Departures of note

In April 1906, Ivan Narodny organized a dinner at the A Club on Fifth Avenue in honor of Maxim Gorky, who had arrived in New York City with Narodny to raise support for the Revolutionary Movement in Russia. The dinner provided the setting for the announcement of a new committee backing the proposed Russian Revolution, a committee that included Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Robert J. Collier, and Finley Peter Dunne. Narodny, a Russian émigré who had come to the United States with Gorky, was bitter about the suppression of intellectuals in Russia, and he later wrote that his own efforts to promote Russian art and music in American periodicals were branded by officials as 'the dangerous efforts of an agitator.'

Born Jaan Sibbul in Estonia in 1870, Narodny claimed involvement in revolutionary activity in Kronstadt during the 1905 Russian Revolution, and FBI files recorded that he had been imprisoned in Estonia in 1898. He also wrote about forming a Russian musical society with four women, including his wife, and recalled: 'We were called terrorists, and a systematic agitation was started by the government's officials against our activity.' After moving to the United States, he continued to face scrutiny: in 1915, the Russian Imperial Government placed advertisements in New York newspapers to undermine his self-proclaimed 'Russian Chamber of Commerce,' and he was involved in the arms trade, selling munitions to Russia via Japan and Vladivostok.

Beyond his political activities, Narodny was also a writer. In 1912, The San Francisco Call published his story 'The Artificial Man,' and he is considered one of Estonia's first science fiction writers; two of his stories later appeared in The Pilgrims Almanach. In 1923, his play The Skygirl, depicting life in the future, was staged. In 1917, following the February Revolution, he presented himself as head of the Russian-American Asiatic Corporation and announced that the Russian Duma was forming the 'United States of Russia.' He died in 1953.