Red Flowers and a Shabby Coat: Russian Literature and the Presentation of ‘Madness’ in Virginia Woolf 's Mrs Dalloway

Abstract

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Great Britain experienced a very peculiar form of ‘folly’ commonly referred to as the ‘Russian fever’ or ‘Russian craze’.1 Russian writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lev Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Nikolay Gogol and Vsevolod Garshin were very popular both with the reading public and with major British writers. VirginiaWoolf, for example, states in her groundbreaking essay ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919/1925): ‘The most elementary remarks upon modern English fiction can hardly avoid some mention of the Russian influence, and if the Russians are mentioned one runs the risk of feeling that to write of any fiction save theirs is a waste of time [. . . ].’2 While most of her contemporaries must have been primarily fascinated by the exotic quality of Russian literature, Virginia Woolf admired above all its superior aesthetic merits. In the novels of Dostoevsky –whom she once called ‘the greatest writer ever born’3 – for instance, she praised the author’s gift of presenting states of consciousness in all their complexity, while Chekhov’s stories impressed her with their superior aesthetic unity disguised as inconclusiveness.4 At the same time, Virginia Woolf was acutely conscious of the dangers involved in the intensive reception of other writers’ works. According to Woolf, the Russians did not just provide English authors with inspiration, they also represented a threat to their creative integrity. In ‘Re-Reading Meredith’ she at once applauds and regrets the innovative power of the ‘Russian influence’: ‘The Russians might well overcome us, for they seemed to possess an entirely new conception of the novel and one that was larger, saner and much more profound than ours. [. . . ] Could any English novel survive in the furnace