Sophia did not reply, but took the hint and departed for another visit to Paris. The baby Mariana was deposited with an aunt." Tolstoy hoped to marry Kandaurova, but she rejected him, and before the end of the year he had met his third wife, Natalya Volkenstein, nee Krandinskaya, by whom he had three children. During World War I Tolstoy worked as a war correspondent, and visited England and France, and wrote several essays, and two plays. Emigre Tolstoy opposed the Bolshevik Revolution. To escape living under Bolshevik rule, he moved with his family in 1918 to Odesa, then, as the White Army was driven out of Ukraine, fled to Constantinople, then back to Paris. Unhappy at being, as he put it, "cut off from his homeland", in 1920, he wrote the story Nikita's Childhood, about growing up as an exile. Nikita was their oldest child, born in 1917, who was starting to speak with a French accent. While living in France, Aleksey wrote several plays, and began writing a lengthy historical novel entitled, The Road to Calvary, which tracked the period from 1914 to 1919 including the Russian Civil War, which he had completed by 1921. Reaction to it in Soviet Russia was very hostile. The leading Bolshevik literary critic, Aleksandr Voronsky, editor of Krasnaya Nov described Tolstoy's depiction of the new regime as a "tendentious lie" full of "improbable banalities" and berated the writer for his "countish hatred, his lordly disdain, his spite, bitterness, fury." By 1921, Tolstoy was bothered by the Gallicisms appearing in his son's spoken Russian language. Declaring that his son was becoming a foreigner, Aleksey moved the family to Berlin, which was then one of the main centers of the Russian diaspora. There, he wrote his science fiction novel, Aelita, and became associated with the 'Changing Landmarks' (Смена вех) group whose leading thinker was Nikolai Ustryalov, who were also known National Bolsheviks, because, despite their opposition to communism, they acknowledged that the Bolsheviks had united Russia. While there, he eventually began collaborating with Maxim Gorky on the Pro-Soviet journal Nakanune. Ilya Ehrenburg later recalled:There was a place in Berlin that reminded one of Noah's Ark, where the clean and unclean met peacefully; it was called the House of Arts and was just a common German café where Russian writers gathered on Fridays. Stories were read aloud by Tolstoy ... Apparently, not all the dice