Ariadna Vladimirovna Tyrkova-Williams Papers, 1897-1961

Ariadna Vladimirovna Tyrkova-Williams (Ариадна Владимировна Тыркова; 1869-1962), was a Russian émigré writer, journalist, and leader of the Russian Kadet Party (Konstitut︠s︡ionno-demokraticheskai︠a︡ partii︠a︡).

Ariadna Tyrkova was born in 1869 in St. Petersburg. She was a daughter of Vladimir Alekseevich Tyrkov, a justice of the peace, and Sofiia Karlovna Gaili. One of seven children, Tyrkova spent her early childhood on the family estate, "Vergezha," in Novgorod Province. While she was a secondary school student in St. Petersburg, her older brother was implicated in a plot to assassinate the tsar and was sentenced to 20 years of hard labor in Siberia. Expelled from the Obolenskaia gimnazia, Tyrkova finished her studies attending the "Vysshie зhenskie (Bestuzhevskie) kursy."

In 1890 Ariadna Tyrkova married Alfred Nikolaevich Borman, an engineer. They had two children, Arkadii and Sofiia, and after seven years of marriage they were divorced. It was after the divorce that Tyrkova began to earn her living as a writer and journalist.

In 1903 Tyrkova was arrested on the Russo-Finnish border for possession of the outlawed liberal journal Osvobozhdenie. Condemned to a prison term, she fled to Germany, residing chiefly in Stuttgart with the family of Petr Struve. In 1905 Tyrkova returned to St. Petersburg and to her career as a journalist, writing first for the newspaper Rus', and after 1911 for Russkaia molva. She became actively involved in the newly formed Kadet Party, served as a member of its Central Committee and headed its delegates to the Petrograd City Council.

It was at this time that she met and married the British journalist Harold Williams, a native of New Zealand. In 1918 she left with him for London where she helped to establish the London based Russian Liberation Committee and later the Paris centered Russian National Committee. She returned to the South of Russia briefly in 1919 accompanying her husband on assignment, but by the end of 1920 Harold and Ariadna Williams were permanently settled in London. Harold Williams was appointed foreign editor of the Times and Tyrkova-Williams resumed her writing career. She contributed articles to Vozrozhdenie, wrote an account of the first year of the Russian Revolution entitled From Liberty to Brest-Litovsk (London, 1919), collaborated with her husband on the novel Hosts of Darkness (London, 1921), and worked on the first of two volumes of The Life of Pushkin.

After the death of Harold Williams in November 1928, Tyrkova-Williams devoted her time to writing her husband's biography, which was published in 1935 under the title A Cheerful Giver. Obliged once again to earn her living as a writer, she contributed articles to the English press and wrote regularly for the Riga Russian language periodical Segodnia.

Tyrkova-Williams spent the war years in France with her son Arkadii and his family; it was at this time that she began writing her memoirs. In 1951 she emigrated together with her son's family to the United States, residing first in New York and then in Washington D.C., where she died in 1962 at the age of ninety-two.

Arkadii Borman, Aug. 31, 1891 – May 20, 1974