclaimed him the aristocrat, I think the manager might
have protested. The morning being cold,
he had added to his absurd raiment a red flannel chest-protector pinned outside his pullover! After doing full justice to the breakfast, he
went with me to the station…” (ibid.)
You can read more about “Bournemouth’s radical Russian
printers” in this article on Dorset Life: http://www.dorsetlife.co.uk/2012/09/viva-iford-bournemouths-radical-russian-printers/
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