Russian Ink in a British Pen: Anglo-Russian Echoes of Ivan Turgenev’s Aesthetics in Virginia Woolf’s "The Years"

Since the beginning of the 1880s, Russian migration to the UK has triggered the process of border blurring and has stimulated the birth of a new literary creativity. In the wake of the Russian emigrants' readings of Turgenev, particularly Stepniak's, the Garnett family provided not only English translations of the Russian master’s novels, but also new interpretations of his works. In so doing, Stepniak and the Garnetts, reunited in a truly literary circle for the promotion of Russian literature, informed modernist re-reading and re-writings of Turgenev’s novels. In my essay, I will explore how this literary group favoured the creation of a distinctive Anglo-Russian voice that was to reverberate in Woolf's modernist re-reading of Turgenev's fiction, in the hope of demonstrating to what extent it is possible to talk about the presence of “Russian ink” in Woolf's modernist pen.