Russian Reflections

Yup it’s not a mis-print, Arthur Ransome, most famous in Britain as the author of the children’s book Swallows and Amazons, spent time in Russia.

When I was 9, my Aunt gave me Ransome’s book ‘Old Peter’s Russian Tales‘ for Christmas. I still have it and brought it to Russia with me when we moved here. I then thought that I should re-read it, which I did. At the beginning of the book A.R. notes that he wrote it at ‘Vergezha in 1915’. So, on a recent family trip, we took a little time out to try and track down the same spot.

Ransome came to Russia in 1913, to escape an unhappy marriage and to study Russian folklore. In 1914, at the start of the First World War he became a foreign correspondent for a radical newspaper and then later, in 1917, he covered the Bolshevik Revolution, becoming sympathetic to their cause. He became personal friends with, among others, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. He met the woman who would become his second wife, Evgenia Shelepina, who was Trotsky’s personal secretary and he would later go to Lenin’s funeral. At the same time as supporting the Bolsheviks and being on excellent terms with the leadership, he was also passing very useful information back to MI6 in London! So he was a writer, journalist and spy!

Old Peter’s Russian Tales is a collection of 21 Russian folk tales re-written by him. He had been invited to Vergezha by his friends, Harold Williams a New Zealand polyglot who spoke 58 languages and his Russian wife Ariadne Tyrkova, whose family’s ancestral estate was in the village. A fascinating couple. Ransome himself had been ill and sought both recuperation and inspiration to finish his book. It seems to have worked. He wrote romantically in the foreword: ‘under my window the wavelets of the Volkhov river are beating quietly in the dusk. A gold light burns on a timber raft floating down the river. Beyond the river in the blue midsummer twilight are the broad Russian plain and the distant forest’. He also wrote ‘I would like to stay here for ever’ enjoying the fishing ‘just before sunset or before breakfast’.

The Search

A search on Google Maps showed the village to be at the end of a 6km unpaved road about an hour north of Veliky Novgorod. But where was the house he stayed in? That required a little more detective work and a few more internet searches.

My husband, after a little more sleuthing, managed to establish that the Tyrkov house was no longer standing having been destoyed during the War and also that Ariadne’s brother was buried in the village. So, armed with the knowledge that at a cluster of houses at the very end of a dirt track we might find a grave and the same view of the river that A.R. looked at while writing, we set off on “Operation Wild Goosechase”. The dirt road was surprisingly easy to find and was in better condition than some of the tarmac roads that we have encountered! We bounced our way along for 6km passing another little village on the way. We finally arrived at Vergezha. I think I was expecting a small cluster of dilapidated wooden huts but far from it. Yes most of the houses were traditional wooden ones but all were in good condition and the village had an air of wealth to it.

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Parking the car, we walked down the hill and along the river bank for a short way watching Arthur Ransome’s “wavelets of the Volkhov river” before heading back up and through the village. On the way we passed several pretty, but modest wooden houses. At the end of the track, where we had parked the car, was a small slightly overgrown graveyard, still very much in use judging from the dates of some of the newer graves. Sadly we did not find the grave belonging to Ariadne’s brother or indeed any graves of the Tyrkov family though they must be there somewhere. The site of the old Tyrkov manor was obvious, on the hill on a bend in the river. Old lime trees lined the old entrance to the vanished house although we didn’t stay long due to the presence of a million mosquitos.

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So it turned out that ‘Operation Wild Goose Chase’ was not a wild goose chase after all. We succeeded in our mission, we found the village, the site of the Tyrkov house, and the view that helped to restore Ransome’s health and inspired him to complete the book.

A very satisfying and pretty detour into some lovely countryside.