Margarita Meklina

A Couple Split Up by Posterity: New Zealander Harold Williams and Russian Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams

 

            There are many famous family unions for whom when you mention the one half, you immediately remember the other. But sometimes it happens that after they pass away, the couple is split up: “they” is replaced by “she” or “he,” though they had called themselves “we.” This was the fate of the couple I’m going to tell you about.

New Zealander Harold Williams is now remembered virtually only in New Zealand and England, while his Russian wife’s name is familiar only to Russians. When they write about them in New Zealand, pages are devoted to him, and only few lines to her. The opposite happens in Russia: there she is in every history book, whereas he is only a footnote. This story about their union will try to repair the unjust damage perpetrated against their memory.

Harold was born in Christchurch in 1876; Ariadna, seven years older than Harold, was born in Saint Petersburg in 1869. They both grew up in large families: he was the seventh son in the family; she had four brothers and two sisters. His father was a Nonconformist minister, who moved to New Zealand from England; her father was a Saint Petersburg judge. Harold spent his childhood conversing with Polynesian and Melanesian seamen in the harbor in Auckland, where his family had settled in 1893, and Ariadna read French philosophers and translated Jules Verne in the estate belonging to her father, a wealthy landowner. 

            Later, after being appointed minister, young Harold loved to socialize with foreign laborers, thereby familiarizing himself with their native languages. Soon, his “Slavonic crazes” awoke: he said once that his interest in Russia and Russian language was provoked by the ideas of the writer Leo Tolstoy.

While Harold was unsuccessfully sitting for his exam for BA at Auckland University (his knowledge of math failed him), Ariadna was studying mathematics at the Bestuzhev Higher Courses for Women in St. Petersburg. Math was not her first choice; however, her aspiration to become a doctor was prevented by the lack of a medical school at the Courses. In 1890, she married an engineer, and later bore two children.

When in 1900, restless, adventurous William obtained a grant from a director of The New Zealand Herald and embarked on a trip to Russia, Ariadna was already divorced. However, their meeting would be postponed: sidetracked by his studies at German universities, Harold would arrive in Russia only five years later. There he got the chance to talk to Leo Tolstoy (the interview would appear in The Manchester Guardian in 1905).

Here’s what Harold would later write about Tolstoy: “Throughout the ‘eighties, the period of paralyzing reaction, his doctrine of non-resistance to evil permeated Russian society and attracted many sympathizers. Tolstoy preached, expounded his religious teachings in writings…. and led a simple life. Towards the end of the ‘eighties a fresh spirit of resistance arose and Tolstoy’s direct influence diminished.” So did, few years after the interview, Harold’s interest in him. 

Harold, who during his life learned approximately sixty languages, received his Ph.D. from the University of Munich and soon was appointed as correspondent for London’s Times in Stuttgart (his interest in writing apparently was inherited from his father, who was the editor of New Zealand’s Methodist Times).

Ariadna, a single mother, also supported herself by writing for periodicals. She chose, as her male nom-de-plume, the last name of Vergezhskii, which was derived from the village owned by her father. Later she would become the editor of a liberal newspaper, the first daily published in the capital led by a woman.

She also entered politics, and from 1906 to 1917, she was the only woman in the Party of Constitutional Democrats and the first woman to be elected to the Russian Parliament (because of her strong temper and fiery speeches, somebody joked that she was the only man in the party). Her older brother was much more radical: he was a member of The People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya), the organization which assassinated, ironically, one of the most progressive Russian tsars, Alexander the Second.

Once Ariadna was caught smuggling prohibited newspapers into Russia and was sentenced to two and half years in jail. She then fled the country, crossing the border with Finland and eventually ended up in Stuttgart with Russian political refugees, who were gathering around Petr Struve, a political exile and publisher of the radical newspaper Liberation.

            At the editorial office of Liberation, she met “Harold Vasil’evich,” as Russians called him, who had been sent there by the Times of London to report on Russian events. Here is what Ariadna’s son, Arkadii Borman (1891 – 1974), wrote about him in his memoirs: “First Sonja [Ariadna’s daughter] and I were shy in the presence of this tall and silent foreigner from mysterious New Zealand. Then this mystery thickened even more when Harold Vasil’evich, with a serious, almost fierce face, began to dance a Maori dance.”

Right away, the worldly linguist and the charming suffragette found out that they shared many things, especially a love for Russian literature. In the book Russia of the Russians, Harold talks extensively about such authors as Alexander Blok, Aleksei Remisov, Dmitrii Merezhkovsky, Andrei Belyi and others, many of whom were frequent guests of the couple. They also got to personally know the English writer H.G. Wells, author of The Invisible Man and Time Machine, who called Russia of the Russians “the most stimulating book on international relations and the physical and intellectual being of a state that has been put before the English reader for many years.”

They both were into religion, even though Ariadna discovered her faith much later in life. It was reported that Harold, during his youth, read the New Testament in twenty six languages. They also loved to travel and visited England, Switzerland, Italy and Turkey, where Harold was the correspondent for the Morning Post.

            But their peaceful existence did not last long: the Revolution had started. They were for a radical change in Russian society, but against the Bolsheviks. In her memoirs Ariadna, who went to the gymnasium together with the future wife of Lenin, writes about her meeting with the Bolshevik leader in Geneva. After listening to Ariadna’s political views, Lenin reportedly said, “We are going to hang people like you on street lanterns.” And, indeed, he kept his word.

            Harold wrote in his newspaper: “The present phase of the Russian Revolution is one of disaster and ruin…. Of constructive power the Bolsheviks have none, but they have enormous power for destruction…. They can finally demoralize the army and reduce it to a rabble of hungry, looting bands, who will stream across the country, block the railways, reduce the civil population to starvation and the extreme of terror, and will fight like wolves over their prey.”

             And Ariadna, who was helping White Army officers to obtain false IDs, echoed in her diary: “I’m sickened by politics…. I see powerlessness, mistakes, and the immobility of my friends. Russia must draw out some completely new forces or die. Is salvation now impossible? The poison of anarchy, statelessness and arbitrariness is deeply rooted. How can we extinguish it? I want to think only about Pushkin. If Russia will regenerate, he will be needed. If not – my book about him will serve as its tomb. It will tell everybody which abilities existed in Russian culture, talents now being buried by ‘comrades.’”

            In March 1918, Harold and Ariadna, at the time stationed with the White Army, had to hastily evacuate to England with the advance of the Red Army. At the passport control, the officer smiled at Harold: “Are you Doctor Harold Williams? We never missed any of your telegrams. Now you are going to tell us the whole truth about Russians!”

In England, Ariadna and Harold immediately started making political propaganda against the Soviet regime. Together, they published the magazine New Russia and established the Russian Liberation Committee, in which they invited the leading Russian intellectuals opposing the Soviets, such as Struve or Milukov (the same Milukov whose life later would be saved from a bullet by the father of Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov). They also organized fundraising events for Russian émigrés, such as the future Russian Nobel prize winner Ivan Bunin, and became co-authors of the Hosts of Darkness, a novel set in the times of the Russian Revolution.

In spite of all these activities, life for Ariadna in England, according to her son Arkadii, was not easy. He wrote that his mother, used to equality between men and women in Russia, felt uncomfortable in England, where men sent women away when talking about business and politics. However, for Ariadna, a complex and fulfilled intellectual life was possible because of Harold’s support. They were always together. They did not know what family quarrels were. Arkadii wrote that Harold Vasil’evich worshipped Ariadna, and she admired his talents and was proud of him.

We can imagine Ariadna’s despair when Harold fell gravely sick. In an unpublished chapter of her memoirs she mentioned that she went to church and lighted a candle; at the time, she was not the deeply religious person she later would become, and she only wanted somebody to answer her prayers. But Harold died on November 18, 1928, his book about the Russian revolution unfinished. Ariadna would pay a tribute to him in 1935, when her biography of Harold Williams titled Cheerful Giver was published in London.

Reading Pushkin already comforted her during the Revolution, and even more after her husband’s death. It looked like she was prepared by destiny itself to write about him. First, she already had experience as a biographer, compiling the biography of Anna Philosophova, a leader of the women’s movement; second, a brother of her grandfather knew Pushkin in person.

The first volume of Pushkin’s biography appeared in France in 1929 and the second in 1948 (it took more than fifty years before the book was published in 1998 in Russia itself to a great critical acclaim).

In 1951, Ariadna moved to the U.S., where she continued her passionate political and cultural life. She died in Washington, D.C. in 1962. In one of her letters to her granddaughter she wrote that she loved only two people: one was Alexander Pushkin and the other was Harold Williams.