Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams

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Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams
feminist
SpouseHarold Williams
Children2

Ariadna Vladimirovna Tyrkova-Williams (

Washington, DC; Ariadna Borman during the first marriage) was a liberal politician, journalist, writer and feminist[1] in Russia during the revolutionary period until 1920. Afterwards, she lived as a writer in Britain (1920–1951) and the United States
(1951–1962).

Biography

Revolutionary beginnings

Ariadna Vladimirovna Tyrkova was born on 13 November 1869, the daughter of Vladimir Tyrkov, a landowner whose hereditary estate was Vergezhi in the

Novgorod region. She studied in Saint Petersburg
.

There she married A. N. Borman, an engineer, and with him had a son, Arcadiy (b. 1891). In the early 1900s, she became active among liberal opposition groups linked to

Constitutional Democratic party
(also known as the Kadet Party), and in 1906 became a member of its Central Committee.

Between the Revolutions

In 1906, she married

All-Russian Union for Women's Equality[2] and, with Ekaterina Kuskova, became a leading campaigner for equal rights for women, prompting the Constitutional Democratic party to add women's suffrage to its platform [3]
.

After the defeat of the revolution in late 1907, Tyrkova-Williams moved to the far Right of the Constitutional Democratic party, and advocated an alliance with the Progressive faction in the

Octobrist party [4]
.

In 1911, the family was briefly embroiled in controversy, when Harold Williams was accused of espionage, supposedly as a result of Russian secret police machinations [5].

During World War I, she worked in the All-Russian Union of Cities. She also spent a year in Turkey and wrote a book about her experiences there (Staraya Turtsia, 1916) [6].

1917 Revolution and emigration

On March 17, 1917, immediately after the

October Revolution of 1917 she ran for the Constituent Assembly in November elections, and, with Alexander Izgoev
, briefly edited the newspaper, Borba, until it was shut down by the Bolshevik government.

After the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks, she helped organize anti-Bolshevik resistance in southern Russia. But in the spring of 1918, she emigrated to Britain, and in 1919 published an account of the first year of the Russian revolution, From Liberty to Brest-Litovsk, before returning to

White Movement
. By then, she had moved further to the Right, and wrote:

We must support the army first and place the democratic programs in the background. We must create a ruling class and not a dictatorship of the majority. The universal hegemony of Western democracy is a fraud, which politicians have foisted upon us. We must have the courage to look directly into the eye of the wild beast—which is called the people [7].

In late 1919, General Denikin was defeated, and Tyrkova-Williams returned to Britain in 1920.

In London, she became a founder of the London-based Russian Liberation Committee, edited its publications, and raised money for Russian orphans [8]. In November 1928, her husband died. Afterwards she wrote a biography of Alexander Pushkin (Zhizn' Pushkina, 2 vols., 1928–1929) [9], and a book about her late husband (Cheerful Giver, 1935).

After the second World War, in March 1951, she migrated to the United States of America and later published three volumes of memoirs (1952, 1954, 1956) in Russian.

Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams died on 12 January 1962 in Washington DC and was buried there in Rock Creek Cemetery.

References

  1. ^
    JSTOR 126719
    .
  2. ^ SHADOW OF DEMOCRACY. Dispatches from Russia: 1905 Revolution, by Harold Williams.

Sources

Works

See also

Further reading

  • Arkady Borman. A. V. Tyrkova-Williams: po ee pis’mam i vospominaniiam syna (1964 Washington, DC, Luven)
  • 'A. V. Tyrkova-Williams', in Novy Zhurnal; 98 (1970)
  • Politicheskie deyateli Rossii 1917: Biograficheskij slovar', ed. Pavel Volobuev (1993. Moscow)
    ISBN 978-5-85270-137-4
    .
  • Irene Zohrab. 'Remizov, Williams, Mirsky and English Readers (with some Letters from Remizov to Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams and Two Unknown Reviews)', in New Zealand Slavonic Journal (1994), pp. 259–287.
  • Alexandra Smith. 'The Shaping of the Literary Canon in A. Tyrkova-Williams's book The Life of Pushkin ', in Pushkinskie chteniia v Tartu: 2, ed. L. Kiseleva (2000. University of Tartu, Tartu), pp. 267–81.
  • Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild. 'Writing for Their Rights: Four Feminist Journalists: Mariia Chekhova, Liubov' Gurevich, Mariia Pokrovskaia, and Ariadna Tyrkova', in An Improper Profession: Women, Gender and Journalism in Late Imperial Russia, eds. Barbara T. Norton and Jehanne M. Gheith (2001. Duke University Press)
    ISBN 978-0-8223-2585-7
    pp. 167–195

External links
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