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We are not Barbarians: Literature and the Russian Émigré Press in England, 1890–1905

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If any single factor militated against late Victorian support for a Russian revolution, it was the entrenched belief that Russians were barbarians, incapable of governing themselves, a race of ‘besotted savages utterly unfit for civilisation'. Yet during the last years of the nineteenth century, England faced a challenge to her conception of the Russian race. Educated and cultured Russian exiles toured up and down the country lecturing on Russian themes; they also published propaganda aimed at winning English hearts over to the Russian revolution. This paper examines two émigré magazines – the pro-Nihilist Free Russia (1890–1914) and its ostensibly less radical rival, The Anglo-Russian (1897–1914). Specifically, it explores how they used fiction, commentaries on Russian literature, and descriptions of Russian literary culture to advertise the race's creative and spiritual potential and its readiness for self-government.
1
We are not Barbarians:
Literature and the Russian Émigré Press in England, 1890–1905
Carol Peaker
I
If any single factor militated against late Victorian support for a Russian revolution, it was the
entrenched belief that Russians were barbarians, incapable of governing themselves, a race of
‘besotted savages utterly unfit for civilisation’.
1
Marquis de Custine’s famous travelogue,
printed many times in England after 1843, described Russian culture as ‘masked barbarism,
nothing more’.
2
Another commentator pointed out that for two hundred years, German-
blooded Tsars had whipped the shuffling and reluctant Russians along the road to civilisation
to no avail: ‘The Russian is captivated with the thought of ceasing to pretend to be civilised.
His is the longing of the young Indian brave at the missionary-school … to exchange the
school-desk and books for forest glades and the chase.’
3
The well-known journalist William
Stead, meanwhile, played the ‘barbarian’ card to counter Russian reformers’ calls for a
constitution and the democratic freedoms enjoyed by the west. ‘[Not] one man in a hundred
can read’, Stead cautioned, ‘and not one man in a hundred would have the remotest idea what
to do with his vote if he had one.’
4
Admittedly, such Russophobia was just as often leveled against the nation's
government and its autocratic head. Since the Crimean war, Russia had been viewed as a
traditional enemy, engaged in global imperial rivalry and interfering with England’s valuable
trade relations with China.
5
Some believed (with reason) that Russia had a greedy eye on the
territories of India, Afghanistan and the Middle East.
6
Anti-Russian sentiment climaxed in
1878, when Russia began fighting the Turks over purported Turkish atrocities against
Bulgarian Christians. At one end of the social spectrum, Queen Victoria declared she could
not remain ‘the sovereign of a country that was letting itself down to kiss the feet of the great
barbarians’.
7
At the other end, Britons voiced their patriotic contempt by singing the popular
music hall hit, MacDermott’s War Song: ‘The 'Dogs of War' are loose and the rugged Russian
Bear, /Full bent on blood and robbery, has crawled out of his lair’.
8
Following the advice of
his monarch and the will of her subjects, Lord Beaconsfield sent a cautionary fleet to
Carol Peaker, ‘We are not Barbarians: Literature and the Russian Émigré Press in England, 1890–1905’
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 3 (2006) www.19.bbk.ac.uk
2
Constantinople, and the Russians backed down. But jingoistic attitudes prevailed. Russians
were seen as a savage, cruel, and war-loving race, a threat to the security of the civilised
world.
In the 1890s, russophobia applied to noble, rebel, and peasant alike and reflected
England’s post-Darwinian pre-occupations. The 1891 novel Mademoiselle Ixe satirised
English attitudes. At a party, a pretty socialite expresses amazement at a Russian she has just
met – a man with ‘long Eastern eyes and a protruding animal jaw’:
Oh he is such a darling, and so hideous. Frightful! Do you know, the first time I saw
him … I thought he was the missing link. It was at a dance at Lady Dunmere's … I
said, 'Why Lady Dunmere, it is a gorilla, isn't it?' and she said, quite gravely, 'On no,
dear; he is a Russian Count.’
9
Worse stereotypes surrounded the Nihilists, Russia’s so-called reformers and revolutionaries.
Still fresh in Britons’ memories was the spate of terrorist attacks spanning from 1878 – when
the female Nihilist, Vera Zasulich shot the Governor General of St. Petersburg – to the 1881
assassination of Tsar Alexander II. De Vogüé, whose study Le Roman Russe (1886) was
required reading throughout the fin de siècle, depicted the Russian Nihilist as a ‘savage’ and a
‘wolf’ suffering a ‘want of human feeling’. ‘[Western] revolutionaries are but as infuriated
dogs’, he writes, ‘the Russian Nihilist is a wolf, and we know to-day that the enraged wolf is
the more dangerous of the two’.
10
English commentators matched his vehemence. The fact
that the Nihilists opposed Russia’s bellicose government did little to ameliorate their atavistic
profile. On the contrary, the two sides were seen as twin heads of the same monster. Journal
articles paired Nihilism with state-sponsored pan-Slavonic expansionism as just another ugly
aspect of Eastern barbarism, known as the ‘Slavonic Menace’, oozing forth from Russia.
11
Yet England was about to face challenges to her picture of Russia’s disaffected
hordes. Between 1881 and 1901, the Russian population of England and Wales climbed from
3,789 to 61,789.
12
Russian Jews fleeing pogroms filled up the sweat and tailor shops of east
London; intellectuals thwarted by Russia’s draconian censorship laws moved to areas like
Belsize Park and St. John’s Wood where they intersected with England’s literary and socialist
circles; and escapees from Siberia or fortress prisons breathed relief at having found asylum
in what one émigré described as ‘The land of the just and the free!’.
13
Both as refugees
relying on the at times tenuous hospitality of a foreign country, and as propagandists working,
as the Nihilist Stepniak stated ‘To conquer the world for the Russian revolution’, Russian
Carol Peaker, ‘We are not Barbarians: Literature and the Russian Émigré Press in England, 1890–1905’
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3
émigrés had a vested interest in manipulating Britons’ preconceptions of Russia and her
people.
14
In the 1890s, a handful of English-language émigré journals duly appeared for the
purpose of facilitating this process of manipulation. This paper deals with the two most
influential among these – the revolutionary Free Russia (1890–1914) and its less radical rival,
The Anglo-Russian (1897–1914) – until the first Russian revolution in 1905. Specifically, it
explores how they used fiction, commentaries on Russian literature, and descriptions of
Russian literary culture to cut across the negative stereotypes of Russians so predominant in
late Victorian England. To date, scholarship on these journals been confined to socialist,
Russian and émigré studies, and has been largely descriptive. Barry Hollingsworth’s
meticulous account of Free Russia in ‘The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom: English
Liberals and Russian Socialists, 1890–1917’, chronicles the journal’s political campaigns and
credits it with preparing the ground for the non-party Parliamentary Russian Committee,
founded in 1908 ‘to cultivate friendly relations with all Russians who are working for the
social and political amelioration of their country’.
15
The journal’s ambassadorial use of
fiction, however, is outside the article’s gamut. John Slatter’s ‘Jaakoff Prelooker and The
Anglo-Russian’ in From the Other Shore, Russian Political Emigrants in Britain, 1880–1917,
reflects momentarily on The Anglo-Russian’s ‘great play of local colour’ as evidence of its
editor’s ability ‘to adapt his ‘pitch’ to the demands of his audience’, and provides an insight
into the historical origins of his serialised fiction.
16
Beyond this, scant mention is made of The
Anglo-Russian’s coverage of literary topics. Biographical sketches of the journals’ Russian
editors likewise focus on their more overtly political propaganda, commenting only passingly
on their presentation of Russia’s literary culture as an important corollary to this
propaganda.
17
In contrast, this paper suggests that the cultural material appearing in Free
Russia and The Anglo-Russian was a central feature in the émigré campaign to redress late
Victorian russophobia. In so doing, it also gestures at the neglected significance of these
journals as English publishing phenomena, accruing meaning and taking cues from the
English social system in which they operated.
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II
Free Russia
The anti-Tsarist journal Free Russia was founded in 1890, and at first edited by the notorious
Nihilist Sergei Kravchinskii, popularly known as Stepniak, meaning ‘man of the steppe’. In
late Victorian London, Stepniak cut a romantic figure. In the 1870s, he had been part of the
populist movement in Russia, taking socialist propaganda to the peasants while disguised as a
woodcutter. In 1878 he had become a political assassin, murdering General Mezentseff, the
St. Petersburg Chief of Police who had been responsible for ordering the flogging of political
prisoners. Stepniak subsequently fled to the continent, where he reinvented himself as a
revolutionary troubadour, writing his best-selling collection of idealised revolutionary
sketches, Underground Russia (1883).
18
He arrived in England in 1884 and, with
Underground Russia as his calling card, rapidly made friends with London’s intellectual and
radical elite; his inner circle included Bernard Shaw, William Morris and Constance Garnett,
whom he tutored and assisted as a translator of Russian literature.
19
Officially, Free Russia
was the organ of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom (SFRF), which Stepniak co-
founded in 1889 with Robert Spence Watson, president of the National Liberal Association.
In order to avert scandal, Stepniak edited the journal anonymously; this gave the impression
that it principally represented the efforts of the eminent English men and women (including
nine members of parliament and ministers of all denominations) on the SFRF’s committee. In
1894, Stepniak passed editorship to his comrade-in-arms, Felix Volkhovsky, a revolutionary
whose reception in England was assured by George Kennan’s sympathetic accounts of his
trials in Siberia and the Exile System (1891).
20
Even in England, Volkhovsky was very much
the active revolutionary. Besides editing Free Russia, he occupied himself by smuggling into
Russia banned books and English passports for the use of escaping prisoners.
21
As a
propagandist, he acquired a reputation for his lectures about his escape from Russia, which he
delivered wearing convicts’ garb and manacles. His friend, George Herbert Perris, a leading
light in the International Arbitration and Peace Association, described him as ‘a second
Herzen, an unpaid ambassador who, at a difficult juncture, not unworthily represented to the
outer world the great soul of his people’.
22
Carol Peaker, ‘We are not Barbarians: Literature and the Russian Émigré Press in England, 1890–1905’
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In Free Russia, Stepniak and Volkhovsky exploited the late Victorian taste for
sensation and righteous indignation. The journal’s pages were filled with tales of the massacre
of dissidents, public floggings, deplorable prisons, the persecution of religious minorities, and
the starvation of peasants deprived even of soup kitchens by officialdom. It also riveted
adventure-seeking western audiences with real-life accounts of prison escapes, captures and
Nihilist intrigue. Yet it is also true that much of its news was presented in a sober,
authoritative tone, with writers relying upon a strategic selection of facts to make their
argument and avoiding hyperbole and incendiary language. In early issues, token gestures
were made to appear to be accommodating divergent views: a Bibliography ‘On the Russian
Question’, for example, even listed a book by the Tsarist agent, Madame Novikoff.
Maintaining a balanced voice was essential if the journal was to succeed in its objective ‘[of
influencing] public opinion by revealing the truth about Russia, by challenging the views and
statements of apologists for the Tsarist régime, and by holding up the atrocities of the Russian
Government to the judgement of the civilized world’.
23
Within months of its inception Free
Russia claimed a readership of 5,000 – but it also became a weapon for continual influence on
newspapers which were read, as Stepniak alleged, ‘not by thousands, but by millions’.
24
For
the next two decades Free Russia and the SFRF would be the principal agents through which
Russian émigrés communicated their message to the rest of the Western world.
Free Russia published translations of Russian fiction alongside its political jeremiads,
because stories about Siberian exile, oppression, and peasant famines breathed life and
meaning into otherwise dry statistics. Take the story of the serf-boy, Misha ‘a delicate,
nervous child, with fair skin, yellow hair, and great blue eyes’, who drew a knife across his
throat to escape his mistress’s flogging.
25
Notwithstanding the fact that serfdom had been
abolished in 1853, it was easier for readers to experience the sensation of horror when
engaging in the fate of this sweet, if fictional, serf-boy than when reading the estimated
number of people dead in a more recent bureaucracy-induced famine. Fiction established a
basis for a direct emotional congruence between propagandist and audience in a way that
logical arguments could not. There are plenty of indications that Stepniak and Volkhovsky
were aware of this effect. In Free Russia, fiction was described as ‘a single shining spark’
providing ‘spiritual communion with the reader’.
26
Stepniak’s friend, the English novelist
Olive Garnett, would one day model one of her heroes after him: a Russian Nihilist who
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turned ‘creative art … to the service of his cause, as one might wish to harness a leaping
cataract to a dynamo’.
27
It is evident that in Free Russia’s programme of re-forging English
conceptions of the Russian national character, fiction, with its power to generate sympathy,
build myths and shatter stereotypes, played a particularly crucial role.
The short fiction which appeared in Free Russia humanised Slavic ‘barbarians’,
showcasing their better qualities. Several stories countered the notion – still lingering from the
Crimean War – that Russians were a war-mongering race, bent on invading the civilised
world. The tale ‘Mahmoudka’s Children’ is set during the heady days of the Russo-Turkish
war, and tells of a kindly Cossack Major and a captured Turk. The Turk is frantic with worry
about fate of his dispossessed wife and children. Sympathetic to his prisoner’s plight, the
Cossack engineers his escape. The story showed Russians to be compassionate and peaceable
– fighting on behalf of their bellicose government only because, as the Major says, ‘I have no
other means but my salary’.
28
Another example of Russian sympathy was given in the tale
‘The Famine Year’, a sketch about peasant generosity in the face of starvation.
29
It was perhaps the Russian peasant who fared best in Free Russia’s fiction pages.
Commonly described in the British press as lazy, unteachable, retrograde and superstitious,
the Russian peasant was seen as an evolutionary throwback; certainly not equal to self-
government or a constitution. A story entitled ‘How a Peasant Fed Two Generals’ by the
satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin, countered ingrained stereotypes of peasant sloth. The fable
pictures two Russian bureaucrats stranded on an uninhabited island. Unable to make a fire,
catch a fish, or pick fruit from a tree, they almost die of hunger until they are rescued by a
peasant who feeds and shelters them. As they grow fat and merry on his labour, they upbraid
their deliverer for his laziness and stupidity. Finally the peasant builds a boat and sails them to
St. Petersburg, whereupon the generals send him a glass of vodka and 6d. along with the
words, ‘Enjoy yourself, my good man!’
30
Another short sketch gainsaid the English belief that the Russian masses were
unreceptive to education and self-betterment, or as William Stead declared, incapable of
doing anything but ‘jogging along in their ancient ruts’.
31
‘On Easter Day’, shows peasant
schoolboys reading out Tolstoy’s didactic short stories to circles of illiterate family members:
‘The good words, the ideas of truth and justice, find their way into the hearts and minds of the
listeners. Those miseries which originate in their own faults, stand before them in striking
Carol Peaker, ‘We are not Barbarians: Literature and the Russian Émigré Press in England, 1890–1905’
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pictures. They might live better. Their intelligence is awakened. A tear is seen creeping down
a wrinkled, weather beaten face.’
32
Stepniak enhanced the effect of such stories with an article on the phenomenal growth
in mass literacy and the emergence of a new popular literature in Russia – something he
attributed to the educational efforts of reformers and revolutionaries. After one short
generation, he explains, the tillers of the soil themselves are now ‘founders of libraries, public
readers, authors of books for the peasants, and even popular lecturers upon scientific
subjects’. A new breed of peasant authors testify to the race’s potential. Samuel Xenofontov,
for example, works the land in the summer and makes wooden spades in the winter. His spare
time he devotes to reading and to writing short plain stories from life. ‘What Samuel
Xenofontov wishes books to do is to bring about more union, more fraternal feeling as a
remedy for the dissevering effect of modern industrialism.’
33
Far from rising as a half-
enlightened spectre of ‘yellow’ degeneration, the educated peasant offers to a Europe
undergoing its own social convulsions the hope of cultural and social renewal.
Stepniak and Volkhovsky did not only draw upon the rural classes in arguing their
case for a free, democratic Russia. They also printed articles portraying Russia’s
sophisticated, cosmopolitan city dwellers. In contrast to Stead’s barbarians, Russian society
could boast 10,000 university students, who received ‘an education as good as Oxford or
Cambridge’; and a publishing industry in which ‘more books are published yearly,
irrespective of the population … than in Great Britain’.
34
Supplementing such statistics were
numerous idealised sketches of Russia’s poets and writers: men and women who belonged to
the highest ranks of literary genius. The only thing restricting the full flowering of Russia’s
culture was the Russian Imperial government, which, it was reported, militated against the
opening of new schools, imprisoned youths for reading, and spread the plague of censorship.
35
It was with the intention of mythologising Russia’s creative potential – a potential
quashed only by Tsarist repression – that in 1899 Volkhovsky stepped up Free Russia’s then-
flagging coverage of art and literature. ‘[Free Russia] has… become more varied in its
contents’, he announced:
More stress has been laid on showing the capabilities and genius of the Russian race,
thus bringing home this truth, that if the Russians enjoyed political liberty and
personal security, their social, literary, artistic and scientific development would be an
enormous spiritual gain to mankind. With this view, translations of some of the best
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specimens of Russian fiction and poetry, as well as articles dealing with Russian
music, art industries, social work, etc., have been introduced.
The move was accompanied by an increase in the number of illustrations and a new masthead
drawn by Walter Crane. In his Annual Report, Volkhovsky claimed that the masthead was
designed to lend an ‘artistic appearance to our paper’.
36
But it also functioned as a ‘cartoon
for the cause’.
From the left – the west, as it were – an angel of mercy reaches out a hand
holding a heart. From the east, a bearded Russian mujik stretches his arm to receive the
angel’s offering. The Russian is bound tightly with rope, his torso pierced by the claws of an
enormous double-headed eagle (representing the autocracy and the Orthodox Church)
wearing two crowns. Crane’s drawing reiterated Volkhovsky’s message of Tsar/Church
oppression arresting the development of Russia’s national genius and the hope engendered by
the sympathy and enlightened views of the west.
The short fiction Volkhovsky printed to encourage Western confidence in Russia’s
potential revealed a catholic taste – ranging from the comic to the tragic, taking forms as
diverse as allegory, fairy-tales and realist sketches. The editor’s abridged version of Gogol’s
now well-known vignette, ‘On Christmas Eve’, with its witches, devils and rustic colouring,
added touches of the surreal and comic to the English conception of the nation. Free Russia
also published a fairy tale by Garshin, ‘to give to the English reader a full idea of this subtle,
poetic, merciless, yet irresistibly sympathetic author.’
37
In May 1900, the journal claimed,
with only slight exaggeration, to be publishing the first English translation of any story by
Chekhov.
38
‘[M]y conviction’ Volkhovsky wrote in an aside on the fiction of Tolstoy, ‘[is]
that the more nations learn to know one another the stronger grows their mutual affection’.
39
As a corollary to his efforts to turn Free Russia into a literary as well as a political
concern, Volkhovsky employed the services of Vasily Zhook, a spry-looking, erudite young
exile who spent a great deal of time at the British Library reading about Russian history.
Zhook had a scholar’s interest in literary biography, Russian literature and the art of
translation. In Free Russia his province was a column called ‘Bibliography’ or, sometimes,
‘Rossica’: a compilation of notices of translations and books about Russia, fleshed out with
lengthier reviews. The latter were generally more occupied with minutiae than politics. With
an armoury of encyclopaedic knowledge and a copy-editor’s eye, he criticised anthologies for
their oversights, literary biographies for wrongly cited dates and place names, and recent
translations for inaccuracies and clumsy prose. Beautifully rendered works of scholarship, on
Carol Peaker, ‘We are not Barbarians: Literature and the Russian Émigré Press in England, 1890–1905’
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the other hand, drew melodious praise from his pen. In their small way, Zhook’s reviews
enhanced Russians’ reputation for high culture and civilised values.
III
The Anglo-Russian
In the summer of 1897, Jaakoff Prelooker, a Russian-Jewish convert to protestant
Christianity, established a competing anti-Tsarist organ, The Anglo-Russian, with the similar
aim of building mutual affection between England and the Russian people. Prelooker had an
unusual background. Born into a strictly orthodox Jewish household where only Yiddish and
Hebrew were used, he learnt Russian from Jewish boys who had been forced into the Russian
schools set up by Alexander II to force Jewish assimilation into Russian society.
40
His
encounter with the New Testament and Russian literature persuaded him to try to effect a
rapprochement between the two religions, to which end he founded the sect, New Israel. His
harassment by Russian authorities commenced when New Israel started attracting members of
Christian sects. In 1891, he chose to exile himself to Britain. Casting himself as something of
a Christian martyr, he soon established himself as a popular speaker and writer on the
persecution of what he sagely described as Russia’s ‘protestant’ sects. He also organised
Russian fairs, pageants, bazaars, recitals and tableaux in provincial towns and villages.
Following the lead of Stepniak and Volkhovsky, who appealed to England’s Nonconformist
conscience, Prelooker drummed up support at ‘The Established, Free, and United Presbyterian
Churches all over Scotland; Congregational and Baptist Churches, Wesleyan Chapels,
Meeting Houses of the Friends, Salvation Army Halls, Unitarian Churches, Secular Societies,
Philosophical and Literary Societies, Y.M. and Y.W.C.A., Temperance Societies, Peace and
Arbitration meetings, … ’.
41
The stated position of Prelooker’s journal, The Anglo-Russian, resembled that of Free
Russia: it set out ‘to advocate freedom of conscience and a representative form of government
in Russia, … and generally stimulate a better understanding and greater harmony between the
two nations’.
42
In contrast to the editors of Free Russia, however, Prelooker dissociated
himself from socialism. He also wrapped around himself the halo of Christianity, while
accusing the émigrés behind Free Russia of being avowedly antagonistic to any religious
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creed. Finally, he posed as a pacifist reformer, decrying the ‘Foolish Schemes of Russian
Revolutionists’,
43
while simultaneously publishing the sort of exposés of Tsarist despotism
that would make any Briton’s blood boil. Prelooker sent free copies of his monthly to leading
newspapers and magazines across Europe and to countries as far afield as India, New
Zealand, and Japan, as well as to libraries in Britain, and members of Parliament.
44
The
second issue was sent to 3000 writers and journalists in the UK. With its emphasis on
Christianity, capitalism and conservatism, the journal was targeted at readers from
communities normally deeply suspicious of Russia’s liberal elements.
Prelooker was well aware of prejudices against Russians. His acquaintance Edna
Lyall’s Autobiography of a Slander (1887) had given witness to English racial snobbery in
exactly the realms in which Prelooker himself circulated. The novel tells of how a kind, well-
meaning Russian émigré who speaks about his country’s government in terms of disgust is
gossiped about as a Nihilist in parsonage and village green. Eventually slanderous rumours
linking him with the assassination of the Tsar reach Russia. The hero, called back to St.
Petersburg on business, is incarcerated and dies in prison. Underlying the loose talk which
brings him to this grisly fate, however, is a fear that the English race might itself become
contaminated: the Russian, with his foreign visage and slightly ‘off’ mannerisms is rumoured
to be engaged to an English rose.
45
Prelooker believed that the best way to overcome English hostility towards the
Russian race was present it in familiar trappings. When he founded The Anglo-Russian, the
idea of perpetuating the image of a cultivated, none-too-foreign Russia was thus central to his
design. The Anglo-Russian took the form of a hybrid English magazine, and appealed to
middle-class values and tastes. Interspersed with the requisite stories about Russia’s religious
persecution, famines, and bureaucratic horrors, were articles on Russian composers, book
reviews, translations of the poetry of Lermontov and Pushkin, articles on such topics as
‘Russian Tea and Tea à L’anglaise’, and the editor’s own allegories and lightweight serialised
novels. Taking its cue from magazines like Tid-bits, a ‘Russian Wit and Humour’ column
quoted amusing lines from unacknowledged Russian magazines, and there was an abundance
of excerpts on the Russian question from the English press. Prelooker also appealed to the
women’s market with a series titled, ‘Heroines of Russia’. In 1897, he capitalised on the
fashion for interviews, publishing an account of ‘A Visit to George Meredith’.
46
Drawing a
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course between the Free Russia’s earnest denunciation of Tsarist despotism and the chatty
language of popular English magazines, The Anglo-Russian proved Prelooker’s boast that he
could adapt ‘to the ways of an orthodox English audience, which will not exert itself to strain
their nerves in listening to foreign half-Dutch English, unless some special attractions were
offered to them’.
47
English regional newspapers, which received the journal gratis, warmed to
its kaleidoscopic format. ‘The Anglo-Russian has made a bold bid for sympathy,’ reflected the
Durham Chronicle, ‘…few people…will quarrel with the aim it has set before it. We wish the
new paper well. It chats about many interesting things – Russian wit and humour, art,
literature, &c.’
48
One regular feature of the magazine was the column, ‘Literature and Art’, made up of
news snippets about ‘cultivated’ Russia. Here, English readers learned of events like
Tolstoy’s literary Jubilee; Pushkin’s Hundreth Anniversary; the translation into Russian of
Kipling, the Talmud, or John Stuart Mill; and the opening in Moscow of yet another literary
and philosophical society. In March 1900, a half page was devoted to The New Russian
Academy of Belle-Lettres whose ‘Honorary Academicians’ were to include writers with
radical tendencies like Tolstoy and Korolenko.
49
Another issue reported how the Tsar had
given his consent to open up a subscription list for a monument to Turgenev.
50
An article
celebrating the brilliant literary career of Nikolai Konstantinovich Mikhailovsky, meanwhile,
showed Russia to be the home of advanced and measured theoretical debate.
51
In the pages of
Prelooker’s journal, Russian society appeared as rich as its English or European counterparts:
a familiar tapestry of publishing ventures, scholarly projects, literary clubs, museums, and
institutions capable of legitimising and acknowledging the nation’s artists and writers.
Certainly, it was not a culture which could be described as ‘masked barbarism … nothing
more.’
Yet promoting such a positive picture of Russia’s cultural scene carried with it the risk
of undermining the magazine’s anti-Tsarist message. After all, if culture could flourish,
perhaps claims of Tsarist despotism were exaggerated. Prelooker thus tempered his portrait
with manifold references to the ‘real madness’ of the Russian Censorship,
52
a blood-curdling
account of Dostoevsky’s mock-execution,
53
and eulogistic reminiscences of poets and
pressmen who were, invariably, staunch defenders of ‘the noble causes of progress and
reform’.
54
Further tipping the balance against any beneficent view of the Russian government
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were pieces on populist authors – Korolenko, Gorky, Nekrassof, and Grigorovitch – and their
extraordinary revelations about peasant suffering and brutal officialdom: ‘[Korolenko’s story]
presents a picture of the humiliated and outraged of even greater precision and vividness than
that of Dostoievsky. A nobody, a species of a Government worm, a sort of policeman, a brute,
officially invested with a fraction of power, in a word simply a scoundrel can dare to cruelly
insult and outrage a fellow man without himself running the slightest risk of any punishment.
Here is the question in full light … ’
55
In 1898, Prelooker published articles by Free Russia’s
Vasily Zhook describing the ‘Martyrology of the Press in Russia’.
56
The message conveyed
was that Russia was home to a mature, civilised and moral race where marvellous indigenous
talent and industry were constantly thwarted by a childishly despotic bureaucracy. The British
conception of Russia as a nation of unruly savages kept in line by a necessarily brutal Tsar
was turned on its head. Russia’s oppressed were ‘cultivated’. The Tsar, to quote Prelooker:
was ‘an eternal foe of human progress’.
57
Interestingly, Prelooker’s commentary on literary subjects was often used as a starting
point from which to address English prejudice head-on. An example is his defence of
Tolstoy’s Resurrection, which had offended some English readers with its references to
undergarments and the ‘the lively naturalism of [his] description of vice’ which they felt
‘would do more mischief than all the preaching of virtue would do good’.
58
John Bellows, the
clerk of the Quaker Society of Friends had even declared it to be ‘a smutty book’.
59
To
Prelooker’s dismay, England’s preoccupation with the novel’s prurient aspects had siphoned
attention away from its graphic exposé of the Siberian penal system. Prelooker responded by
drawing a comparison of Russia and England in which Russia became both the more honest
and the more puritanical of the two nations:
We know that certain words to be found in all English dictionaries and frequently
conspicuously exposed at tailor’s shop-windows … are no longer used in good
English society … [But] we could never reconcile [this] with the fact that crowds of
Britons of both sexes flock to public bathing places to gaze for hours at those who are
altogether stripped of their ‘unmentionables.’ In Russian society ‘briuki,’ the English
‘unmentionables,’ are mentioned without any remorse of conscience, but at the same
time Russians would consider it an immodest proceeding to watch and behold their
absence in public places.
60
The theme of the ‘pure and sincere Russian spirit’ was a recurring one. In an essay on ‘Anton
Tchekhoff & His “Mouzhiks”’, Chekhov is described as ‘a humble and sweet-smelling violet’
Carol Peaker, ‘We are not Barbarians: Literature and the Russian Émigré Press in England, 1890–1905’
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 3 (2006) www.19.bbk.ac.uk
13
from which emanates ‘a penetrating perfume … [that] softens and goes right through the
soul’.
61
On the whole, Prelooker’s measured coverage of Russia’s cultural scene checked any
ill effects of his occasionally flagrant use of revolutionary language. His examples of Russian
modesty, and his references to the benevolent cultural institutions which, despite the horrors
of tyranny, still had some pre-eminence in Russian society – these positioned his magazine as
an organ not altogether antithetical to the values of Britain’s establishment and conservative
elements. Framed in this way, Prelooker’s version of Russian society seemed a familiar entity,
far removed from the hotheaded Nihilists who daily caused the Russian throne to tremble in
trepidation. Reflecting on the achievements of The Anglo-Russian in 1904, Prelooker noted a
decrease in russophobia. Russia was no longer ‘a country where tallow candles and lamp-oil
were still eaten and drunk in quantities, … where peasants hibernated eating and doing
nothing during five months in the year, where…girls were taken as wives by lot or public
auction … ’. England now had ‘a fuller appreciation of the true inwardness of things Russian’,
and ‘newspapers notorious hitherto for their strong anti-Russian sentiments now begin to
explain that for the Russian people they cherish but the kindliest feelings and best wishes, and
that their russophobia is directed exclusively against the iniquitous system of Russian
autocratic and bureaucratic Government’.
62
The contributions made by Free Russia and The Anglo-Russian to England’s understanding of
Russian culture can be viewed in the larger context of the great wave of Russian art and
literature entering the country around the fin de siècle: Constance Garnett’s seminal
translations of Turgenev in the 1890s and later, of Chekhov, Gorky, Hertzen and Dostoevsky;
the manifold translations of lesser-known Russian populist writers which filled bookshops
and libraries; the mass-dissemination of Tolstoy’s tracts and novels. The use of fiction in Free
Russia and The Anglo-Russian gestures at a phenomenon which has hitherto been ignored: the
role of émigrés in expediting the progress of Russian literature into England and in mediating
the ways in which it was read. Stepniak assisted Constance Garnett with her translations and
wrote prefaces to two of them. He also tutored Ethel Lillian Voynich, who produced several
books of Russian stories, bringing writers like Garshin and Saltykov to England’s attention.
For his part, Jaakoff Prelooker encouraged what was a growing vogue for Russian study by
Carol Peaker, ‘We are not Barbarians: Literature and the Russian Émigré Press in England, 1890–1905’
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 3 (2006) www.19.bbk.ac.uk
14
setting up a Russian language institute and a Russian reading circle. Other émigrés also took
part. The famous anarchist Peter Kropotkin published his voluminous Ideals and Realities in
Russian Literature in 1905. And Tolstoy’s exiled literary agent, Vladimir Chertkov, published
Tolstoy’s tracts, stories and the novel Resurrection in such quantities that ‘424 million pages
of Tolstoy’s writings’ were put by his Free Age Press before the English-speaking world.
63
Less remembered are the lectures on Russian literature delivered by émigrés in Church halls,
clubs, societies and packed drawing rooms up and down England. To date, neither reception
studies nor émigré studies have acknowledged this tremendous industry or examined its
collateral effects.
The translations and commentary about Russian literature published in Free Russian
and The Anglo-Russian are of interest, then, because they are representative of a much wider
project to displace Russia’s fetid stench of barbarism with a fine aroma of her best cultural
products; to sell the Russian revolution to the English by imbuing it with the values of the
bourgeoisie. The way these journals advertised Russia’s literary and cultural output, relied on
fiction to add an illustrative and emotional dimension to their propaganda, and appropriated
the country’s best writers to the radical cause – all these were typical of the methods by which
émigrés turned Russian literature into one of the most potent forms of propaganda at their
disposal.
To a great extent, the émigré project was successful. England’s newfound sense of
cultural affinity with Russia helped prime the population to respond to the news of the 1905
Russian revolution with widespread, though not universal, support. Winston Churchill
compared it ‘to the struggle for British liberty’. J. Bruce Glasier, a leading member of the
Independent Labour Party, wrote a poem ‘To the Russian Revolutionary Martyrs’ for the
Labour Leader.
64
George Meredith set up a subscription to raise funds for the revolution. It is
notable that Meredith’s optimistic view of the Russian race was based on ‘the sublime and
self-sacrificing types of Russian womanhood as presented both in works of fiction and
produced by real life’.
65
Support was strongest in avowedly liberal and socialist circles, but
newspapers such as The Times and the conservative organ, The Morning Post also evinced
pro-Cadet (Constitutional Democrat) tendencies. Public opinion would fluctuate after the
Tsar’s dissolution of the first Duma and the surprising failure of Russians to rise en masse to
avenge it.
66
Moreover, admiration for Russian literature did not prepare the English for the
Carol Peaker, ‘We are not Barbarians: Literature and the Russian Émigré Press in England, 1890–1905’
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 3 (2006) www.19.bbk.ac.uk
15
shocking resumption of terrorist activity in 1906. But at the outset, at least, the English were
mostly on the side of the uprising, and if accusations of barbarism were hurled, they were
aimed at the autocracy and not the Russian people.
67
As Sir Arthur Nicolson, British
Ambassador to St. Petersburg, recalled, ‘Russia was regarded as a ruthless and barbarous
autocratic state, denying all liberties to her subjects and employing the most cruel methods of
suppression of freedom of speech and indeed of thought.’
68
As for the Russian race, The
Manchester Guardian opined that it was ‘their literature, their music, and their prophetic
writings [that] entitle[d] them to a place among the original forces of European civilization.’
69
A singular example of the new mood can be seen in a speech given in Croydon by Britain’s
Secretary of War, Arnold Forster, announcing the government’s position with respect to the
1905 revolution. Forster’s confidence in Russia’s new government was predicated on the
country’s artistic sensibilities:
The works of the great Russian [authors] showed that art was powerful in the Russian
mind; …‘The best message we could send them was a message of sympathy and hope
that their aspirations might develop in such a manner that their institutions might bring
to them the same good that our institutions had brought to us’.
In stark contrast to 1878, when Queen Victoria’s jingoistic call to arms against the ‘great
barbarians’ was echoed in Music Halls throughout England, the Russian emperor and his
downtrodden subjects were now seen as separate entities. Forster’s appeal for sympathy was
greeted with cheers.
70
1
S. Stepniak, ‘The Russian Peasants and their Detractors & Panegyrists’, Free Russia, 1 December 1892, p. 9.
2
Journey for Our Time: The Journals of the Marquis de Custine, ed. and trans. by Phyllis Penn Kohler, intro. by
Simon Sebag Montefiore (London: Phoenix Press, 2001), p. 124. First published as La Russie en 1839, it was
published in English as The Empire of the Czar in 1843; subsequent editions were titled Russia. It has been
published under the title, Journey for Our Time since 1951.
3
Harold Frederic, The New Exodus: A Study of Israel in Russia (London: Heinemann, 1892), p. 6.
4
‘Alexander III, Tsar of all the Russias’, The Review of Reviews 5 (15 January 1892), 15–27 (p. 15).
5
Pascal Venier, ‘The diplomatic context: Britain and International Relations around 1904’ in Global
Geostrategy, Mackinder and the Defence of the West, ed. by Brian W. Blouet (London: Frank Cass, 2004), pp.
55–63 (p. 57).
6
See, for example, An Indian Officer, Russia’s March Towards India, 2 vols (London: Sampson Low, Marston
& Company, 1894). For more on English suspicion over Russia’s designs in Afghanistan, see J.A.R. Marriott,
Anglo-Russian Relations 1689–1943 (London: Methuen, 1944), pp. 130–9.
Carol Peaker, ‘We are not Barbarians: Literature and the Russian Émigré Press in England, 1890–1905’
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 3 (2006) www.19.bbk.ac.uk
16
7
Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria (London: Chatto & Windus, 1921), pp. 264, 266.
8
The words and music of the Jingo song were by G.W. Hunt. Maurice Willson Disher, Victorian Song: From
Dive to Drawing Room (London: Phoenix House, 1955), p. 165.
9
Lanoe Falconer, Mademoiselle Ixe (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1924), pp. 51–2.
10
Le Vicomte E.-M. de Vogüé, The Russian Novel, trans. from 11
th
French edition by H.A. Sawyer (London:
Chapman and Hall, 1913), pp. 180–1.
11
‘The Slavonic Menace to Europe’, Quarterly Review, 149 (April 1880), 518–48 (p. 518).
12
Census Returns of Aliens in England and Wales between 1871 and 1911 can be found in Lloyd P. Gartner,
The Jewish Immigrant in England: 1870–1914 (London, Portland, Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell, 2001), p. 283.
13
Jaakoff Prelooker, Under the Czar and Queen Victoria: The Experiences of a Russian Reformer (London:
James Nisbet & Co., 1895), p. 45.
14
Stepniak, ‘What Americans Can Do for Russia’, The North American Review 153 (November 1891), 596–610
(p. 600).
15
Barry Hollingsworth, ‘The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom: English Liberals and Russian Socialists,
1890–1917’, Oxford Slavonic Papers, n.s. 3 (1970), 45–64 (p. 64).
16
‘Jaakoff Prelooker and The Anglo-Russian’ in From the Other Shore, Russian Political Emigrants in Britain,
1880–1917, edited by John Slatter (London: Frank Cass, 1984), pp. 49–66 (pp. 59, 61).
17
See James W. Hulse, Revolutionists in London: A Study of Five Unorthodox Socialists (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1970); John Elliot Bachman, ‘Serge Mikhailovich Stepniak-Kravchinkii: A Biography from the Russian
Revolutionary Movement on Native and Foreign Soil’. (unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, American University,
Washington, D.C, 1971); Donald Senese, S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii: The London Years (Newtonville, Mass.:
Oriental Research Partners, 1987); Evgeniia Taratuta, S.M. Stepniak-Kravshinskii V Londonskoi Emigratsii
(Moskva: Naiuka, 1968); Helena Frank, ‘‘Jaakoff Prelooker’, in Jaakoff Prelooker, Russian Flashlights (London:
Chapman and Hall, 1911), pp. 1–53.
18
Sergei Stepniak, Underground Russia: Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life (London: Smith, Elder,
& Co., 1883).
19
See letter from Constance Garnett to Stepniak, RGALI archive, f 1158, op 1, ed khr 238, no. 3.
20
George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System (Chicago: Double-Page Reprint Series, 1958), pp. 100–110.
21
S.G. Hobson, Pilgrim to the Left: Memoirs of a Modern Revolutionist (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1938),
pp. 126–7.
22
George Herbert Perris, Russia in Revolution (London: Chapman & Hall, 1905), p. 226.
23
Hollingsworth, ‘The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom’, p. 51.
24
Readership statistics can be found in Free Russia (1 December 1891), p. 3; and in Stepniak, Nihilism As It Is,
trans. by E.L. Voynich (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895), p. 71.
25
Saltykov-Shchedrin, ‘Misha and Vania: A Forgotten Story’, Free Russia, 1 January 1893, pp. 13–15; and 1
February 1893, pp. 28–31.
26
‘Saltykov (Shchedrin), From a Biography by S.N. Krivenko’, Free Russia, 1 May 1893, p. 73.
Carol Peaker, ‘We are not Barbarians: Literature and the Russian Émigré Press in England, 1890–1905’
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 3 (2006) www.19.bbk.ac.uk
17
27
Olivia Rayne Garnett, In Russia’s Night (London: W. Collins, 1918), p. 189.
28
V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, ‘Mahmoudka’s Children’, trans. by A. Val. Finkenstein, Free Russia, January
1900, p. 8.
29
‘The Famine Year’, Free Russia, 1 September 1892, pp. 13–15.
30
Shchedrin, ‘Story of How One Peasant Saved Two Generals’, Free Russia, 1 January 1892, p. 15.
31
William Stead, ‘Alexander III, Tsar of all the Russias’, The Review of Reviews, 15 January 1892, p. 16.
32
Mikhaylov [A teacher in a Russian peasant school], ‘On Easter Day’, Free Russia, 1 April 1894, p. 35.
33
S. Stepniak, ‘The Russian Peasants as Readers and Writers’, Free Russia, 1 July 1892, p. 10.
34
S. Stepniak, ‘Mr. W.T. Stead upon Russia’, Free Russia, 1 February 1892, p. 6. Russia is known to have had a
surprisingly high university population in the early 1900s, however, I have been unable to locate statistics for the
early 1890s. When quoting statistics on publishing, Stepniak was probably thinking of the popular chap-book
industry and the recently-established publishing house, the Intermediary, which printed morally edifying tales by
Tolstoy (and other popular writers such as Garshin, Korolenko, and Leskov) for mass distribution in the
provinces. Within four years of its inception, the Intermediary had sold 12 million copies. Thais S. Lindstrom,
“From Chapbooks to Classics: The Story of the Intermediary”, American Slavic and East European Review 16,
issue 2 (April 1957), p. 194.
35
See, for example, ‘Too Many Schools!’, Free Russia, 1 April 1894, p. 34.
36
The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom, ‘Eighth Annual Report of the Executive Committee (1898–99)’,
pp. 7–8, Archive of British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics, COLL
MISC 1028.
37
Volkhovsky, commentary to ‘The Story of the Toad and the Rose’, by Vsevolod Garshin, trans. by Mrs. Dora
Zhook, Free Russia, June 1900, p. 68.
38
Anton Chekhov, ‘Sharp Beyond My Years’, translated by Vera Volkhovsky, Free Russia, May 1900, p. 55–7.
This was not, in fact, the earliest translation of Chekhov in English. An earlier one was ‘Two Tales from the
Russian of Anton Tschechow: The Biter Bit and Sorrow’, translated by Elaine A. Swire [Mrs. Henry Swire],
Temple Bar, May 1897, pp. 104–13.
39
‘A Russian View of Tolstoi’, Free Russia, November 1898, p. 64.
40
Jaakoff Prelooker, Under the Czar and Queen Victoria, p. 5.
41
Jaakoff Prelooker, Under the Czar and Queen Victoria, p. 164n.
42
This journal was anticipated in Prelooker, Under the Czar and Queen Victoria, p. 176.
43
Jaakoff Prelooker, ‘Foolish Schemes of Russian Revolutionists’, Anglo-Russian, January 1897, p. 79.
44
Helena Frank, ‘Jaakoff Prelooker’, in Jaakoff Prelooker, Russian Flashlights (London: Chapman and Hall,
1911), pp. 1–53 (p. 31).
45
Edna Lyall, The Autobiography of a Slander (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1887).
46
Jaakoff Prelooker, ‘A Visit to George Meredith’, Anglo-Russian, October 1897, p. 37–9.
47
Jaakoff Prelooker, ‘Our Seventh Anniversary’, Anglo-Russian, June – July 1904, p. 844.
Carol Peaker, ‘We are not Barbarians: Literature and the Russian Émigré Press in England, 1890–1905’
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 3 (2006) www.19.bbk.ac.uk
18
48
Quoted in ‘Opinions on the Anglo-Russian’, Anglo-Russian, August 1897, p. 20.
49
‘The New Russian Academicians’, Anglo-Russian, March 1900, p. 347.
50
‘Monument to Tourgeneff’, Anglo-Russian, July 1897, p. 10.
51
‘Nikolai Konstantinovich Mikhailovsky’, Anglo-Russian, January 1901, p.37–8.
52
See for example, the ‘Literature and Art’ columns in Anglo-Russian, February 1898, p. 92; and June 1898, p.
140.
53
Prelooker’s commentary to John M. Robertson, ‘Feodore Michaelovich Dostoevsky’, Anglo-Russian, January
1899, p. 207.
54
‘Literature and Art’, Anglo-Russian, September 1897, p. 31.
55
G. Savitch, ‘Vladimir Korolenko’, Anglo-Russian, September and October 1903, p. 740.
56
Vasili Zhook, ‘Martyrology of the Press in Russia’, Anglo-Russian, July 1898, pp. 145–6; August 1898, pp.
154–5.
57
Prelooker, ‘Introduction’ in Count Tolstoy, On Flogged and Floggers, Russian Reformation Society, 1
(January 1899), p. 1.
58
Newcastle Chronicle, quoted in Prelooker, ‘Russia in Tolstoy’s Latest, Reflections on “Resurrection”’, Anglo-
Russian, June 1900, p. 377.
59
Richenda Scott, The Quakers in Russia (London: Michael Joseph, 1964), pp. 137–9. See also, [Bellows, Mr.
John, and Tolstoy’s Resurrection], Academy and “Literature”, 18 January 1902, p. 44.
60
‘Russia in Tolstoy’s Latest’, Anglo-Russian, June 1900, pp. 377–379 (p. 378).
61
‘Anton Tchekhoff & His “Mouzhiks”, A Study’, Anglo-Russian, January 1904, 785.
62
Jaakoff Prelooker, ‘Our Seventh Anniversary’, Anglo-Russian, June – July 1904, pp. 844–5.
63
Arnold, C. Fifield, The Free Age Press (English Branch), A Brief Statement of its Work, unpublished
manuscript, Leeds Russian Archive, University of Leeds, MS. 1381/1238a, p. 23.
64
These examples were cited in W.S. Adams, ‘British Reactions to the 1905 Russian Revolution’, Marxist
Quarterly 2, 3 (July 1955), p. 174.
65
Prelooker, ‘A Visit to George Meredith’, p. 37.
66
W. Harrison, ‘The British Press and the Russian Revolution of 1905–1907’, Oxford Slavonic Papers, n.s. 7
(1974), p. 86–87.
67
W. Harrison, ‘Mackenzie Wallace’s View of the Russian Revolution of 1905–1907’, Oxford Slavonic Papers
n.s. 4 (1971), pp. 73–82 (p. 78); and Harrison, ‘The British Press’, pp. 86–7.
68
Quoted in Harrison, ‘The British Press’, p. 82.
69
Quoted in W.S. Adams, ‘British Reactions to 1905’, p. 175.
70
‘British Opinion on the Russian Revolt, a Minister’s Good Wishes’, The Manchester Guardian, 25 January
1905, p. 8.
Carol Peaker, ‘We are not Barbarians: Literature and the Russian Émigré Press in England, 1890–1905’
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 3 (2006) www.19.bbk.ac.uk
... 24 While her power ostensibly resides in the futuristic weaponry that is fetishized throughout the text (see figure 2) and her hypnotic skills are science-based rather than supernatural, in Olga's own view her scheming makes her more like "a witch or a poisoner of the fifteenth century than … a girl of the twenty-first" (54). 25 22 For an overview of late-nineteenth century British Russophobia, see Peaker (2006). 23 Russia's prominence as antagonist receded as Germany's power grew in the early-twentieth century and following the 1907 Anglo-Russian rapprochement. ...
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While neo-barbarian dystopian futures are typically associated with contemporary popular culture, they were not, in fact, uncommon in late-Victorian popular fiction, especially in the politically charged, future-oriented popular fiction subgenres of invasion fiction and catastrophe fiction. Focusing on a representative tale from each subgenre – George Griffith’s Olga Romanoff (1894) and Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885) – this article shows how they made innovative use of the gothic to show the future following a large-scale war or natural disaster as a decline back into an exaggerated version of the barbaric past. Reworking the familiar gothic trope of doomed inheritance, the tales showed nemesis occurring not on an individual or familial level, but on an extensive societal scale in keeping with their sweeping narratives of mass death and its aftermath. In presenting a post-catastrophe relapse to barbarism, the tales were extrapolating from the social evolution theories of Herbert Spencer and Walter Bagehot which, though delineating the forward tendency of western social progress, allowed the fearful corollary that in periods of crisis advanced societies might also regress. While popular fiction’s engagement with theories of biological degeneration has been well researched, engagements with these theories of societal reversion have received less attention. Applying them to invasion and catastrophe fiction elucidates how the tales used their regressive futures to warn hubristic nineteenth-century modernity about its potential comeuppance if it continued to either aggressively militarise or unthinkingly exploit the non-human world, two major negative social tendencies which were the source of considerable contemporary anxiety.
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Foreign literature usually enters the field of the other culture obeying certain rules, including readers’ willingness, due to various reasons (political, social, psychological, etc.) to receive just these or those components. Such fragmentation, more or less, is overcome by the efforts of translators, commentators, researchers, critics; if the interest in the other culture is strong enough, the reader sees a relatively coherent picture, though not necessarily it is absolutely true. For many years Russian literature, first regarded as semi-barbarous and then considered to be high, was such an area of exotic interest for the English-speaking readers. Having entered the British range of reading, Leo Tolstoy became one of the cult foreign figures in the United Kingdom. Tolstoy’s reception included several layers: he was read as a bright representative of a foreign culture mainly known through stereotypes, as a great heir of the tradition of the European novel, as a progressive social activist whose creative work achieved the special meaning in the course of the political struggle, as the personified rebuff to the French naturalism and as an earnest religious philosopher leading the others by his example. Selective reception, namely, what caught the eye of the English-speaking auditory first of all, helps us reveal the specifics of the reading of Tolstoy’s works in Britain.
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