The New Russia/Biographical Note
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
On
PAUL BIRUKOFF.
Paul Birukoff, an intimate friend and biographer of Leo Tolstoi, was born in 1860 at Kostroma in Russia. He studied first with the Corps of Pages, then at the School of Imperial Marine, and later, after a cruise in the Mediterranean, went to the Marine Academy.
Feeling no vocation for a military career, he transferred his services to the Academy of Sciences, taking a post at the Central Observatory of Petrograd. The social and moral ideas which were then current in high society in Russia attracted him greatly, and he soon abandoned his scientific career and took to popular propaganda for Christian and democratic ideals. He was one of the founders of the publishing house, Posrednich, which soon became the principal medium of propaganda for Tolstoi's ideas. Becoming acquainted with Leo Tolstoi, Paul Birukoff soon became one of his intimate friends, and later an interpreter of his ideals. In 1897 he took an active part in the anti-militarist movement of the Doukhobortsi, as a result of which he was exiled and deported to the Baltic Provinces near Mitau, where he had to spend a year under close police supervision. After that he was allowed to go abroad, and went first to England, then made a journey to Cyprus to establish there a colony of the Doukhobortsi, and finally settled in Switzerland near Geneva. After the Russian Revolution of 1905 he was able to return to Russia, but as he found his activities hampered by the last reactionary Czarist Government, he left Russia again and returned to Switzerland in 1912, and, believing that he would have to settle there for ever, he was naturalised and became a citizen of Geneva. But at the end of the world war in November, 1918, being anxious to renew his literary relations with Russia, he took an engagement with the Swiss Red Cross, conducted a number of Russian emigrants from Switzerland to Moscow, and after a stay of three months in Moscow, returned to Geneva with the last train load of Swiss subjects in March, 1919. In the brief account which follows he gives an impartial account of his impressions of his former Fatherland. His main literary works are:
(1) Tolstoi's Life. A biography in four volumes (two volumes already published, the third in the press, and the fourth in preparation. This has been translated into all European languages).
(2) The French edition of Tolstoi's complete works, with preface and notes.
(3) Edition, with notes, of Leo Tolstoi's Journal.
(4) A large number of articles on the Tolstoian Movement in Russia, published in various papers and reviews.