A People Passing Rude E-Book

Anthony Cross

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Described by the sixteenth-century English poet George Turbervile as "a people passing rude, to vices vile inclin’d", the Russians waited some three centuries before their subsequent cultural achievements—in music, art and particularly literature—achieved widespread recognition in Britain.The essays in this stimulating collection attest to the scope and variety of Russia’s influence on British culture. They move from the early nineteenth century—when Byron sent his hero Don Juan to meet Catherine the Great, and an English critic sought to come to terms with the challenge of Pushkin—to a series of Russian-themed exhibitions at venues including the Crystal Palace and Earls Court. The collection looks at British encounters with Russian music, the absorption with Dostoevskii and Chekhov, and finishes by shedding light on Britain’s engagement with Soviet film.Edited by Anthony Cross, one of the world’s foremost authorities on Anglo-Russian relations, A People Passing Rude is essential reading for anyone with an interest in British and Russian cultures and their complex relationship.

Leseprobe

A PEOPLE PASSING RUDE

A PEOPLE PASSING RUDE:BRITISH RESPONSES TO RUSSIANCULTURE

Edited by

Anthony Cross

Open Book Publishers CIC Ltd.,40 Devonshire Road, Cambridge, CB1 2BL, United Kingdom http://www.openbookpublishers.com

© 2012 Anthony Cross et al. (contributors retain copyright of their work).

The articles of this book are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Some rights are reserved. This book and digital material are made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. This license allows for copying any part of the work for personal and non-commercial use, providing author attribution is clearly stated. Details of allowances and restrictions are available at:

http://www.openbookpublishers.com

As with all Open Book Publishers titles, digital material and resources associated with this volume are available from our website at:

http://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/160

ISBN Hardback: 978-1-909254-11-4

ISBN Paperback: 978-1-909254-10-7

ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-909254-12-1

ISBN Digital ebook (epub version): 978-1-909254-13-8

ISBN Digital ebook (mobi version): 978-1-909254-14-5

Cover image: Russians Teaching Boney to Dance, a caricature by George Cruikshank published on 18 May 1813 and adapted from an original 1812 caricature by Ivan Terebenev. An early example of a British response to Russian art! By kind permission of the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library.

Every effort has been made to identity and contact copyright holders; any omissions or errors will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher.

All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), and PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) Certified.

Printed in the United Kingdom and United States byLightning Source for Open Book Publishers

Contents

Illustrations

Notes on contributors

  1.  By Way of Introduction: British Reception, Perception and Recognition of Russian Culture

Anthony Cross

  2.  Byron, Don Juan, and Russia

Peter Cochran

  3.  William Henry Leeds and Early British Responses to Russian Literature

Anthony Cross

  4.  Russian Icons through British Eyes, c. 1830-1930

Richard Marks

  5.  The Crystal Palace Exhibition and Britain’s Encounter with Russia

Scott Ruby

  6.  An ‘Extraordinary Engagement’: A Russian Opera Company in Victorian Britain

Tamsin Alexander

  7.  Russian Folk Tales for English Readers: Two Personalities and Two Strategies in British Translations of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Tatiana Bogrdanova

  8.  ‘Wilful Melancholy’ or ‘a Vigorous and Manly Optimism’?: Rosa Newmarch and the Struggle against Decadence in the British Reception of Russian Music, 1897-1917

Philip Ross Bullock

  9.  ‘Infantine Smudges of Paint… Infantine Rudeness of Soul’: British Reception of Russian Art at the Exhibitions of the Allied Artists’ Association, 1908-1911

Louise Hardiman

10.  Crime and Publishing: How Dostoevskii Changed the British Murder

Muireann Maguire

11.  Stephen Graham and Russian Spirituality: The Pilgrim in Search of Salvation

Michael Hughes

12.  Jane Harrison as an Interpreter of Russian Culture in the 1910s-1920s

Alexandra Smith

13.  Aleksei Remizov’s English-language Translators: New Material

Marilyn Schwinn Smith

14.  Chekhov and the Buried Life of Katherine Mansfield

Rachel Polonsky

15.  ‘A Gaul Who has Chosen Impeccable Russian as his Medium’: Ivan Bunin and the British Myth of Russia in the Early 20th Century

Svetlana Klimova

16.  Russia and Russian Culture in The Criterion, 1922-1939

Olga Ushakova

17.  ‘Racy of the Soil’: Filipp Maliavin’s London Exhibition of 1935

Nicola Kozicharow

18.  Mrs Churchill Goes to Russia: The Wartime Gift-Exchange between Britain and the Soviet Union

Claire Knight

19.  ‘Unity in Difference’: The Representation of Life in the Soviet Union through Isotype

Emma Minns

20.  ‘Sputniks and Sideboards’: Exhibiting the Soviet ‘Way of Life’ in Cold War Britain, 1961-1979

Verity Clarkson

21.  The British Reception of Russian Film, 1960-1990: The Role of Sight and Sound

Julian Graffy

Index

Illustrations

  4.1  Mother of God of Vladimir icon (before 1918). Kremlin Museums (The Armoury Chamber). Reproduced in E.K. Guseva et al. (ed.) Bogomater’ Vladimirskaia k 600 letiiu Sretenia ikony Bogomateri Vladimirskoi v Moskve 26 avgusta (8 sentiabria) 1995: Sbornik materialov, katalog vystavki (Moscow 1995).

  4.2  Mother of God of Vladimir icon after cleaning and removal of oklad. © Tretyakov Gallery (Museum-Church of St Nicholas in Tolmachi).

  4.3  St Nicholas icon (18th century). © Christ Church College, Oxford.

  4.4  Cast-metal and enamel Old Believer cross (19th century). Private collection.

  4.5  Victoria & Albert Museum Russian Ikon Exhibition poster (1929). Reproduced in M. Farbman (ed.), Masterpieces of Russian Painting (London, 1930), p. 121.

  4.6  General view of the Russian Ikon Exhibition (1929), Victoria & Albert Museum. Reproduced in M. Farbman (ed.), Masterpieces of Russian Painting (London, 1930), p. 119.

  5.1  Ignatii Pavlovich Sazikov (1796-1868), Covered Cup (1851), St Petersburg, Russia. Silver gilt. Hillwood Estate, Museum, & Gardens, Washington, D.C. Photography: Edward Owen.

  6.1  Advertisement for the Russian Opera Company, Western Mail, Cardiff (24 September 1888). © The British Library.

  6.2  The Jodrell Theatre’s announcement, The Standard (22 October 1888). © The British Library.

  6.3  ‘Sketches at the Russian Opera’, Dart: The Midland Figaro, Birmingham (27 July 1888). © The British Library.

  9.1  Photograph of the 1908 Exhibition of the Allied Artists’ Association at the Royal Albert Hall in London, Illustrated London News (18 July 1908). © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans.

  9.2  Mariia Tenisheva, Enamelled Amaranth Chest (c.1907). Reproduced in Denis Roche, Les émaux champlevés de la princesse Marie Ténichév (Paris, 1907).

  9.3  Mariia Tenisheva, Enamelled Mirror Frame (c.1907). Reproduced in Denis Roche, Les émaux champlevés de la princesse Marie Ténichév (Paris, 1907).

  9.4  Mariia Tenisheva, Ornamental Chest (c.1907). Reproduced in Denis Roche, Les émaux champlevés de la princesse Marie Ténichév (Paris, 1907).

  9.5  Vasilii Kandinskii, Improvisation No. 6 (‘Afrikanisches’) (1910). Oil on canvas, 107 x 95.5cm. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012.

   9.6  Petr Konchalovskii, Les oliviers (1910). Oil on canvas, 70.5 x 90.2 cm. Private Collection. Reproduced by permission of Sotheby’s.

17.1  Filipp Maliavin, Country Ablutions (1930). Oil on canvas, 73 x 60.5cm. Private Collection. Reproduced by permission of Sotheby’s.

17.2  Filipp Maliavin, Troika (1933). Oil on canvas, 201 x 224cm. Private Collection. © Stockholms Auktionsverk.

17.3  Filipp Maliavin, Portrait of Leon Trotskii. Oil on canvas, whereabouts unknown. 26 October 1935. © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans.

19.1  ‘Coal output in the USSR’, The Struggle for Five Years in Four (Moscow, 1932). Otto & Marie Neurath Isotype Collection, University of Reading.

19.2  ‘Isotype Vocabulary’, Landsmen and Seafarers (London, 1945). Otto & Marie Neurath Isotype Collection, University of Reading.

19.3  ‘Large Town Development in Britain, Large Town Development in Russia’, How do you do, Tovarish? (London, 1947). Otto & Marie Neurath Isotype Collection, University of Reading.

19.4  ‘Climate: Rain and Temperature’, Landsmen and Seafarers (London, 1945). Otto & Marie Neurath Isotype Collection, University of Reading.

19.5  ‘What a Briton Can Own, What a Russian Can Own’, How do you do, Tovarish? (London, 1947). Otto & Marie Neurath Isotype Collection, University of Reading.

20.1  Entrance façade of ‘USSR at Earls Court’ (1968). Press photo EC & O Venues Archive, Box 1601.

20.2  Plan of the first Soviet Earls Court exhibition (1961). Exhibition guide. EC & O Venues Archive, Box 1009.

Contributors

Tamsin Alexander holds a BMus from King’s College London and MPhil from the University of Cambridge. She is currently in the second year of her PhD on an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded place at Selwyn College. Her research, under the supervision of Dr Marina Frolova-Walker, is on the reception of Russian opera across Europe in the 19th century, considering contrasting reactions to the repertoire in Britain, Germany, France and the Czech lands.

Tatiana Bogrdanova is Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Philology at the Kalmyk State University in Elista, Republic of Kalmykia. She received her PhD from the Lomonosov Moscow State University. Her main research interests are in English and Translation Studies and she has published a number of articles in Russian scholarly journals.

Philip Ross Bullock is University Lecturer in Russian at the University of Oxford, and Tutor and Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford. He is the author of The Feminine in the Prose of Andrey Platonov (2005), Rosa Newmarch and Russian Music in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century England (2009), and The Correspondence of Jean Sibelius and Rosa Newmarch, 1906-1939 (2011). He has a particular interest in the reception of Russian culture in Britain, and is currently co-editing Russia in Britain: From Melodrama to Modernism with Rebecca Beasley.

Verity Clarkson read Modern History at St Hilda’s College, Oxford before completing an MA in History of Design and Decorative Arts at the University of Brighton. She recently completed a PhD thesis on ‘The Organisation and Reception of Eastern Bloc Exhibitions on the British Cold War “Home Front” c. 1956-1979’, funded by an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award (University of Brighton and the Victoria and Albert Museum). She currently teaches part time at Brighton and also works in collections research at the Crafts Council.

Peter Cochran did his PhD, an edition of Byron’s The Vision of Judgement, at Glasgow, under the supervision of Drummond Bone. He is responsible for the editions of Byron’s works and correspondence on the website of the International Byron Society, for the Byron entry in CBEL3, and the entries for John Cam Hobhouse and E.J. Trelawny in the NDNB. He has lectured on Byron all over the world, and written and edited several books, including Byron and Bob, Byron and Hobby-O, Byron’s Romantic Politics, and ‘Romanticism’—and Byron, together with numerous articles on the poet.

Anthony Cross is Professor Emeritus of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy. His main research interests are Anglo-Russian cultural relations and 18th century Russia. He is currently completing an annotated bibliography of English-language first-hand accounts of Russia, 1613-1917.

Julian Graffy is Professor of Russian Literature and Cinema at University College London. He is the author of Gogol’s The Overcoat (2000), Bed and Sofa: The Film Companion (2001); Chapaev: The Film Companion (2010); and several articles about Russian literature and film. He is currently engaged in a study of the representation of the foreigner over a hundred years of Russian film.

Louise Hardiman is a doctoral student in the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge. Her research concerns the exchange of ideas between the Russian and British ‘arts and crafts’ revival movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and her thesis, supervised by Dr Rosalind P. Blakesley, is provisionally entitled ‘Netta Peacock and British Engagement with the Russian Decorative Arts, 1890-1917’.

Michael Hughes is Professor of Russian and International History at the University of Liverpool. He has published two books on Anglo-Russian relations in the early 20th century, as well as further books on British foreign policy, and is currently completing a biography of Stephen Graham.

Svetlana Klimova is a Lecturer in Russian Stylistics at the Linguistic University of Nizhnii Novgorod (Russia). Her doctoral dissertation was devoted to Russian Byronism at the beginning of the 20th century. The results of her research are published in the book Dva avtora, dve kul’tury, dve epokhi (Bairon v vospriiatii Bunina) (2011). She is currently working on the project ‘Russia and Russians in British Culture at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century’.

Claire Knight is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge, where she is completing her dissertation on postwar Stalin-era popular cinema. She is also interested in British media perceptions of the Soviet Union during the wartime Anglo-Soviet Alliance. Her chapter in this volume arises from her work as an assistant at the Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College.

Nicola Kozicharow is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge supervised by Dr Rosalind P. Blakesley, and her dissertation title is ‘Dmitrii Stelletskii and Filipp Maliavin in Emigration: Dreaming of Russia and Resisting Change’. Her research engages with Russian émigré artists in France between the wars. She received her MPhil in History of Art from Cambridge University (2011), M.A. in History of Art from University College London (2007), and B.A. in History of Art and Slavic Studies from Brown University (2006).

Muireann Maguire is Fellow in Russian Literature and Culture at Wadham College, Oxford. Her book Stalin’s Ghosts: Gothic Themes in Early Soviet Literature is forthcoming. Her collection of Russian 20th century ghost stories in translation, Red Spectres, will be published in 2012. Her current research examines the cultural mythology of the scientist in Russia in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Richard Marks is Honorary Professor of the History of Art at the University of Cambridge and Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at the University of York. His research interests are in devotional imagery of the ‘long’ middle ages in Western Europe, Byzantium and Russia, on which he has published extensively.

Emma Minns is Associate Director of Postgraduate Research Studies at the University of Reading. She has a long-standing interest in the reception of Russian arts and crafts in Great Britain at the turn of the 19th century and the visual representation of Russian writers. She has been investigating the development of pictorial statistics in Soviet Russia as part of the AHRC-funded ‘Isotype Revisited Project’ (Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading).

Rachel Polonsky is an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Modern and Mediaeval Languages at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Murray Edwards College. She is the author of English Literature and the Russian Aesthetic Renaissance (1998) and Molotov’s Magic Lantern (2010).

Scott Ruby, who holds a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, is Associate Curator of Russian and Eastern European Art at Hillwood Estate Museum, and Gardens in Washington, DC. Recent publications include ‘The Power of Porcelain: the Gardner Order Services for the Empress of Russia’ for Ars Ceramica (forthcoming), ‘A Toast to Vodka and Russia’ in The Art of Drinking (2007) and Masterpieces of Early Christian Art and Icons (2005).

Alexandra Smith is Reader in Russian Studies at the University of Edinburgh and the author of The Song of the Mockingbird: Pushkin in the Works of Marina Tsvetaeva (1994) and Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian Twentieth-Century Poetry (2006), as well as numerous articles on Russian literature and culture. Currently she is working on several publications related to the project ‘Reconfiguring the Canon of Russian Twentieth-Century Poetry, 1991-2008’ funded by the AHRC.

Marilyn Schwinn Smith is a Five College Associate, affiliated with Five Colleges, Inc. in Amherst, MA. She received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst with a thesis on Marina Tsvetaeva’s Civil War poema, Perekop. She has published on Tsvetaeva, Virginia Woolf, Vsevolod Garshin, Jane Harrison and Aleksei Remizov. She is currently writing on John Cournos as an American writer in Europe.

Olga M. Ushakova, who received her PhD at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, is a professor in the Department for Foreign Literature at the Tiumen State University, West Siberia. She is the author of a monograph T.S. Eliot and European Cultural Tradition (2005) and other articles on T.S. Eliot, modernism, and Anglo-Russian literary relations. She is currently working on a study of T.S. Eliot and Russian Culture.

1.  By Way of Introduction: British Perception, Reception and Recognition of Russian Culture

Anthony Cross

Over 450 years have elapsed since the English navigator Richard Chancellor arrived by chance in the White Sea and made his way to the Moscow of Ivan the Terrible. It was a ‘discovery’ that eventually would lead to the establishment of commercial, political and cultural relations between Great Britain and Russia that provide a fascinating history of political estrangement and reconciliation and cultural rejection and acceptance.

Much has been written both about English influences on Russian life and culture—that were much in evidence from the time of Peter the Great and were particularly apparent in the reign of Alexander I—and about the reverse process that was slower to manifest itself but gained momentum after the Crimean War, leading to the ‘Russian Fever’ that over the years 1890-1930 developed, peaked and ebbed away, to be replaced by the challenge of the Soviet Union. There is always much more to be researched and written.

The present collection offers a wide chronological perspective on British responses to Russian culture from the 18th century to the present day, encompassing major areas of cultural life from literature and theatre to art, music and cinema. The overall theme allowed contributors to fill lacunae in the existing literature or re-visit subjects already seemingly explored. Not unexpectedly the weight of the volume is on literary topics, but there are important contributions in the field of art, and not least of exhibitions that brought the work of Russian artists, collectively or individually, before the British public, and of music. While contributions to British awareness of the political and scientific culture of Russia are absent from this volume, the significance of the Russian church is testified in a study of British perceptions of icons and in the contribution devoted to ‘Holy Russia’, as perceived and propagandized by a leading English author of the beginning of the 20th century.

Of course Russian culture is infinitely greater than the sum of the particular parts here presented and there is no pretension to offer a comprehensive treatment of the subject. Nonetheless these contributions add significantly to the store of material on the basis of which, one hopes, one day will be written an authoritative and definitive history of British reception and perception of Russian culture.

The contributions to his volume are presented in roughly chronological order to afford the reader some awareness of growing British exposure to various aspects of Russian culture, although some essays concentrate on a single episode or event strictly located in time, while the time span of others is over decades or even centuries. In this introduction I have attempted to provide in some detail a survey of the ‘early’ period of Anglo-Russian intercourse, up the end of the reign of Alexander I (1825), and then to offer a context in which to site the bulk of the studies in the collection that belong to the 19th and early 20th centuries. My emphasis is on British awareness of Russian literary, artistic and musical culture projected, however succinctly, against important historical and political events.

More than three centuries were to pass before Russian culture, broadly understood, achieved wide recognition in Britain, both for its distinctive nature and for the significant contribution and enrichment that it was seen to bring to western literary and artistic endeavours. Along the long road that led from the 16th century to the last decades of the 19th there were many individuals who in works of history and travels and in articles in journals attempted to acquaint the reading public with notable aspects of Russian culture. There were also events, mainly political and military, that focused public attention on Russia and heightened interest in its people and their customs, traditions and history. Traditional stereotypes and hardened prejudices, particularly with regard to nations, are, however, hard to eradicate and negative British perceptions of Russia were no exception.

Among the earliest and most influential Elizabethan accounts of Russia were those collected and published by Richard Hakluyt in two editions at the end of the 16th century, but two other publications, appearing before Hakluyt but then included by him in emasculated form, were influential in establishing a largely negative perception of Russia that extended way beyond intense cold and ubiquitous bears to religious obscurantism, tyrannical rule, and almost wilful ignorance. The poet George Turbervile, secretary to Sir Thomas Randolph during his embassy to Muscovy in 1568, penned poetic epistles to London friends with damning pictures of ‘a people passing rude to vices vile inclin’d’ that were published for the first time in 1587,1 some four years before the appearance of the scholarly Giles Fletcher’s much more widely known and influential Of the Russe Commonwealth, a country he had observed at close quarters as Elizabeth’s ambassador in 1588-9. If he could pronounce that the Russian clergy, ‘being ignorant and godless themselves, are very wary to keep the people likewise in their ignorance and blindness’,2 few would doubt the rightness of his judgment, even in a period when English society was much taken with things Muscovite, as the plays and poems of Shakespeare and his fellows eloquently illustrate.3 The views he elaborated were embraced and emphasized in a 17th-century England that saw relations with Muscovy at a low ebb, particularly following the execution of Charles I: in 1682 John Milton in his , a compilation based on 16th-century accounts, echoed Fletcher in suggesting that the Russians ‘have no learning, nor will suffer it to be among them’ and Samuel Collins with the authority and expertise of several years as physician to Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich opined that they were ‘wholly devoted to their own Ignorance’ and ‘looked upon Learning as a Monster, and feared it no less than a ship of Wildfire’.