and when, in 1906, Alexander Kuprin visited Alushta and sent a messenger to Sergeyev-Tsensky, Sergeyev "told the messenger that the letter was intended for his absent uncle." Kuprin, however, was standing nearby and made sure he spoke with Sergeyev. "Such behavior was typical of Sergeyev-Tsensky" and when staying in a famous St. Petersburg hotel known as a place where most of Russia's great writers had stayed, "Sergeyev-Tsensky put a notice on his door saying 'I'm never at home.'" During World War I, the author was again drafted into the army, but was put into the reserve because of his age. Little was heard from the writer during World War I and the following Russian Civil War with lean times forcing Sergeyev to sell off his possessions for food. A story goes that a neighbor who helped him milk a newly acquired cow soon became his wife, Khristina – a college graduate and a gifted pianist. The author turned to historical subjects in 1923, but with the communist rule, it became harder to write freely on any topic. With the rise of Maxim Gorky, however, who admired Sergeyev, things gradually improved. Reportedly, "in letter to Sergeyev-Tsensky, Gorky admitted that [although] they had differences in their attitudes to the human species [and] that Sergeyev-Tsensky did not have the respect for people that he, Gorky, felt, this did not prevent them from sharing many other basic feelings." Even with Gorky's support, however, "Sergeyev-Tsensky had difficulty adapting to Soviet reality and was, in particular, forced to rewrite some of his earlier works.". The work of his life was Russia's Transfiguration which consisted of 12 novels, 3 stories and 2 studies. This work is reportedly comparable with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Red Wheel. Both are monumental works dealing with the period before, during and after the revolution. Sergeyev-Tsensky, however, is, reportedly, "a better stylist than Solzhenitsyn, who keeps inventing non-existent Russian words [and while] both works are biased, Solzhenitsyn's bias is monarchist and self-imposed, while Sergeyev-Tsensky no doubt had to tread carefully to save his life and struggle with himself to appear pro-Soviet.". "The late 1930s were a particularly dangerous time, and to weather it Sergeyev-Tsensky had the brilliant idea to write a work about the Crimean War. His father's library included an excellent selection of books about the siege of Sevastopol, and he set to work, producing three volumes in 1936–1938, the worst years of the