Anglo-Russian modernities: intellectual networks and literary transactions 1880s-1910s

This thesis explores Anglo-Russian contact zones in fin-de-siècle Britain. It examines how Russian émigrés impacted on British public, cultural, and literary discourses, promoting diverse forms of interactions across borders and triggering the creation of a transnational community of letters. Russian émigrés promoted a distinctive form of Anglo-Russian cosmopolitanism, which would become the touchstone of literary creation: intellectual networks and literary transactions, in fact, set the terms for artistic renewal and stand, as such, at the threshold of modernism. Chapter one offers an insight into the politics of emigration: describing the arrival of Russian émigrés in Britain and their mixed British reception, it reflects on the importance émigrés’ pasts experiences in Russia had in shaping their interest in communal affiliations. It introduces four leading émigré voices, Stepniak, Volkhovsky, Kropotkin and Chertkov, providing biographical details and outlining their contribution in the construction of an Anglo-Russian counter-public discourse. It then maps the émigrés’ ideological affiliations, identifying London and Tyneside as the loci of Anglo-Russian relations, and the British Museum as the cradle, as it were, for this thriving counter culture. Chapter two focuses on Free Russia, an institution of this unprecedented Anglo-Russian discourse. Having briefly introduced the importance of journalism among émigré circles, the chapter explores the genealogy of this hybrid magazine and points out its leading role in raising British interests for Russian affairs and, consequently, in triggering the construction of an Anglo-Russian space of public debate. It then pinpoints the differences between Stepniak’s and Volkhovsky’s editorial agendas, and focuses greater attention of the literary turn the magazine takes under Volkhovsky’s editorship. Literature emphasises, in fact, the blurring of national, cultural, and ideological borders that the magazine promotes, and it is with the study of poetic patterns that the chapter ends: the opposition to institutions, the motif of exile and uprootedness, as well as concerns for the time-space dimensions are the crux and pivot of both émigrés’ propaganda and English modernism. Tolstoyan utopianism and its literary offshoots are extensively discussed in chapter three. Once again, the role of the Russian émigré Vladimir Chertkov is fundamental in propelling forward Tolstoy’s ideology, as well as in triggering the circulation of the Russian author’s texts. Emphasis is given to Chertkov’s Free Age Press and to the foreignizing ideal of collaborative translations. Moreover, the chapter explores alternative communities of Tolstoyan matrix in tandem with their cultural and literary implications. It reflects on the genres of utopia and romance and it reveals how Ford Madox Ford’s The Simple Life Limited (1911) and Salome Hocking’s Belinda The Backward: A Romance of Modern Idealism (1905) encapsulate the reformative stances that alternative orderings of modernity informed by Tolstoyan ideology promote. It illuminates, in fact, the significance narrative chronotopes, cottage life and agricultural land in particular, and the narrative technique of defamiliarization have in staging the problematic relationship between innovation and tradition, thereby propelling forward the resignification of geography and space and unravelling the texts’ implicit standpoints. Chapter four is a case study on the émigrés’ impact on the intellectual and literary life of the Garnett cosmopolitan coterie, which becomes as a proper workshop of Anglo-Russian literary modernity. It starts by tracing the émigrés’ reception, as well as their role as linguistic advisors and literary mentors. In particular, it shows how Stepniak’s collaboration with Constance Garnett over the English translations of Turgenev and his commentary on the Russian author’s works pays a unique contribution to the creation of a transnational space of letters. It then examines Olive Garnett’s novel In Russia’s Night (1918), calling attention to how it articulates cross-cultural encounters and the related concerns of travelling, shifting points of view, community building, and hyphenated identities. It pinpoints how Olive’s novel challenges well-established notions of nationality and national literature: performing cross-fertilization at different levels and balancing English and Russian discourses, the novel stands out as a unique Anglo-Russian Künstlerroman, resulting from actual and fictional transnational encounters and intellectual transfers. The conclusions focus on the innovative and unprecedented nature of Anglo-Russian intellectual, cultural and literary cross-fertilizations as they take place in turn-of-the-20th-century Britain. First, it looks at the ways in which they negotiate a new transnational space, raising Anglo-Russian cosmopolitanism as the conditio sine-qua-non of literary creation. It then considers how Anglo-Russian collaborations and literary encounters remarkably impact on the modernist fascination for group relations, literary transfers and modes of composition. A brief sketch on how they develop and branch out in other directions is carried out with specific reference to Koteliansky and the Bloomsbury Group, which ends upon suggestions for further lines of inquiry.