In September 1890, Alexander Ivanovich Ertel rented the Yempelevo hamlet, located near Voronezh, and moved there with his family. In a letter to the writer and philosopher Pavel Alexandrovich Bakunin dated November 5, 1890, he described his new residence, “I found a pretty estate: with an old fruit garden, clean ponds, decent buildings. The land is small, of course — 114 dessiatins; needless to say, it is our usual chernozem black soil. The garden has a nice alley, a lot of raspberries, gooseberries, currants, 400 old apple trees and over 150 young trees. The railroad station is ten versts away, the city of Voronezh — thirty versts; behind the garden is the village.”
Soon after moving to the estate, the writer witnessed with his own eyes the plight in the neighboring villages and hamlets, inflicted by a bad harvest and a terrible famine that followed. The disaster covered a vast territory of South and Central Russia, affecting the Voronezh and Nizhny Novgorod Governorates most of all.
In November 1891, Alexander Ivanovich Ertel, together with several residents of the parish of the village of Makarye, which included seven villages, organized the “Makarye Trusteeship” to help the starving villagers. Ertel dedicated all his efforts and means to the poor: he arranged soup kitchens and the distribution of free flour for peasants, organized public works, bought horses and raised money through newspaper advertisements. It was during these hungry times that an elementary school for peasant children was opened in the village of Makarye on November 1, 1892.
Ertel had no time left for writing. On March 8, 1892, Ertel wrote to the publicist Sergey Nikolayevich Krivenko and the writer Konstantin Mikhailovich Stanyukovich,
