Reporting Realities: Henry Noel Brailsford

This chapter gives an account of the journalism of Henry Noel Brailsford who travelled extensively in the collapsed Austro-Hungarian Empire, where he met with Béla Kun, leader of the short-lived Hungarian Socialist Republic; and in the newly formed Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, where he was able to report in detail the working of a sovietised factory. The chapter unpacks Brailsford’s highly critical accounts of the Treaty of Versailles and the formation of the League of Nations, and offers a theoretical account of the ontology of journalism based on practical language acquisition and movement through the world, as an alternative to high theory and its emphasis on language-as-such.

‘The Two Internationals’

This chapter outlines the attempts of journalists in the New Age and the New Statesman to understand and evaluate the events of the Russian Revolution as they occurred, with reference to such figures as Alfred Orage and Julius West. It then describes elements of early nationalities discourse in the writings of Leonard Woolf and J.A. Hobson, who debated the potential of a League of Nations as the basis of a postwar peace. These discourses about the Revolution and League would begin to change as the Revolution developed and Woodrow Wilson threw American weight behind the League.

Introduction

The introduction makes a link between the mention of Russia and Lithuania in Eliot’s The Waste Land in order to introduce the theme of the study in terms of the geopolitics of the period from 1917, which was characterised by the dismantling or destabilising of the European empress and the beginning of a process of de-imperialisation. The focus of the study will be on the adjacent and intersecting discourses in Britain concerning the Russian Revolution, nationalities, and the formation of the League of Nations, with reference to the literature and journalism of the period.

Coda

The conclusion briefly reflects on the myopia that the Russian Revolution itself generated, and suggests that in British literature it was Aldous Huxley, just a few years after the period considered in this study, who was the first to take a distance from events and from the particularities of the Revolution and the League to ask what a future, world state might look like.

Fiction and Story of the Russian Revolution

This chapter gives an account of a selection of the earliest fiction and memoirs to come out of the British encounter with the Russian Revolution, including work by Douglas Goldring, Harold Williams, William Gerhardie, Hugh Walpole, W.L. Blennerhassett, Ernest John Harrison, and Oliver Baldwin. Of these, it is Gerhardie who made the most of his experience as a British army officer and of his polyglot talents in forming his novel Futility, while others veer between adventure, conspiracy, propaganda and fantasy.

British Visitors to Russia

This chapter deals with the writings of some of the British visitors to Russia, including John Cournos, the modernist writer, who produced an early anti-Bolshevik pamphlet; Robert Wilton, the anti-Semitic correspondent for the Times, and Michael Farbman, correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, who offered highly contrasting early accounts; Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells, whose accounts were distinguished by the cultural status of their authors, the latter much noted for an interview with Lenin; and Francis McCullagh, the former journalist, now British officer and agent taken prisoner by the Bolsheviks, who offered quite contrasting perspectives to those of the official visitors.

The Criterion, the English Trotsky and the Idea of Europe

This chapter narrates the moment in which T.S. Eliot came to identify the Russian Revolution as the main event of the war and the motive for a re-evaluation of Europe’s position in the world. Eliot’s review of Trotsky in the Criterion introduces an account of the extensive and prominent publication of Trotsky’s works in Britain and responses to them by such figures as Maynard Keynes and even Stanley Baldwin, and the chapter concludes with an account of Valéry’s role in shaping Eliot’s thought on Europe, in the famous essay which he wrote for Middleton Murry’s Athenaeum.

Conveying the New Russian Culture: From Eden and Cedar Paul to René Fülöp-Miller

In the early years of the Soviet state, a small number of commentators sought to give an account of the new Russian culture to outsiders. Among these were Eden and Cedar Paul, advocates of workers’ education, keen advocates of Lunacharsky and Proletcult, who used their numerous translations as well as their own books and articles to advance their own version of workers’ culture based on Marx, Bergson and Freud. John Cournos and D.S. Mirsky were among those who described Proletcult for the British public, while Huntly Carter gave an account of developments in theatre. The English translation of René Fülöp-Miller’s The Mind and Face of Bolshevism gave British readers the most extensive account of the new Russian culture.

Clare Sheridan: A Sculptor in the Kremlin

This chapter narrates the visit to Moscow of the sculptor Clare Sheridan, cousin of Winston Churchill, who caused a scandal when she accepted an invitation to the Kremlin to create busts of the Bolshevik leadership, including Lenin and Trotsky. Her account of the sittings, first published in the Times and subsequently as a book, offered a remarkable account of her sittings, notably her dealings with Trotsky. As a consequence of her visit she was rejected by British high society and accepted a role as a correspondent which took her to Ireland, where she interviewed Rory O’Connor at the Four Courts, Italy, where she was assaulted by Mussolini, and Turkey, which became one of the sites in her first, semi-autobiographical novel, Stella Defiant. The novel, subtitled ‘The Passionate History of a Modernist Woman’, narrates its protagonist’s repudiation of modernism in favour of communism, and subsequent rejection of the latter in favour of Islam.

Masaryk and the New Europe

This chapter offers a detailed account of Tomáš Masaryk’s extensive attempts to steer nationalities discourse in Britain, with a view to securing the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the creation of the new Czecho-Slovakian state. It describes Masaryk’s relationship with British supporters such as Robert William Seton-Watson, and their creation of the journal The New Europe as a platform for advocating total victory in the war, and articulating the cultural right to independent existence of the constituent nations of the Habsburg Empire.