For most, the move abroad was impelled by a simple instinct for self-preservation, while revolutionary evangelism was the motive for others. In the case of Nicholas Chaikovsky, however, his arrival in New York in late 1875, with his heavily pregnant wife, had a quite different explanation. For whilst the other members of the circle that bore his name were still risking arrest in their struggle to galvanise the peasant masses, Chaikovsky had succumbed to a growing sense of alienation from precisely the ‘adventurism of the intelligentsia’ that he himself had done so much to foster in the preceding years.Plunged into a maelstrom of spiritual self-doubt, Chaikovsky had experienced an epiphany whilst passing through the provincial town of Oryol in the spring of 1874, when he had chanced to meet Alexander Malinkov, the charismatic leader of a religious cult. ‘In every man there is a divine element,’ Malinkov taught. ‘It is sufficient to appeal to it, to find the God in man, for no coercion to be necessary.
