Russia haunted the British cultural imagination throughout the 20th century - whether as a romantic source of literary and political inspiration or as a warning of creeping totalitarianism. In this new book, Ira Nadel, charts the story of that...
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Russia haunted the British cultural imagination throughout the 20th century - whether as a romantic source of literary and political inspiration or as a warning of creeping totalitarianism. In this new book, Ira Nadel, charts the story of that influence through the work of some of the key figures in British literature across the century, including Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, Jane Harrison, Virginia Woolf, and H.G. Wells. Framed by the story of two romantic encounters, between Walter Benjamin and the actress Asja Lacis in Moscow in 1926 and between Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova in 1945, Love and Russian Literature casts a vivid new light on the ways in which responses to Russia shaped the history of British modernism
Introduction: "Magnanimous Despair" -- Prelude: Walter Benjamin in love. Somerset Maugham: "Love and Russian literature" ; H. Bruce Lockhart: love and revolution ; Jane Harrison: in love with language ; William Gerhardie: flattery is not enough -- Interlude: Edmund Wilson: in love with Lenin ; H.G. Wells: triangles ; Virginia Woolf: the sound of Russian love -- Postscript: Isaiah Berlin: from the Finland station.
