Aylmer and Louise Maude
Encyclopedia
Aylmer Maude and Louise Maude (1855–1939) were English translators of Tolstoy's
works, and Aylmer Maude also wrote his friend Tolstoy's biography. After living many years in Russia the Maudes spent the rest of their life in England translating Tolstoy's writing and promoting public interest in his work. Aylmer Maude was also involved in a number of early 20th century progressive and idealistic causes.
, the son of a Church of England clergyman, Reverend F.H. Maude, and his wife Lucy, who came from a Quaker
background. The family lived near the newly-built Holy Trinity Church where Rev. Maude’s preaching helped draw a large congregation. A few of the vicar’s earlier sermons were published with stirring titles like Nineveh: A Warning to England!, but later he moved from Evangelical Anglicanism towards the Anglo-Catholic Church Union
.
After boarding at Christ's Hospital
from 1868 to 1874, Aylmer went to study at the Moscow Lyceum from 1874 to 1876, and was a tutor there between 1877 and 1880. Meanwhile he got to know the thriving British community in Moscow, was involved in their amateur dramatics and debating, and played a great deal of chess. One of his chess partners, Archibald Mirrielees, employed him to manage the carpet department at the Scots-owned department store, Muir & Mirrielees
. This led to Maude becoming business manager and then director of the Anglo-Russian Carpet Company. Despite this position he “rejected the business ethos” of his British compatriots, took a thoughtful interest in Russian society, and has been described as the only “important intermediary between the two cultures” at that time.
Louise Maude was born Louise Shanks in Moscow, one of the eight children of James Stewart Shanks, partner in a jewelry business and its Magasin Anglais (English store). Two of Louise’s sisters were artists: Mary knew Tolstoy and prepared illustrations for Where Love is, God is, and Emily
was a painter associated with the Peredvizhniki
. Louise married Aylmer Maude in 1884 in an Anglican ceremony at the British vice-consulate in Moscow, and they had five sons, one of them still-born.
Aylmer Maude met Tolstoy in 1888, introduced to him by Peter Alekseyev, a doctor married to Maude's sister Lucy. Maude was a frequent visitor, an admirer and friend, playing tennis and chess, enjoying long discussions, but not always agreeing with the great writer 30 years his senior. Tolstoy made return visits, getting to know Louise and the family, even showing the boys how to make "paper cockerels". After the Maudes settled in England, Tolstoy and Aylmer Maude kept up a regular correspondence, with Maude making occasional trips to Russia to see Tolstoy at his Yasnaya Polyana
estate. During his 1902 visit Tolstoy authorised Maude to write his biography.
, a Tolstoyan
group believing in co-operative ideals and non-violence. Their next home was in Essex
at Wickham's Farm in Bicknacre, associated with the adjacent Brotherhood Church commune at Cock Clarks, Purleigh which they helped establish and to which they gave financial support until it came to an end in 1899. At least two of their sons went to the Friends
(Quaker) school at Saffron Walden
.
In 1898 Maude sailed from Liverpool
to Quebec
with representatives of the Doukhobors, a group supported by Tolstoy, who were persecuted in Russia for their beliefs and wanted to resettle in Canada
. He confessed to the "un-Tolstoyan
self-indulgence" of arranging a first-class cabin for himself. Maude wrote about this journey and the Doukhobors in A Peculiar People (1904).
The Maudes soon moved to Great Baddow
near Chelmsford
where they were members of the Fabian Society
and co-operative movement.
Aylmer was on the Fabian national executive from 1907-1912, lectured for the society, and wrote one of their pamphlets in association with Bernard Shaw
. His lecturing talents included a "pleasing smile, manly and unruffled demeanour" and a "beautiful voice" according to the writer William Loftus Hare, who also described him as a "lucid, confident, instructive, persuasive" speaker.
Some years after leaving Wickham’s Farm, Maude would express doubts about communal living, feeling it could only succeed with a strong leader or shared traditions, and he called the Purleigh commune a "queer colony".
"The really sad part of the Tolstoy movement was the terrible amount of quarrelling . . ."
While Aylmer Maude did not stick rigidly to a Tolstoyan set of ideas, and was associated with a variety of causes and campaigns, he never wavered in his admiration of Tolstoy, even when he held different views: ". . .though Tolstoy is sincere and wise, he, like all mortals, makes mistakes. . ."
In 1913 Maude was in Hampstead
lodging in the household of Marie Stopes
and her first husband. There was probably a "flirtatious friendship" between Stopes and Maude, but there is no hint of this in Maude's books, The Authorised Life of Marie C. Stopes (1924) or Marie Stopes: her work and play (1933). Stopes' campaign to make contraception freely available to married women was another cause supported by Maude.
Maude travelled to Archangel (now Arkhangelsk
) in Russia with the British North Russian Expeditionary Force
in 1918, acting as interpreter and liaison officer, and lecturing while there for the Universities' Committee of the YMCA
to both Russian- and English-speakers, to both civilian and military audiences. The 60-year-old lecturer found himself under fire from "Bolsheviki" , but was more interested in ideas than fighting. Later he suggested that "world statesmen" faced with the Russian revolution had "missed an opportunity to make the world 'safe for democracy'".
During their later years, the Maudes were occupied with preparing a comprehensive edition of Tolstoy's works. Their private resources were dwindling, but Aylmer Maude was granted a Civil List
pension for services to literature in 1932. His death in 1938, aged 80, brought newspaper headlines describing him as "Authority on Tolstoy" and "Friend of Tolstoy". Louise died the following year.
published Aylmer Maude's two volume Life of Tolstoy in 1908 and 1910.
Aylmer Maude handled most of the practical affairs related to publication, corresponding often with George Herbert Perris and Charles F. Cazenove at the Literary Agency in London to discuss publishers, funding and other business. His prolific correspondence included not only letters to friends, and lobbying letters for causes he supported, but also letters to correct details in newspaper reviews: the Maudes disapproved of the "French" spelling Tolstoi, for instance.
Maude wanted to publish a complete collected works of Tolstoy and enlisted his friends and acquaintances to help campaign for funding and support. There were many competing editions of the more popular works, some of them "very incompetent", according to Bernard Shaw, since Tolstoy had waived his rights over translation. Shaw wrote to The Times
asking readers to support the project by "spontaneously giving it the privileges of a copyright edition" and "subscribing for complete sets", to make up for the “miscarriage of Tolstoy’s public-spirited intentions". Shaw’s signature was followed by many more, including literary figures like Arnold Bennett
, Arthur Conan Doyle
, Gilbert Murray
and H. G. Wells
. Thomas Hardy
added his own independent letter, offering support though he did not feel equipped to comment on all the points in the main letter.
After a protesting letter from an admirer of Constance Garnett
's translations, the correspondence continued, with Maude asserting that "Tolstoy authorized my wife’s translation" of Resurrection and Shaw insisting on the need for a complete collected works, going beyond the "great novels" which were "sure to get themselves translated everywhere", since other translators had "picked the plums out of the pudding". He went on to compare Maude’s "devoted relation" to Tolstoy with that of Henrik Ibsen
's translator William Archer, or Richard Wagner
's Ashton Ellis.
The Oxford University Press
Centenary Edition of Tolstoy came out in 21 volumes between 1928 and 1937, with the complete collection available at "9 guineas the set".
Both husband and wife lived to see the final volume of the collected works published the year before Aylmer Maude's death. Their work was thought to be of high quality in their lifetime, and this opinion still has wide support. Tolstoy believed that "Better translators, both for knowledge of the two languages and for penetration into the very meaning of the matter translated, could not be invented."
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
works, and Aylmer Maude also wrote his friend Tolstoy's biography. After living many years in Russia the Maudes spent the rest of their life in England translating Tolstoy's writing and promoting public interest in his work. Aylmer Maude was also involved in a number of early 20th century progressive and idealistic causes.
Family & Russia
Aylmer Maude was born in IpswichIpswich
Ipswich is a large town and a non-metropolitan district. It is the county town of Suffolk, England. Ipswich is located on the estuary of the River Orwell...
, the son of a Church of England clergyman, Reverend F.H. Maude, and his wife Lucy, who came from a Quaker
Religious Society of Friends
The Religious Society of Friends, or Friends Church, is a Christian movement which stresses the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Members are known as Friends, or popularly as Quakers. It is made of independent organisations, which have split from one another due to doctrinal differences...
background. The family lived near the newly-built Holy Trinity Church where Rev. Maude’s preaching helped draw a large congregation. A few of the vicar’s earlier sermons were published with stirring titles like Nineveh: A Warning to England!, but later he moved from Evangelical Anglicanism towards the Anglo-Catholic Church Union
The Church Union
The Church Union is an Anglo-Catholic advocacy group within the Church of England.The organisation was founded as the Church of England Protection Society on May 12, 1859 to challenge the authority of the English civil courts to determine questions of doctrine...
.
After boarding at Christ's Hospital
Christ's Hospital
Christ's Hospital is an English coeducational independent day and boarding school with Royal Charter located in the Sussex countryside just south of Horsham in Horsham District, West Sussex, England...
from 1868 to 1874, Aylmer went to study at the Moscow Lyceum from 1874 to 1876, and was a tutor there between 1877 and 1880. Meanwhile he got to know the thriving British community in Moscow, was involved in their amateur dramatics and debating, and played a great deal of chess. One of his chess partners, Archibald Mirrielees, employed him to manage the carpet department at the Scots-owned department store, Muir & Mirrielees
Muir & Mirrielees
TsUM – Central Universal Department Store – is one of the most renowned department stores in Moscow. It is located in a six-story historical building at Petrovka street. TSUM is a part of Mercury group.- TSUM today :...
. This led to Maude becoming business manager and then director of the Anglo-Russian Carpet Company. Despite this position he “rejected the business ethos” of his British compatriots, took a thoughtful interest in Russian society, and has been described as the only “important intermediary between the two cultures” at that time.
Louise Maude was born Louise Shanks in Moscow, one of the eight children of James Stewart Shanks, partner in a jewelry business and its Magasin Anglais (English store). Two of Louise’s sisters were artists: Mary knew Tolstoy and prepared illustrations for Where Love is, God is, and Emily
Emily Shanks
Emily Shanks, also known as Emiliya Yakovlevna Shanks , was an Anglo-Russian artist.Her father, James Stewart Shanks, was a Moscow businessman, and her siblings include Mary Shanks, also an artist, and Louise Maude, translator of Tolstoy's fiction...
was a painter associated with the Peredvizhniki
Peredvizhniki
Peredvizhniki , often called The Wanderers or The Itinerants in English, were a group of Russian realist artists who in protest at academic restrictions formed an artists' cooperative; it evolved into the Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions in 1870.- History :In 1863 a group of fourteen students...
. Louise married Aylmer Maude in 1884 in an Anglican ceremony at the British vice-consulate in Moscow, and they had five sons, one of them still-born.
Aylmer Maude met Tolstoy in 1888, introduced to him by Peter Alekseyev, a doctor married to Maude's sister Lucy. Maude was a frequent visitor, an admirer and friend, playing tennis and chess, enjoying long discussions, but not always agreeing with the great writer 30 years his senior. Tolstoy made return visits, getting to know Louise and the family, even showing the boys how to make "paper cockerels". After the Maudes settled in England, Tolstoy and Aylmer Maude kept up a regular correspondence, with Maude making occasional trips to Russia to see Tolstoy at his Yasnaya Polyana
Yasnaya Polyana
Yasnaya Polyana was the home of the writer Leo Tolstoy, where he was born, wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and is buried. Tolstoy called Yasnaya Polyana his "inaccessible literary stronghold". It is located southwest of Tula, Russia and from Moscow.In 1921, the estate formally became his...
estate. During his 1902 visit Tolstoy authorised Maude to write his biography.
From 1897: England & travel
Many of the British business people in late 19th century Russia prospered and were able to plan for early retirement; Aylmer Maude gave up his trading career before he reached 40. He, Louise, and family arrived in England in 1897 ready to live a different kind of life. At first the family stayed a short time in Croydon with the Brotherhood ChurchBrotherhood Church
The Brotherhood Church is a Christian anarchist and pacifist community. An intentional community with Quaker origins has been located at Stapleton, near Pontefract, Yorkshire, since 1921.-History:...
, a Tolstoyan
Tolstoyan
The Tolstoyan movement is a social movement based on the philosophical and religious views of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy . Tolstoy's views were formed by rigorous study of the ministry of Jesus, particularly the Sermon on the Mount....
group believing in co-operative ideals and non-violence. Their next home was in Essex
Essex
Essex is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the East region of England, and one of the home counties. It is located to the northeast of Greater London. It borders with Cambridgeshire and Suffolk to the north, Hertfordshire to the west, Kent to the South and London to the south west...
at Wickham's Farm in Bicknacre, associated with the adjacent Brotherhood Church commune at Cock Clarks, Purleigh which they helped establish and to which they gave financial support until it came to an end in 1899. At least two of their sons went to the Friends
Religious Society of Friends
The Religious Society of Friends, or Friends Church, is a Christian movement which stresses the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Members are known as Friends, or popularly as Quakers. It is made of independent organisations, which have split from one another due to doctrinal differences...
(Quaker) school at Saffron Walden
Friends School Saffron Walden
Friends' School is an Quaker independent school located in Saffron Walden, Essex, situated approximately 12 miles south of the city of Cambridge...
.
In 1898 Maude sailed from Liverpool
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...
to Quebec
Quebec
Quebec or is a province in east-central Canada. It is the only Canadian province with a predominantly French-speaking population and the only one whose sole official language is French at the provincial level....
with representatives of the Doukhobors, a group supported by Tolstoy, who were persecuted in Russia for their beliefs and wanted to resettle in Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
. He confessed to the "un-Tolstoyan
Tolstoyan
The Tolstoyan movement is a social movement based on the philosophical and religious views of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy . Tolstoy's views were formed by rigorous study of the ministry of Jesus, particularly the Sermon on the Mount....
self-indulgence" of arranging a first-class cabin for himself. Maude wrote about this journey and the Doukhobors in A Peculiar People (1904).
The Maudes soon moved to Great Baddow
Great Baddow
Great Baddow is an urban village in the Chelmsford borough of Essex, England. It is close to the county town, Chelmsford and, with a population of over 13,000, is one of the largest villages in the country....
near Chelmsford
Chelmsford
Chelmsford is the county town of Essex, England and the principal settlement of the borough of Chelmsford. It is located in the London commuter belt, approximately northeast of Charing Cross, London, and approximately the same distance from the once provincial Roman capital at Colchester...
where they were members of the Fabian Society
Fabian Society
The Fabian Society is a British socialist movement, whose purpose is to advance the principles of democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist, rather than revolutionary, means. It is best known for its initial ground-breaking work beginning late in the 19th century and continuing up to World...
and co-operative movement.
Aylmer was on the Fabian national executive from 1907-1912, lectured for the society, and wrote one of their pamphlets in association with Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
. His lecturing talents included a "pleasing smile, manly and unruffled demeanour" and a "beautiful voice" according to the writer William Loftus Hare, who also described him as a "lucid, confident, instructive, persuasive" speaker.
Some years after leaving Wickham’s Farm, Maude would express doubts about communal living, feeling it could only succeed with a strong leader or shared traditions, and he called the Purleigh commune a "queer colony".
"The really sad part of the Tolstoy movement was the terrible amount of quarrelling . . ."
While Aylmer Maude did not stick rigidly to a Tolstoyan set of ideas, and was associated with a variety of causes and campaigns, he never wavered in his admiration of Tolstoy, even when he held different views: ". . .though Tolstoy is sincere and wise, he, like all mortals, makes mistakes. . ."
In 1913 Maude was in Hampstead
Hampstead
Hampstead is an area of London, England, north-west of Charing Cross. Part of the London Borough of Camden in Inner London, it is known for its intellectual, liberal, artistic, musical and literary associations and for Hampstead Heath, a large, hilly expanse of parkland...
lodging in the household of Marie Stopes
Marie Stopes
Marie Carmichael Stopes was a British author, palaeobotanist, campaigner for women's rights and pioneer in the field of birth control...
and her first husband. There was probably a "flirtatious friendship" between Stopes and Maude, but there is no hint of this in Maude's books, The Authorised Life of Marie C. Stopes (1924) or Marie Stopes: her work and play (1933). Stopes' campaign to make contraception freely available to married women was another cause supported by Maude.
Maude travelled to Archangel (now Arkhangelsk
Arkhangelsk
Arkhangelsk , formerly known as Archangel in English, is a city and the administrative center of Arkhangelsk Oblast, Russia. It lies on both banks of the Northern Dvina River near its exit into the White Sea in the north of European Russia. The city spreads for over along the banks of the river...
) in Russia with the British North Russian Expeditionary Force
North Russia Campaign
The North Russia Intervention, also known as the Northern Russian Expedition, was part of the Allied Intervention in Russia after the October Revolution. The intervention brought about the involvement of foreign troops in the Russian Civil War on the side of the White movement...
in 1918, acting as interpreter and liaison officer, and lecturing while there for the Universities' Committee of the YMCA
YMCA
The Young Men's Christian Association is a worldwide organization of more than 45 million members from 125 national federations affiliated through the World Alliance of YMCAs...
to both Russian- and English-speakers, to both civilian and military audiences. The 60-year-old lecturer found himself under fire from "Bolsheviki" , but was more interested in ideas than fighting. Later he suggested that "world statesmen" faced with the Russian revolution had "missed an opportunity to make the world 'safe for democracy'".
During their later years, the Maudes were occupied with preparing a comprehensive edition of Tolstoy's works. Their private resources were dwindling, but Aylmer Maude was granted a Civil List
Civil list
-United Kingdom:In the United Kingdom, the Civil List is the name given to the annual grant that covers some expenses associated with the Sovereign performing their official duties, including those for staff salaries, State Visits, public engagements, ceremonial functions and the upkeep of the...
pension for services to literature in 1932. His death in 1938, aged 80, brought newspaper headlines describing him as "Authority on Tolstoy" and "Friend of Tolstoy". Louise died the following year.
Literary activities
To a large extent, it was Louise who worked on Tolstoy's fiction, and Aylmer who tackled his philosophical writing. The "retired carpet manufacturer" brought out a translation of What is Art? in 1899, while Louise’s translation of Resurrection was published in 1900 by the Brotherhood Publishing Company. Some of their work was published by the OUP World Classics Series, but they also used the smaller firm of Grant Richards, and ConstableConstable & Robinson
Constable & Robinson Ltd. is an independent British book publisher of fiction and non-fiction works. Founded in Edinburgh in 1795 by Archibald Constable as Constable & Co. it is probably the oldest independent publisher in the English-speaking world still operating under the name of its...
published Aylmer Maude's two volume Life of Tolstoy in 1908 and 1910.
Aylmer Maude handled most of the practical affairs related to publication, corresponding often with George Herbert Perris and Charles F. Cazenove at the Literary Agency in London to discuss publishers, funding and other business. His prolific correspondence included not only letters to friends, and lobbying letters for causes he supported, but also letters to correct details in newspaper reviews: the Maudes disapproved of the "French" spelling Tolstoi, for instance.
Maude wanted to publish a complete collected works of Tolstoy and enlisted his friends and acquaintances to help campaign for funding and support. There were many competing editions of the more popular works, some of them "very incompetent", according to Bernard Shaw, since Tolstoy had waived his rights over translation. Shaw wrote to The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
asking readers to support the project by "spontaneously giving it the privileges of a copyright edition" and "subscribing for complete sets", to make up for the “miscarriage of Tolstoy’s public-spirited intentions". Shaw’s signature was followed by many more, including literary figures like Arnold Bennett
Arnold Bennett
- Early life :Bennett was born in a modest house in Hanley in the Potteries district of Staffordshire. Hanley is one of a conurbation of six towns which joined together at the beginning of the twentieth century as Stoke-on-Trent. Enoch Bennett, his father, qualified as a solicitor in 1876, and the...
, Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle DL was a Scottish physician and writer, most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, generally considered a milestone in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Challenger...
, Gilbert Murray
Gilbert Murray
George Gilbert Aimé Murray, OM was an Australian born British classical scholar and public intellectual, with connections in many spheres. He was an outstanding scholar of the language and culture of Ancient Greece, perhaps the leading authority in the first half of the twentieth century...
and H. G. Wells
H. G. Wells
Herbert George Wells was an English author, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing text books and rules for war games...
. Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.While he regarded himself primarily as a...
added his own independent letter, offering support though he did not feel equipped to comment on all the points in the main letter.
After a protesting letter from an admirer of Constance Garnett
Constance Garnett
Constance Clara Garnett was an English translator of nineteenth-century Russian literature...
's translations, the correspondence continued, with Maude asserting that "Tolstoy authorized my wife’s translation" of Resurrection and Shaw insisting on the need for a complete collected works, going beyond the "great novels" which were "sure to get themselves translated everywhere", since other translators had "picked the plums out of the pudding". He went on to compare Maude’s "devoted relation" to Tolstoy with that of Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of prose drama" and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre...
's translator William Archer, or Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
's Ashton Ellis.
The Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as...
Centenary Edition of Tolstoy came out in 21 volumes between 1928 and 1937, with the complete collection available at "9 guineas the set".
Both husband and wife lived to see the final volume of the collected works published the year before Aylmer Maude's death. Their work was thought to be of high quality in their lifetime, and this opinion still has wide support. Tolstoy believed that "Better translators, both for knowledge of the two languages and for penetration into the very meaning of the matter translated, could not be invented."