Katherine Mansfield and Russia

Abstract

It is hard to overestimate how huge the “Russian influence” was on both Mansfield’s craft as a short story writer and her life choices, including, even, whom she most trusted to treat her tuberculosis. Growing up in New Zealand, young Mansfield began devouring Russian books in translation. The authors she read included Marie Bashkirtseff, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky. After she moved to England, which at the time was undergoing its own passionate affair with all things Russian, Mansfield also discovered Russian art and Russian ballet. Later she became, with S. S. Koteliansky, a co-translator of Chekhov’s and Leonid Andreyev’s letters and autobiographical writings. And yet, other than Joanna Woods’ Katerina: The Russian World of Katherine Mansfield (2001), there have not been any significant publications dealing with this extraordinary aspect of Mansfield’s evolution as an artist and a human being. This volume goes a long way to remedy that. It includes contributions by both English and Russian scholars and explores many aspects of Mansfield’s personal and artistic response to Russian literature, culture, philosophy, and art, as well as to the actual Russians she met in England and — towards the end of her life — in France.