H. G. Wells and All Things Russian by Diment Galya (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 341 Diment, Galya (ed.). H. G. Wells and All Things Russian. Anthem Press, London and New York,2019. xv + 238 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Indexes. £80.00: $125.00. Russian writers’ interest in the work of H. G. Wells, as well as Wells’s own interest in Russia itself, seem so logical, obvious and ubiquitous that it comes as some surprise that, as Galya Diment claims, ‘this book is the first one to devote itself entirely to this theme’ (p. 1). Building, nonetheless, on a substantial bibliography of existing scholarship, H. G. Wells and All Things Russian is subdivided into three sections, exploring first his reception in Russia before World War Two, then his post-war afterlife, and finally traces of Russia in Wells’s own oeuvre. Throughout, there is a refreshing variety of heterogeneous models of influence and intertextuality. Thus, Maxim Shadurski revisits the largely familiar topic of Wells and Evgenii Zamiatin in order to interrogate each author’s attitude to utopia and social progress. The utopian theme is picked up by Muireann Maguire in a comparison of the satirical fictions of Mikhail Bulgakov and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii, in which a number of Wellsian echoes are identified. Zoran Kuzmanovich offers an elegant, playful, even sceptical reading of Vladimir Nabokov, a writer who claimed to ‘loathe science fiction’ (p. 54). Kuzmanovich’s essay also offers welcome reflections on how we might define and interpret literary influence. Richard Boyechko’s chapter maps the field of Soviet science fiction writing, focusing in particular on the work of Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii, and exposing the ways in which ‘Soviet authors freely interpreted Wells’s many barbs directed toward the uneducated and uncultured masses as referencing the meshchanstvo, their own “un-intelligentsia”’ (p. 93). Patrick Parrinder’s pithy contribution usefully widens the parameters of the volume; taking Iulii Kagarlitskii’s 1963 study of Wells as its central text, it exposes ambiguities both in Wells’s attitude to Marxism, and in Marxist understandings of Wells’s world-view. This theme is picked up by Olga Sobolev and Angus Wrenn in their examination of a number of theatrical and cinematic representations of Wells. Here, Wells appears as the archetypical ‘fellow traveller’, often depicted in conversation with Lenin, who invites him to ‘come and visit us in ten years’ time!’ in order to admire the Soviet Union’s future social, economic and scientific achievements. If these six chapters chart a variegated chronology of Wells’s Russian reception, the next three focus more specifically on Wells’s own interest in Russia. David Rampton offers a compendious reading of Babes in the Darkling Wood, a 1940 novel of ideas, analysing it as a heuristic commentary on Wells’s own ambivalent attempt to come to terms with what the Soviet experiment had become under Stalin. Ira Nadel traces the personal, aesthetic and ideological affinities characterizing the friendship between Wells and Maksim Gor´kii, 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...