“Thirty years of confusion”: the correspondence between Stephen Mckenna and Stephen Mckenna on the occasion of his visit to Leo Tolstoy

Abstract

This article examines the history of the Irish-born journalist S. McKenna’s visits to Leo Tolstoy. He first visited Yasnaya Polyana in 1905 to interview the writer about the Bloody Sunday. Having studied McKenna’s letters, I clearly understand that he visited Tolstoy twice (the second time was presumably in 1907). In 1927, against the wishes of the journalist himself, the story about his visit to the Russian writer reached the Irish press, in which Tolstoy was presented as a “muzhik” (a peasant, a kerne) sitting behind a dirty tablecloth. Such an image aroused indignation among British Tolstoyans, E. Mood in particular. By an ironic coincidence, Mood was preparing to avenge such an image of Tolstoy not on McKenna himself, whose description was the basis for the article in the Irish magazine, but on his British namesake, the novelist S. McKenna. This article provides an analysis of the correspondence between the two namesakes from October 1927; it discusses the figure of Tolstoy and the history of the journalist McKenna’s visits to Yasnaya Polyana. McKenna’s figure is of great interest both in the context of a more global topic about Tolstoy’s relationship with Ireland and in terms of biographical issues.