Ivan Nestor-Schnurmann (1852–1917): a Pioneer of the Teaching of Russian in Great Britain1
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James Muckle Ivan Nestor-Schnurmann (1852–1917): A Pioneer of the Teaching of Russian in Great Britain1 The alliance with Russia in the First World War led to an explosion of interest in Russia and her language in the United Kingdom. British universities and schools introduced the subject, technical and commercial education was inundated with students seeking to learn Russian for business purposes, private individuals went to classes and bought Russian textbooks, friendship societies burgeoned. The Times issued a quarterly Russian Supplement or Russian Section, in which the language was discussed and opportunities to learn it were publicized. It amounted to what Bernard Pares (1867–1949), that great pioneer of university Russian who was later knighted for his work, called a ‘boom’. Yet before 1914 Britain had shown relatively little interest in the Russian language, and it was in this period that Ivan Nestor-Schnurmann made his not insignificant mark by fostering and encouraging interest in a range of ways, and by providing tuition when very little was available. He was one of a small number of enthusiasts at work as early as the 1880s, when promoting Russian must have seemed a thankless task. One purpose of this article is to characterize the context in which he and those others worked. Britain, Russia and the Russian language in the thirty years before the Great War Neither in Britain, nor for that matter in America – despite the acquisition of Alaska by the USA and a perceptible amount of immigration into both countries from the Russian Empire from around 1870 onwards2 – did formal teaching of 1 The author is indebted to the following: Mrs Siann Hurt, for advice and practical help in tracing the Schnurmanns in census and registration records; to the Provost and Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge, for kind permission to quote from the Browning Papers; to Professor Geoffrey T. Martin, Honorary Archivist of Christ’s College, Cambridge; to Ms Diane Clements, Director of the Library and Museum of Freemasonry, for information on Schnurmann’s career as a Freemason; to the Archivist of St Paul’s School; and to Mrs Jill Barlow, Archivist at Cheltenham College, for the supply of various information and of photographs of Schnurmann and of Corinth House. 2 The USA is not the subject of this article, but for an earlier period to 1967 a scholarly and entertaining history exists: Albert Parry, America Learns Russian (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1967). ASEES, Vol. 24, Nos. 1–2 (2010): 103–116. 104 JAMES MUCKLE Russian take place, with very little exception, until nearly the end of the nineteenth century. In Britain neither county secondary schools nor independent schools taught Russian before 1914, with one possible exception, as we shall see. At the time Schnurmann began his work, no British university had instituted a Russian department; a mere handful did so in the fifteen or so years before the outbreak of the First World War, but interest in terms of numbers of students was minimal, with the exception of the newly-chartered University of Liverpool. In any case, the ancient universities had little interest in the language as a means of communi- cation: their undergraduates were not tested in its use orally, and university staff concentrated on diachronic linguistic study. Some very slight interest in Russian was shown by the commercial sector, and the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (later Royal Society of Arts: RSA) instituted an examination in Russian in 1889, the first public body to do so. There was only one successful candidate in the first ten years:3 trade with Russia was nugatory, and only a few businessmen had any serious interest. Nevertheless, some of these men of commerce were instrumental in the early twentieth century in pressing for and in generously donating considerable sums of money to univer- sities for the purpose of establishing Russian departments: notable in this context was John Rankin of Liverpool. At the time of Schnurmann’s activity, little of this had come to pass. Only in military circles was serious interest in the practical use of Russian beginning to emerge. There was, however, an undercurrent of interest. The Anglo-Russian Literary Society (ARLS), which was founded in 1893, typified the concern of certain intellectuals, journalists, business people, military men and other friends of Rus- sian culture, literature and society. It had members in both Britain and Russia and published Proceedings for thirty years. The Society was probably the first organisation to press for the introduction of Russian in schools, though many of those urging this policy despaired of schoolmasters’ ‘obsession with Latin and 3 Since he was the first candidate ever to gain any such certificate (and since the papers were of quite phenomenal difficulty!) his name deserves to be recorded: he was Charles Moncur, aged 17, who took the exam in Sheffield in its first year, 1889. No more is known of him than this. The RSA keeps a full record of annual reports, syllabuses and examination results at their headquarters in London. IVAN NESTOR-SCHNURMANN (1852–1917) 105 Greek’.4 Russian literature had not yet had the impact on English-speaking read- ers which it came to have when Constance Garnett’s translations of Dostoevsky appeared in the 1910s, but Ivan Turgenev was widely read and respected – to the extent of having an honorary doctorate conferred at Oxford. The Russo-British Chamber of Commerce dates from 1908; but it was not until 1909 that an inter- parliamentary group was formed. In 1912, when Schnurmann was almost ready to retire, Professor Bernard Pares in his Russian Review published a list of fifteen free-lance tutors in Russian all over the country; one could also learn Russian at the Berlitz and Gouin schools. A dozen or so Russian grammar books of one sort and another, many of them dreary and unsatisfactory, appeared between 1850 and 1914. It may at least be concluded from the existence and the regular reprinting of these publications that there were individuals who wished to learn the language. At the same time, Russia was detested by many politicians and by many among the general public.5 The Victorian press tended to paint a dismal picture of a country oppressively ruled and seething with discontent, to the extent that there were many in Britain who were ready to condone Russian revolutionary terror- ism. While a few travellers and journalists attempted to present a more balanced picture, the influx of refugees (particularly Jewish ones after the pogroms of the 1880s) did nothing to reduce what one civil servant called the ‘asperity which existed’ between the two countries. In the early twentieth century the Cabinet was split over relations with Russia, some ministers claiming to trust the Russian ‘bear’ not a whit. Indeed, the only sector in which Russian had been studied on a substantial scale since 1885 was the Army, and to a lesser extent the Navy. Among the relatively few names that emerge in this pre-1914 period of Rus- sian teaching is that of Ivan Nestor-Schnurmann, and his contribution to the devel- opment of Russian (and Slavonic) language teaching was made in several fields. He taught Russian by correspondence. He offered Russian in a school as an ‘extra’. He was the first teacher of Russian, Bulgarian and Czech (‘Bohemian’, as it was called) at Cambridge University. He coached army and naval officers for their interpretership exams with the War Office and Civil Service Commission 4 ‘From a correspondent: learning Russian’, The Globe and Traveller, 8/8/1892. My source for this article is a cuttings book once belonging to the ARLS, and now kept at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College, University of London; a handwritten note attributes the article to A. A. Sykes, an energetic proponent of the learning of Russian. 5 A useful account of public and politicians’ attitudes to Russia is given in Keith Neilson, Britain and the Last Tsar. British Policy and Russia 1894–1917 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 106 JAMES MUCKLE (CSC) and he was the first CSC examiner in Bulgarian (in 1897). He wrote a Russian grammar book which looked at the language from the point of view of the learner, rather than of the academic analyst. He deserves at least a small corner in the pantheon of pioneer Russian teachers. This short account of his career is offered as a contribution to rescuing his memory. But there is more to it than the personal issue: his story reflects the hard ‘grind’ in which innovators at this period had to engage in order to establish the subject in Britain. They probably did not see it as an issue of national importance, but modern teachers of Russian now appreciate that it was indeed so. Ivan Nestor-Schnurmann: a biographical sketch It is very hard to be exact about the facts of Schnurmann’s life and career. The entry under his name in The Jewish Encyclopedia is very short,6 and is inaccurate as to dates. Even his name is fluid. He was born Johann Nestor Schnurmann on 18 February 1852 at Pabianice, ten miles south-west of Łodz: a Polish Jew and a citizen of the Russian Empire. The name, however, implies a trace of Germanic ethnicity. The hyphen and the name ‘Ivan’ were a later affectation: the hyphen does not appear in British census returns, and the initials I or J alternate there. ‘Ivan’ is recorded by census enumerators from 1901; he may well have adopted it as promotion of a more Russian ‘image’. He was rumoured in the schools where he later taught to have been a nihilist and to have been exiled to Siberia before he came to Britain in about 1877, though this cannot be confirmed.