War Work

Alliance with tsarist Russia during the First World War presented a propaganda challenge for the British government: many believed that to support Russia against Germany was to support a barbarous nation against its own subjects, and to risk tipping the balance of power in Europe away from democracy. Russian literature was strategically deployed by the War Propaganda Bureau as evidence of Russia’s civilization, and writers and critics were marshalled to overturn the anti-tsarist interpretations of Russian literature put in place by the Russian populists. Russian literature now appeared in a new guise, read not through realism but symbolism, a movement introduced to Britain through the performances of the Ballets Russes, the travel writings of Stephen Graham, and reappraisals of Dostoevsky’s writings. The chapter concludes by examining the fiction of D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and John Middleton Murry, which resists wartime propaganda, and finds in Russian literature a critique of Western civilisation and its war.

‘The New Spirit’ in Theatre

The second interchapter examines discussions of Russian theatre in Britain. In a period of transition for British theatre, there was a call to look abroad for inspiration. This interchapter reviews the obstacles to the development of an art theatre movement in Britain, and details three potential conduits of Russian innovations in staging and design: Edward Gordon Craig’s collaboration with the Moscow Art Theatre, the staging of Russian symbolist plays by Edith Craig’s Pioneer Players, and the journalism of Huntly Carter, whose many articles on theatre, opera, art, ballet, and—after the war—film, promoted a ‘new spirit’ in the avant-garde, which he increasingly located in Russia.

Against the Machine

The final chapter of Russomania explores how the war and the Russian revolutions of 1917 transform the role of Russian literature for British-based writers. The first part of the chapter examines debates about Russian and French literature in The Egoist, the home of imagist poetry. It focuses in particular on the emergence of style as a key criterion of literary modernity, championed by the editors Richard Aldington and T. S. Eliot, and the process of its rejection as materialist by Egoist contributors, John Cournos and John Gould Fletcher. Their aesthetics take on a particular, anti-Bolshevik pertinence in the wake of the October Revolution, which Cournos witnessed as a member of the Foreign Office’s propaganda bureau in Petrograd. The chapter surveys British knowledge of the Russian revolutions and early Soviet culture, and analyzes the literary response they elicited..

Aspects of the Novel

This chapter addresses the debates about the future of the British novel in the years leading up the First World War. The initial focus is Ford Madox Ford’s English Review. By reading the magazine forward from the ‘Art of Fiction’ debates of the 1880s, rather than—as is usual—back through canonical modernism, we see how Ford deliberated staged comparisons between what he saw as the two distinct possibilities for the future of modern British literature: the ‘artists’ drawing on a French, specifically Flaubertian, tradition with which Ford aligned his own ‘impressionism’, and the ‘propagandists’ deriving from English and Russian nineteenth-century novels. The literary relevance of the anti-tsarist politics of the magazine is discussed, and the chapter concludes by analysing Joseph Conrad’s work of the period.

The Whitechapel Group

This first interchapter tells the early history of ‘the Whitechapel Group’, the network of Russian Jewish artists and writers who grew up together in the East End of London. We tend to separate the members of this group into associations with different modernist sets—David Bomberg and Jacob Kramer with Wyndham Lewis’s vorticists, Mark Gertler with the Bloomsbury group, John Rodker with James Joyce and Ezra Pound, and Isaac Rosenberg with the war poets. When the Whitechapel Group’s collective identity has been considered, it has been almost exclusively in terms of the members’ Jewish ethnicity, but this chapter examines the significance of the other shared aspect of the Whitechapel Group’s heritage—that is, their families’ lives in, and departure from, the Russian Empire.

Introduction

On 8 February 1929, Constance Garnett wrote to her friend H. E. Bates, I was told yesterday of a very fine picture of Duncan Grant’s called “Crime and Punishment”—a girl sitting on a sofa with her head in her hands, apparently quite overwhelmed, with a book lying open face downwards beside her. I forget whether you have read ‘The Karamazovs’ & ‘The Idiot’—both of them finer to my mind....

Conclusion

The October Revolution, and the new Russia it generated, inevitably changed the way British literary culture responded to Russian literature. The chaikovtsy’s presentation of Russian literature in the 1880s and 1890s as the authentic expression of the Russian people, ‘the medium for expressing their aspirations, their conceptions of national life, or their ideals’, as Kropotkin had written in 1905, had been profoundly attractive to many British writers and critics....

Modern Languages

The third interchapter chapter looks at how Russian language and literature was taught and learned in Britain. While the main chapters show that the British canon of Russian literature was largely the creation of a small number of amateur translators and critics, at the turn of the century the study of Russian was becoming professionalized, with increasing numbers of schools and universities offering courses in Russian. Political imperatives shaped styles of teaching, and in particular the role of literature on Russian courses. The narrow association of Russian literature with realism, deployed by the populists of the nineteenth century, also served the purposes of those who promoted the teaching of Russian as a means of understanding a political and, it was hoped, commercial ally.

Modern Worlds, Simple Lives

This chapter analyses the work of Russian émigrés, especially the members of the Chaikovsky circle, for whom the promotion of Russian literature was part of a campaign to interest the British people and their political leaders in their revolutionary politics. In their articles, translations, and collaborations with British writers, journalists, translators and publishers, this group were able to establish an early canon of Russian literature, and shape its interpretation. As well as forming close strategic relationships with members of the British liberal establishment and socialist groups, Russian émigrés were active in the networks of ‘ethical socialist’, simple life, and Tolstoyan movements. It is in these more literary, more anarchist, versions of socialism that we see the roots of a modernist literature that looked to Russian, rather than French, literature and culture as its model.