Converging orbits: Ford Madox Ford, russian Paris and the motifs of expatriation

Ford’s fascination for Russian literature and culture dates back to the early years of his literary career, when he came into contact with Russian exiles in England. It therefore seems unsurprising that Ford would be attracted to the Russian community of refugees and émigrés that lived in Paris in the 1920s, with whom he shared a double degree of foreignness in the modern city, a sort of intensified cosmopolitanism. This essay discusses Ford’s and the Russians’ modes of experiencing the city, its artistic life and its geography, as they appear in Ford’s A Mirror to France and It was the Nightingale, as well as in Marc Chagall’s paintings, in Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem ‘In Paris’ (1909), in Georgii V. Adamovich’s verses ‘Dva Stichotvoreniia’ (1928) and in Vassily S. Yanovsky’s memoirs Elysian Fields (1983). Of particular interest are the recurrent motifs of the window, the street and the café, which appear as means of negotiating the experience of expatriation, and are actively involved in the making of the transnational artistic and geographic scenes of Paris within the context of modern art.