Vladimir Chertkov

The Great Sin (1905)

The PSS apparatus records his part in The Great Sin: the cuts, a separately printed introduction, the Free Word (Свободное слово) edition, and the English translation.

The cuts

He came to Yasnaya Polyana from England on 24 May 1905 and proposed a series of cuts in the essay.¹ They were accepted; two whole chapters came out.² The diary, 6 June: “I shortened The Great Sin, threw out much. I regret it.”³ The cut material is printed in the PSS as variants.

A Necessary Revolution

The first version of the introduction, set in proof for the Free Word press and then replaced, was printed in the paper Svobodnoe slovo, No. 17–18, under the title A Necessary Revolution.⁴ One paragraph of it was moved out of the introduction and printed after it with an editorial note.⁵ The paragraph says that the life of a people is formed “not as a result of external forms which may be imposed on it by external influences, but by the inner activity of individual persons”.⁶

His reason, given in a letter of 8 July 1905 (new style) and reported in the PSS commentary: the paragraph stands in contradiction with everything before it, where the need for an outward change in the forms of land use is asserted.⁷ In the same printing he changed “all these phenomena arise from the fundamental, chief evil” to “are connected with” it, because the evil of landed property itself arises from a still more basic evil, human egoism.⁸

Publication

The Free Word press printed the essay abroad as No. 98, as The Great Sin with the subtitle On Landed Property.⁹ The other 1905 printings were the July issue of Russkaya Mysl and a Posrednik brochure.¹⁰

The English translation

With Isabella Fyvie Mayo he made the 1905 English translation, A Great Iniquity, printed in The Times (London) and as a Free Age Press pamphlet.¹¹ The title, with “a” for “the” and “iniquity” for “sin”, and a translator’s footnote on the conditional endorsement in chapter IX belong to that edition. Who chose the English title is open (see Isabella Fyvie Mayo).

Open questions

• Who chose the English title A Great Iniquity.
• The Times date: the dive’s work record gives 1 August 1905; the PSS commentary says July.
• His own words on the cuts: the dive has his 8 July letter only as the PSS commentary reports it (archive АТБ), not the letter itself.

Dive provenance

• 1905-the-great-sin (2026-06-30) — the cuts and the diary’s regret (E19, E26); the separated paragraph and the recorded reason (E15, E28); the Free Word publication (E20); the A Great Iniquity co-translation. Written as an enriches-live addition in the entity steer, 2026-08-12; converted to the footnote style 2026-10-02, and the A Necessary Revolution account corrected to the PSS commentary (the title belongs to the whole first introduction, not the one paragraph).