The Only Hope of the World: George Bernard Shaw and Russia by Angus Soboleva, Olga and Wrenn (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 879 seals’ in Blok’s poetry are often elucidated with greater transparency and depths in Ivanov’s writing. Viacheslav the Magnificent does indeed hold the key to many mysteries of Russian Symbolism, and this wonderful little book provides scholars with a precise guide as to how best to use it. Department of Russian Avril Pyman University of Durham Soboleva, Olga and Wrenn, Angus. The Only Hope of the World: George Bernard Shaw and Russia. Peter Lang, Oxford, Bern and New York, 2012. xi + 231 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £40.00 (paperback). One of the features most likely to strike anybody perusing the current repertoire of Russian theatres is the continued prominence of the plays of George Bernard Shaw. By contrast, contemporary British theatre-goers are less likely to be familiar with his works; as Olga Soboleva and Angus Wrenn suggest in their introduction, although he currently ‘enjoys a positive reputation’, he is nonetheless ‘generally regarded as being a little too remote in period […] to be considered an altogether twentieth-century figure and a major influence on upon the drama of the present day’ (p. 1). Appropriately enough, then, Soboleva and Wrenn devote the sixth and final chapter of their study to Russian productions of a number of Shaw’s lesserknown dramas of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as detailing the striking success in Russia of Jerome Kilty’s Dear Liar, a play based on Shaw’s correspondence with Mrs Patrick Campbell (played in one production by no less a figure than Liubov´ Orlova, directed by her husband Grigorii Aleksandrov in a translation by Elsa Triolet). The notion that Russia has been as interested in Shaw as he was in Russia is one of the guiding themes pursued by Soboleva and Wrenn, and is exemplified by two earlier chapters dedicated to Shaw’s relationships with and interest in Tolstoi and Gor´kii as dramatists with a particular commitment to social action above aesthetic form. A further chapter considers the almost entirely forgotten Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress, a play written immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 (and which Soboleva and Wrenn have enterprisingly staged with their students at the London School of Economics). An opening chapter deftly situates Shaw within the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British interest in Russian literature and culture, delineating his relationships both with key British Russophiles and influential individuals from the émigré community. The importance of these predominantly literary chapters cannot be underestimated. Carefully researched and documented (and including a number of new archival sources), they amply demonstrate that Shaw’s long interest in Russia predated his infamous visit to the Soviet Union in 1931. They also embody the authors’ welcome commitment to ‘focusing on textual analysis of Shaw’s dramatic SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 880 work, rather than upon the more purely political writings’ (p. 7). Shaw’s visit to Stalin’s Russia — which has been the subject of a number of studies of British and European intellectual life over the years — is dealt with in the fifth and longest chapter. Inevitably, Shaw does not come out of this well; Sobolev and Wrenn show that Shaw cannot have been ignorant of the consequences of the policy of collectivization that had recently been inaugurated, and as someone whoadmiredbothHitlerandMussolini,hecouldnotevenlayclaimtothecause of anti-fascism espoused by other apologists at the time. Shaw’s subsequent wrangling over royalty payments for Soviet productions of his plays (which he demanded be paid in sterling rather than roubles) further problematizises the picture of his professed socialism. Yet trying to grasp the precise details of Shaw’s political engagement with Soviet Russia is perhaps impossible; as Soboleva and Wrenn briefly but judiciously suggest, ‘Shaw went to the Soviet Union wishing to be convinced of the conclusions he had already drawn – namely that this system was the only “hope of the world”’ (p. 167). Similarly, by situating Shaw’s interest in the Soviet experiment within a broader study of the evolution of his dramatic career, Soboleva and Wrenn reveal that his fascination with the figure of Stalin was part of a broader scepticism about liberal democracy that had its roots in his reading of Carlyle and Nietzsche...