Russomania: Russian Culture and the Creation of British Modernism, 1881–1922 by Rebecca Beasley

Abstract

Reviewed by: Russomania: Russian Culture and the Creation of British Modernism, 1881–1922 by Rebecca Beasley Tatiana Kuzmic Beasley, Rebecca. Russomania: Russian Culture and the Creation of British Modernism, 1881–1922. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2020. xvi + 533 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £93.00: $125.00. Much has been written about the admiration prominent British modernists, most notably Virginia Woolf, had for the giants of nineteenth-century Russian literature once it became available to them in Constance Garnett’s and others’ translations. Rebecca Beasley’s new book emphasizes the important role that Russian writing played in the debates that shaped the very definition of modernism as it follows the course of the battle between French and Russian influences. The French tradition emphasized style, which has since become known as the defining feature of modernism, while the Russian became a repository for old-time romantic values, characterized by a kind of ‘linguistic optimism’ (p. 27) in its portrayal of individual life experiences and, by extension, a belief that a national literature could be representative of national identity. It ultimately lost the battle, however, as Francophile modernism became the main narrative about modernism and occluded Russia’s role, which Beasley’s Russomania brings to light. The book is somewhat unusually structured, with four lengthy chapters and three much shorter ‘interchapters’ that address lesser-known Russophile players in the development of British modernism. Each section brims with detail that at times seems overwhelming, but Beasley is deft at leading the reader through it, providing intermittent summaries of previous chapters that help to hold this immense book together. The story of British Russomania begins with the arrival of Russian émigrés to England in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and their collaboration with British socialists in translating and promoting Russian literature. The two main groups in this initial period were the Chaikovskii circle, which garnered sympathy for Russian revolutionary politics, and the Tolstoyan movement [End Page 537] with its emphasis on simplicity in both life and art. Chapter two focuses on the battle between the Francophile and Russophile strands of English modernism as played out on the pages of Ford Maddox Ford’s English Review, providing a different narrative to the accepted belief that the journal merely recorded the passing of the torch to the second generation of modernists. While firmly on the side of the Franchophiles as ‘artists’ and promoters of ‘imaginative literature’, Ford published their pieces alongside those he deemed ‘propagandist’ and ‘factual’, while himself having to strike a delicate balance between his own Tory politics and appeasing his revolutionary brother-in-law, on whose funding the publication of the journal increasingly depended. Russian literature acquired a new role as the First World War approached and the British public needed convincing that Russia was a worthier ally than Germany. The first generation of Russian émigrés in Britain separated Russian literature from the Russian state in order to win British approval, but these two now needed to be aligned if the British public was going to be comfortable with what was widely perceived as a brutal tsarist regime as a new war ally. An emphasis on Russia’s youth as a civilization (only recently discovered by the British readership) offered the promise of progress, while the notion of civilization was redefined to mean ‘simplicity, authenticity, and spiritual freedom’ (p. 253), values that had been associated with Russian literature since it first captured the British imagination. Where Tolstoi had played a significant role in the first period, Dostoevskii now rose in prominence as a prophet depicting the apocalypse of modern civilization, acting as a powerful coercive voice for those English writers who were not convinced of the rightness of England’s alliance with Russia or the rightness of the war at all. The final chapter considers the next generation of Russophilic dissenters from Francophile modernism, anti-Bolshevik sentiment in the wake of the October Revolution, and the rise of Chekhov’s influence on British literature. By this time, with the emergence of T. S. Eliot, ‘the contours of modernism were hardening’ (p. 345), and the Francophile aesthetic had won. The book’s three interchapters feature the...