RUSSIAN LITERATURE AND BRITISH MODERNISM FROM THE STANDPOINT OF NON-LINEAR CROSS-CULTURAL INTERFERENCES

[Review:] Beasley R. Russomania. Russian Culture and the Creation of British Modernism, 1881–1922. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 560 p.

Russomania

Russomania: Russian Culture and the Creation of British Modernism provides a new account of modernist literature’s emergence in Britain. British writers played a central role in the dissemination of Russian literature and culture during the early twentieth century, and their writing was transformed by the encounter. This study restores the thick history of that moment, by analyzing networks of dissemination and reception to recover the role of neglected as well as canonical figures, and institutions as well as individuals. The dominant account of British modernism privileges a Francophile genealogy, but the turn-of-the century debate about the future of British writing was a triangular debate, a debate not only between French and English models, but between French, English, and Russian models. Francophile modernists associated Russian literature, especially the Tolstoyan novel, with an uncritical immersion in ‘life’ at the expense of a mastery of style, and while individual works might be admired, Russian literature as a whole was represented as a dangerous model for British writing. This supposed danger was closely bound up with the politics of the period, and this book investigates how Russian culture was deployed in the close relationships between writers, editors, and politicians who made up the early twentieth-century intellectual class—the British intelligentsia. Russomania argues that the most significant impact of Russian culture is not to be found in stylistic borrowings between canonical authors, but in the shaping of the major intellectual questions of the period: the relation between language and action, writer and audience, and the work of art and lived experience. The resulting account brings an occluded genealogy of early modernism to the fore, with a different arrangement of protagonists, different critical values, and stronger lines of connection to the realist experiments of the Victorian past, and the anti-formalism and revived romanticism of the 1930s and 1940s future.

‘I’ve Put a Yule Log on Your Grate’: Lynette Roberts’s ‘Naïve’ Modernism

In this article, I suggest that Lynette Roberts develops a ‘naïve’ modernism that emphasizes tropes of folk art, home-made craft, and creative labour as a therapeutic response to war and a means of carving out a public role for the woman writer in the post-war world. Bringing high modernist strategies down to earth through an engagement with localized rural cultures, she strives to bridge the divide between the public and the private in order to open up a space for the woman writer within public life. As part of my discussion, I draw on Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s contention that literary style—conceived broadly as ‘attitude, stance, posture, and consciousness’—is crucial to modernist writers’ attempts to think in—and beyond—the nation. Embracing a liberating openness to experience and ‘amateurish’ passion, Roberts’s ‘home-made’ style challenges imperial constructions of nationhood centred in authority and control with a more collective, constructivist, improvisatory concept of belonging (Roberts 2005, p. xxxvi). Probing the intersections between folk art, national commitments, and global feminist projects in British modernism, I investigate how a radically transformed ‘naïve’ subtends the emergence of a new kind of feminist modernism, rooted in concepts of collective making and creative labour.

Shaping Gender: Femininity and Masculinity Through Sartorial Fashion in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway — published in 1925 — not only represents a major work regarding its literary techniques during the years of British Modernism, but also constitutes a critique of the social system of the post-war years, which was experiencing a change regarding the strict Victorian stereotypes of gender. Social status linked to sartorial fashion is a recurring element in the novel when considering these configurations. Woolf vindicates through different characters’ reflections a rearrangement of femininity and masculinity.

Garnett, Edward (1868–1937)

Although he wrote little of artistic merit himself, Edward Garnett was very influential on British modernism. Like Ezra Pound, Garnett had an uncanny ear for good literature. As a manuscript reader for publishers, he was instrumental in the discovery or fostering of many important writers during this period, among them Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, John Galsworthy, Edward Thomas, Robert Frost, W. H. Hudson, Liam O’Flaherty, Sean O’Faolain, Henry Green and T. E. Lawrence.

Nash, Paul (1889–1946)

Paul Nash was an artist who responded both to a British tradition of landscape painting, specifically to the art of William Blake, Samuel Palmer, and J.M.W. Turner, and to new developments in European modernism. He worked across several media: painting in watercolor and oils, book illustrations, design, and photography. He was inspired by literature, including the poetry of W.B. Yeats, the prose of Sir Thomas Browne and artist-poets like Blake and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He was himself a writer of essays, and of letters published posthumously. Born in London, he achieved early success in the London art world, contributing to the crisis of brilliance (Henry Tonks) that shaped modern art in Britain before the Great War. He served as an official war artist in both world wars, and painted some of the most famous images of conflict, including Wire (1918), The Menin Road (1919), Battle of Britain (1941) and Totes Meer (1940–1941). Between the wars, he became a leading figure in British modernism, co-founding Unit One in 1933 and exhibiting at the International Surrealist Exhibitions in London in 1936 (which he helped to organize) and in Paris in 1938.