Hughes, Michael. Beyond Holy Russia: The Life and Times of Stephen Graham (review)

Abstract

SEER, 93, 3, JULY 2015 558 This is a fine book, and it’s a real shame that it is marred by awful editing. Typos, inconsistent spellings, awkward translations and ungrammatical sentences abound. Some sections seem disconnected; often, no context is given — or else appears a few hundred pages later — and I had to read this book with an encyclopaedia at hand. The trouble was definitely worth the effort, but I wished that Brill — not least considering the hefty price of the book — took their responsibilities as publishers seriously and thereby showed respect for both their authors and readers. Oriel College, University of Oxford J. Mannherz Hughes, Michael. Beyond Holy Russia: The Life and Times of Stephen Graham. Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, 2014. xii + 355 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £32.95; £18.95; £5.95 (ebook). Born in 1884 and dying just short of his ninety-first birthday, Stephen Graham led a rich and multi-faceted life, to which Michael Hughes does full justice in this detailed, annotated and meticulously written biography. Commenting on the obituaries for Graham in The Times and the Daily Telegraph which focused largely on his unique contribution to the public’s understanding of Russia, Hughes writes that ‘he seemed in death to be frozen as a thirty-year old figure tramping across the vast spaces of the Tsarist Empire, in search of a half-mythical world of icons and golden cupolas’ (p. 3). Yet although Graham’s interest in Russia was never to falter ever since he had come across a battered copy of Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment as a young man, he was to make his mark in so many other spheres of activity — as journalist, essayist, literary critic and astonishingly prolific author with over fifty books to his name. Intellectual achievements of this kind, however varied and wide-ranging, were nevertheless only part of the story of this extraordinary man. The reference to this figure ‘tramping across the vast spaces of Russia’ is no hyperbole. For Graham was a chronically restless person, an indefatigable traveller, forever setting off on new expeditions not only to Russia, but also to Europe, Central Asia, South Africa and the USA. And, as Hughes makes clear, such adventures were far more than the typical response to an urge to see more of the world. They became a form of pilgrimage, a spiritual quest, which gave him insights into himself as well as the country through which he was passing. In his most popular book, The Gentle Art of Tramping, he himself described tramping as ‘a way of approach, to Nature, to your fellow-man, to a foreign nation, to beauty, to life itself’ (quoted on p. 215). Although observations of this kind, frequently encountered in Graham’s writing, possess a touch of the REVIEWS 559 pretentious, perhaps even banal, they were undoubtedly a genuine reflection of his feelings, of someone who was at heart an idealist, viewing the world and past events through a partially rose-tinted, partially mythologizing lens. Such sentiments went hand in hand with an increasingly conservative outlook that had its unattractive and distinctly darker side. Although it was not always clear what Graham was trying to say, some of his judgements pointed to apparent prejudices that were to cause considerable outrage in Britain. These included views that bordered on the antisemitic, as in his support for the Russian government’s harsh attitude and policies towards Jews. Whether or not this was actually the case, there can be no doubt that Graham was never afraid to swim against the tide by, for example, openly expressing his bitter opposition to British government policies — most notably with regard to the Yugoslav resistance movement during World War Two and the switch in official support, away from Mihailović’s nationalist Chetniks and towards Tito’s Communist partisans. Just as Graham himself found it difficult to settle in one place, except when forced to by circumstances that were outside his control, so the view of this protean figure that emerges here is constantly shifting, with different and often surprising aspects of his personality coming into focus. His service with the ScotsGuardsintheGreatWardemonstratedhisresilienceandhisabilitytocope with hardship and danger. Some of the...