Description
Book SynopsisRussia in Britain offers the first comprehensive account of the breadth and depth of the British fascination with Russian and Soviet culture, tracing its transformative effect on British intellectual life from the 1880s, the decade which saw the first sustained interest in Russian literature, to 1940, the eve of the Soviet Union''s entry into the Second World War. By focusing on the role played by institutions, disciplines and groups, libraries, periodicals, government agencies, concert halls, publishing houses, theatres, and film societies, this collection marks an important departure from standard literary critical narratives, which have tended to highlight the role of a small number of individuals, notably Sergei Diaghilev, Constance Garnett, Theodore Komisarjevsky, Katherine Mansfield, George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf. Drawing on recent research and newly available archives, Russia in Britain shifts attention from individual figures to the networks within which they operated,
Table of ContentsIntroduction ; "For God, for Tsar, and for Fatherland!" Russians on the British Stage from Napoleon to the Great War ; Oscar Wilde's Vera; or The Nihilists ; Britain and the International Tolstoyan Movement ; The Free Russian Library in London, 1898-1917 ; 'Avert Your Eyes and Hold Your Noses': Non-Chekhovian Russian and Soviet Drama on the British Stage, 1900-1940 ; Tsar's Hall: Russian Music in London, 1895-1926 ; Le Sacre du printemps in London: The Politics of Embodied Freedom in Early Modern Dance and Suffragette Protest ; Russian Aesthetics in Britain: Kandinsky, Sadleir, and Rhythm' ; Reading Russian: Russian Studies and the Literary Canon ; The Translation of Soviet Literature: John Rodker and PresLit ; Russia and the British Intellectuals: The Significance of the Stalin-Wells Talk ; British Film Culture and Soviet Cinema ; Soviet Films and British intelligence in the 1930s: The Case of Kino Films and MI5 ; Afterword: A Time and a Place for Everything: On Russia, Britain, and Being Modern
