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Russia in the Works of Wyndham Lewis, TS Eliot, and DH Lawrence, 1912-1939

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Russia in the Works of Wyndham Lewis, TS Eliot, and DH Lawrence, 1912-1939 1 Unwrapping the Enigma: Russia in the Works of Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence, 1912-1939 ___________________________________________ A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the University of Canterbury by Ben Richardson ________________________________________________________ University of Canterbury 2012 2 Contents Chapter…………………………………………………………………….………….Page Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………….…….…...3 Abstract………………………………………………………………………..…………...4 1: Introduction: 1912 Overture……………………………………………………………...5 2: From Russia with Interest: Said, Hall, and the Anglo-Slavic Past.…………….……….15 3: All Roads Lead To Moscow: Wyndham Lewis and the Russian Grotesque………..…..49 4: Conversing With Spectres: T.S. Eliot and the Russian Subaltern....................................82 5: From Revelation to Revolution: D. H. Lawrence and the Russian Hybrid……………111 6: Conclusion: The Sphinx‘s Riddle…………………………………………………..….143 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………...........151 3 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank my family. To my parents, Peter and Marianne, your support, guidance, and encouragement were invaluable throughout the research and writing of this project. To my brothers, Daniel and Aaron, I am indebted for your moral support, proofreading, and above all providing a laugh or two along the way. To my flatmate Aidan Harrison, I would like to give thanks for reading preliminary drafts and helping talk me through the ins and outs of graduate study. Also, I am particularly grateful to Sam Ovens, without whose efforts to lend a hand at the University of Otago my work could not have become what it is today. Finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Dr. Jennifer Clement and Dr. Paul Millar. Your efforts to read my work, praise what was good, and most of all challenge me to do better, really did make all the difference. 4 Abstract In the history of intercultural relationships, no country has exercised so great an influence on the English geographical imagination as Russia. From its humble beginnings as the kingdom of Muscovy, to the sprawling expanse of the U.S.S.R., Winston Chruchill‘s famous ―riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma‖ both captivated and repulsed English audiences. Cartographically split between Europe and Asia, the ambiguous nature of Russian culture not only undermined absolute ―Orientalist‖ binaries separating East from West, but also contributed, through the epoch-making fin de siècle influx of Slavic aesthetic forms, to the birth of English modernism. The idea of ―Russianess,‖ for pre-war audiences, proved crucial to unsettling received notions of art, ideology, and identity. This destabilizing effect is especially evident in the work of Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence. Despite having largely been dismissed as ―reactionary‖ and ―xenophobic‖ in their political stances, the complex and variegated way in which each author engages with Russia, as this study demonstrates, suggests an underlying ambivalence in their writing. Rather than reflecting a geographic reality, Slavic society, in their hands, appears as a collective fantasy, an external manifestation of their own internal doubts, anxieties, and pre-occupations concerning ―Englishness,‖ which serves to elucidate the conflicted and uncertain politics of twentieth-century avant-garde art. 5 Introduction: 1912 Overture “Rus, whither art though racing? Give an answer. She gives no answer.” Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls. While some social phenomenon can take years or even decades to gestate and come to fruition, Russian culture arrived on English shores with a distinctive roar. ―On or about December 1910,‖ as Virginia Woolf famously asserted, ―human nature changed‖ (―Character in Fiction‖ 38). This epoch making shift in religion, politics, and literature – now known as the birth of European modernism – was a result of radical new approaches to art and society, including the translation of Sigmund Freud‘s Interpretation of Dreams, Henri Bergson‘s public lecture series on the concept of ―Duree,‖ and Roger Fry‘s infamous first Post-Impressionist exhibition. But it was also, to a greater or lesser extent, a product of English interest in the idea of ―Russianness.‖ Following the widely influential 1907 Anglo-Russian accord, which ended decades of Middle-Eastern imperial competition in the ―Great Game‖ and paved the way for military alliance in the impending ―Great War,‖ English society was gripped by a wave of what has variously been termed ―Russomania,‖ ―Russian fever,‖ and the ―Russian Craze.‖1 A passion for all things Slavic, as Somerset Maugham retrospectively noted, ―seized upon Europe with the virulence of an epidemic of influenza‖: ―everyone was reading the Russian novelists, the Russian dancers captivated the civilized world, and the Russian composers set shivering the sensibility of persons who were beginning to want a change from Wagner‖ (265). Almost overnight, ―the Russian‖ became in vogue. Exotic, Slavic themed parties, held by socialites such as Edith Sitwell, began to spring up all over London; Katherine Mansfield, following popular fashion, took to alternating between the 6 Russianized monikers ―Boris Pestrovsky‖ and ―Yekaterina‖ in her publications and letters to friends; Sir Bernard Pares, renowned English historian and academic, famously instituted the first English ―School of Slavonic Studies‖ at the University of Liverpool; while Lady Ottoline Morrell, in perhaps the most extravagant gesture of devotion, was frequently observed wandering around her estate at Garsington wearing a full peasant kaftan, replete with red boots and an Astrakhan fez. The Russian bear, it seemed, had become well and truly ensconced within the English lion‘s den. Although complex and multifarious, the causes behind this sudden whirlwind romance with Russia culture were, at least partly, bound up in a widespread belief that the edifice of Victorian liberalism was collapsing. Overburdened by the weight of corpses littering the poppy fields of Flanders and Ypres, an entire generation had, as Woolf put it, become ―sharply cut off‖ from their predecessors, and now sought new models of living untouched by the horrors of modern industrialism. Within this context, a general fascination arose in English society with the heroic barbarism of primitive cultures – evident in Ezra Pound‘s cheerful theft of the phrase ―Make it New!‖ from the side of an ancient Chinese emperor‘s bath tub – of which Russia became the example par excellence. Far from appearing in its traditional guise as an international ―bugbear of nations,‖ Russia now represented a liberating élan vital, capable of setting society free from the shackles of Edwardian cultural decay.2 Socially, economically, and geographically close enough to be accessible, yet distant and exotic enough to seem alien, Russia became an important touchstone in modernist enthusiasms over the cultural ―other.‖ At the second post-Impressionist exhibition, for instance, English audiences were overawed by the ―religious and fantastical spirit,‖ ―mystical passions,‖ and ―emotional feeling of the prehistoric Slavonic Pagans,‖ apparent in the folk-styled ikon painting of Russian artists such as Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova (Von Anrep 357-358). Meanwhile, Sergei Diaghilev‘s ―Ballets Russes‖ theatre company – led by impresarios such as Fyodor 7 Chaliapin and Vaslav Nijinsky – performed to sold-out London audiences, enthralled by the productions‘ archaic elegance and ―rich décor, so bold and at times so bizarre, the triumphs of its strangeness and its beauty, the unfamiliar rhythms of its musical contributions‖ (Swinnerton 283). Many English men and women, in fact, were so besotted with this vision of Russian atavism that they even joined Slavic-inspired religious communities, such as J.C. Kenworthy‘s Tolstoyan village founded at Purleigh in Essex, and George Gurdjieff‘s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, set up near Fontainebleau on the outskirts of Paris. Russian culture, as Rupert Brooke put it, seemed for a time the one force that could ―redeem our civilization‖ (75). Perhaps the single most important Russian contribution to the development of English modernism, however, was in the field of literature. Beginning with the first mid- nineteenth-century renditions of Gogol and Lermontov, by the end of the Jazz age a tiny coterie of dedicated amateurs and professionals had translated almost the entire oeuvre of classic Slavic letters into English.3 Like their visual and kinetic counterparts, Russia authors, although stylistically varied, were almost universally received as an artistic breath of fresh air. For instance, while Turgenev, the consummate artistic craftsman, struck Henry James as ―a spirit so human that we almost wonder at his control of his matter‖ (52), Tolstoy, temperamentally his diametric opposite, nevertheless appeared, in his expansive and uplifting prose, to Havelock Ellis as a ―colossal and eternal child, the symbol of Russia herself‖ (Bulgakova 215). Whereas Chekhov, a perennial favourite of the English stage, seemed in Arnold Bennett‘s eyes to ―have achieved a perfect realism‖ through his delicate understatement and careful economy (Phelps 190), Dostoevsky, the ―enfant terrible‖ of Russian art, also impressed John Middleton Murry with his ―vision of the timeless world made apparent in that which is time,‖ to the extent that the Englishman described Constance Garnett‘s 1912 publication
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