Tolstoy broke off his studies to dedicate himself to writing. The couple decided to emigrate in 1907, and arrived in Paris in January 1908, to join a wide network of emigre Russian writers and artists, including Nikolay Gumilyov, Valery Bryusov, Konstantin Balmont, Andrei Bely, Maximilian Voloshin. He and Gumilyov launched a periodical that folded after one issue for lack of funds. Tolstoy's first book of poems, Lyric, was published in 1907, at his own expence, but in later life he was embarrassed by it and preferred to forget it. His second poetry collection, Beyond the Blue Rivers (1908) was his last. In a letter to his adoptive father, he complained that the name 'Tolstoy' meant that people had high expectations of him, though Voloshin suggested to him that it was an advantage. One young poet he met mistook him for Leo Tolstoy, who had died in 1910 aged 82. In 1908, he learnt from his ex-wife that their son had died from meningitis. According to Nikolai Tolstoy, Sophia claimed in a pious official memoir published in Moscow in 1973 that Alexey, 'took the child's death very much to heart.' One may question this. The father, after all, made no attempt to visit his ailing son before his lonely end, nor did he return for the funeral (though he did make another, business journey to Petersburg from Paris). As subsequent events were to show, he could evince extraordinary callousness toward individual members of the human race, whatever his broadly liberal viewpoint toward the species at large. Return to Russia Aleksey and Sophia returned to St Petersburg in January 1909. By 1910 his success as a writer enabled them to move into a flat along Nevsky Prospekt, but because of her ex-husband's refusal to grant a divorce, when she became pregnant, she returned to Paris in May 1911, where he joined her, so that he could be registered under French law as the father of their daughter, Marianna. They returned to St Petersburg later in the year, but moved to Moscow in 1912. In summer 1914 Tolstoy and Dymshitz took a vacation in Koktebel, in the Crimea, where he met a 17 year old ballerina named Margarita Kandaurova. Nikolai Tolstoy wrote that "The break with Sophia was as abrupt as it had been with Julia. Out on a stroll, Alexey said significantly, 'I feel that this winter you're going to leave me.'