From Orientalism to Cultural Capital: The Myth of Russia in British Literature of the 1920s by Soboleva Olga (review)

Abstract

SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 342 whilst also narrating details of Wells’s three visits to Russia and the Soviet Union. Nadel’s rather reverential attitude is offset by the edgier tone adopted by Galya Diment in her account of the relationship between Wells and his lover Odette Keun, whose first-hand experience of many of the horrors of life in the Soviet Union is juxtaposed with Wells’s more sympathetic stance. If the nine chapters making up the main part of this volume concentrate primarily on Wells’s works, then a welcome appendix of six translations of memoiristic and observational writing by V. D. Nabokov (father of the novelist), Aleksandr Amfiteatrov, Aleksandr Beliaev, Karl Radek and Solomon Lozovsky, Iurii Olesha and Iulii Kagarlitskii contains some evocative pen portraits of the author and his entourage. Reflecting Russian interest in the man, as much as the author, these set the artistic and political influence of Wells’s work into a very human context and remind us of the contingency of the personal passions and antipathies which shape cultural exchange. H. G. Wells and All Things Russian takes its place in the burgeoning field of recent scholarship on Anglo-Russian relations, a field to which its editor has already made so many significant contributions. Wadham College, University of Oxford P. R. Bullock Soboleva, Olga and Wrenn, Angus. From Orientalism to Cultural Capital: The Myth of Russia in British Literature of the 1920s. Peter Lang, Oxford, Bern, Vienna and New York, 2017. xiii + 337 pp. Illustrations. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. €61.95: £49.95: $75.95 (paperback). This book utilizes the theories of Edward Said and Pierre Bourdieu to examine the shift in British perceptions of Russia that occurred in the early twentieth century. The first chapter revisits familiar Russian tropes offered by British travellers to the country, summed up on page 31 as ‘barbarism, despotism, and extreme cold’. The argument is rooted in Said’s scholarship, but it was surprising to see only one reference to Larry Wolff, whose monograph Inventing Eastern Europe (Stanford, CA, 1994) has already done the work of applying Said’s concept to Western Europe’s geographically closer other, and defines it as ‘an intellectual project of demi-Orientalization’ (p. 7). As the first chapter proceeds to describe the turn-about of the British imagination, one is struck by how quickly Russophilia replaced Russophobia, especially when the authors remind us that the two countries waged wars against one another in Crimea in the 1850s and then again at the turn of the century in north-west India. The rebranding testifies to the great power of literary masterpieces, since it was the onslaught of Constance Garnett’s REVIEWS 343 translations that played the crucial role in turning recent military enemies into aesthetic lovers. No author can be credited more with this shift than John Galsworthy, whose contribution, as the authors state in the opening of chapter two, ‘is difficult to overrate’ (p. 65). He viewed Russian authors as more spiritual and more sincere than the English and, therefore, their works as more broadly encompassing of the human condition. Tolstoi occupied the first place among them, and the parallels between War and Peace and Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga are obvious, but it was Turgenev who influenced his aesthetic the most. H.G.WellstravelledtoRussiathreetimesand,asanenthusiasticsupporterof the Russian Revolution, made enemies at home among both English politicians and Russian émigrés. His view of Russia, though not explicitly identified so by the authors, had more to do with Orientalism than cultural capital. ‘Regarding the influence of Russian literature on Wells’ own writing, one can hardly make the case for any definitive impact’ (p. 111), while his visits to the country were ‘dominated by his mental schemes and preconceptions’ (p. 109), which allowed him to see what he wished to see and reinforce his own politics. For this reason, this third chapter of the book also begs for more engagement with Wolff, especially when it describes Wells ‘seeing Russia as a prospective social project’ (p. 130), which echoes Wolff’s assessment of Eastern Europe as ‘the laboratory of ideological exploration’ (p. 236) for French philosophers. J. M. Barrie was another author not...