The first group of Dukhobors, to the number of 1,126 persons, who had suffered the most from exile, hunger and illness, left on the 6th of August, 1898, for the Island of Cyprus while other lands be found and sufficient money collected for the transportation of those remaining to a more suitable place.
At the request of Tolstoi, L. A. Sullerzhitsky later accompanied a group of Dukhobors to Canada. He wrote a book about this journey, In America With the Dukhobors, issued by Posrednik, Moscow, 1905.
[358.] The sister of Tolstoi, Countess Maria Nicholaievna. A month later, September 30, 1898, Tolstoi wrote to V. G. Chertkov: “Yesterday my sister, M. N., left, with whom I spent a very friendly month, never having been so loving.”
[359.] V. A. Kuzminsky, a niece of Countess S. A. Tolstoi.
[360.] Countess Vera S. Tolstoi, a niece of Tolstoi, daughter of Count S. N. Tolstoi.
[361.] Tolstoi’s seventieth birthday, celebrated August 28, 1898.
[362.] According to the contract with the publisher of Niva, A. F. Marx, Tolstoi at the conclusion of the contract, received the whole of his royalty for only the first 200 pages of Resurrection.
[363.] In regard to the false rumours which were reaching Tolstoi at this time, about the affairs of the emigrating Dukhobors.
[364.] One of the Dukhobors exiled to Siberia, V. N. Pozdniakov, was sent by his brethren to the leader of the Dukhobors, P. V. Verigin, who was then in exile in the village of Obdorsk in the province of Tobolsk. Receiving a letter of instructions from Verigin for the group in general, he brought this letter to his brethren in the Caucasus and on his way reached Yasnaya Polyana. He showed Tolstoi marks on his body from ill-treatment he had suffered three years before.
[365.] Herbert Archer, an English co-worker with V. G. Chertkov, who went at his request to Tolstoi to transmit information to him with regard to the Dukhobors and to dissipate the false rumours about them which had reached Tolstoi from outsiders. About this time, in his letter to Countess S. A. Tolstoi, Tolstoi wrote about Archer: “He looks insignificant, but he is a very good man and a remarkably clever one.” (Letters of Count L. N. Tolstoi to his Wife, March, 1913, page 555.)