Anglo-Russian Modernities: Intellectual Networks and Literary Transactions Facoltà di Filosofia, Lettere, Scienze Umanistiche e Studi Orientali Dottorato di Ricerca in Scienze del Testo Curriculum di Anglistica XXIX ciclo Candidato Martina Ciceri Relatore Riccardo Capoferro I ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many thanks go to Riccardo Capoferro, who has been an ideal supervisor, at all times helpful, encouraging and professional. I have also had the pleasure and privilege of receiving support form Caroline Patey (University of Milan), for which I am very grateful. I thank her for the care with which she read and corrected my thesis. Many academics and archivists have helped me in the course of writing this thesis. Thanks go to Rebecca Beasley (University of Oxford), for her help in outlining this thesis; Charlotte Alston (Northumbria University) for information about Tolstoyan communities and for her advice; Jason Harding (Durham University), for his support during my stay in Durham; Sara Sullam (University of Milan), for her professional advice and insights about translation, world literature theories, and narratology; Richard Davis at the Leeds Russian Archive, for his help in tracking down Chertkov’s papers; Katya Rogatchevskaya for providing me with articles about the Russian collection at the British Library and for her useful leads regarding Russian émigrés’ letters and manuscripts. I also wish to thank the staff of the Parliamentary Archives, of the special collections at UCL and LSE, and of the British Museum Library for granting me access to the archives. Such a project could not have been undertaken without the kind support of good friends. Claudia and Francesca Galli, Martina Baroni, Laura Zacchello, Lisa Tomasini, have all be encouraging, as have new friends, Nicoletta Asciuto, Marco Petrelli, and the members of the Anglo-Russian Research Network. I am thankful to my wonderful parents, who have supported me through their belief in my abilities, and to my brother, Davide, who has always been a significant presence in my life. My husband, Luca Solbiati, has been lovely throughout: an exceptional cook, debater, and best friend. I thank him most dearly for his patience, encouragement, support and for teaching me to persevere. 1 Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................... 4 Introduction ..................................................................................................... 7 1 Redrawing the Borders of Russian Voices in Britain 1880s-1890s. .... 24 1.1 The Politics of Exile ............................................................................... 26 1.1.1 From the terrorist to Terrorism: a modern community? 26 1.1.2 British Attitudes to Russia: from Russophobia to Russophilia 32 1.1.3 Figures 40 1.2 The Locations of Exile: Weaving Connections ....................................... 62 1.2.1 Geography: London and Tyneside 63 1.2.2 Culture and Literature: The British Museum Reading Room 74 2 Free Russia: An Example of Anglo-Russianness ................................ 86 2.1 The Community Building Aspect of Reading ......................................... 88 2.2 The Evolution of Free Russia .............................................................. 105 2.2.1 From Stepniak to Volkhovsky 105 2.2.2 Russian Literature in Free Russia: Translation Practices 117 2.3 Poetic Patterns .................................................................................... 124 2.3.1 Exile and Conspiracy 126 2.3.2 Community Building: Practices of Reading, Education and Propaganda 133 3 Tolstoyan Togetherness and its Literary Legacy ............................... 141 3.1 Tolstoyan Land Experiments in England ............................................. 144 3.2 Translating and Publishing Tolstoy ...................................................... 153 3.2.1 The Free Age Press and its Cosmopolitan Milieu 153 3.2.2 Translation as Anglo-Russian Collaboration 157 3.3 Narratives of Community: Anglo-Russian Crisscrossing Paths in Belinda The Backward (1905) and The Simple Life Limited (1911) ............................ 162 3.3.1 Decentralised Geographies: A Dialogue with Modernity 166 3.3.2 The Chronotopes of Utopian Colonies 174 3.3.3 Cosmopolitanism and Anglo-Russian hybridization 185 3.3.4 In the Heart of Diversity 192 2 4 The Garnett Family: A Case Study of Anglo-Russian Literary Relations 202 4.1 The Garnett Family and the Russian Emigres ..................................... 204 4.2 Translating and Circulating Russian Writings ...................................... 213 4.2.1 The Russian Émigrés and Constance Garnett’s Translations 214 4.2.2 Edward Garnett, Stepniak, Turgenev and the English Novel 220 4.3 Stepniak and the Making of Olive Garnett ........................................... 230 4.4 “All Souls are Mine:”Olive Garnett’s Fiction and the Anglo-Russian Discourse ...................................................................................................... 235 4.4.1 The Wandering I/eye: Travelling and Shifting Perspectives in In Russia’s Night 239 4.4.2 Going Cosmopolitan: The Anglo-Russian Community in Florence 247 CONCLUSIONS ........................................................................................... 260 APPENDIX A ................................................................................................ 269 APPENDIX B ................................................................................................ 271 Bibliography ................................................................................................ 275 3 Abstract This thesis explores Anglo-Russian contact zones in fin-de-siècle Britain. It examines how Russian émigrés impacted on British public, cultural, and literary discourses, promoting diverse forms of interactions across borders and triggering the creation of a transnational community of letters. Russian émigrés promoted a distinctive form of Anglo-Russian cosmopolitanism, which would become the touchstone of literary creation: intellectual networks and literary transactions, in fact, set the terms for artistic renewal and stand, as such, at the threshold of modernism. Chapter one offers an insight into the politics of emigration: describing the arrival of Russian émigrés in Britain and their mixed British reception, it reflects on the importance émigrés’ pasts experiences in Russia had in shaping their interest in communal affiliations. It introduces four leading émigré voices, Stepniak, Volkhovsky, Kropotkin and Chertkov, providing biographical details and outlining their contribution in the construction of an Anglo-Russian counter- public discourse. It then maps the émigrés’ ideological affiliations, identifying London and Tyneside as the loci of Anglo-Russian relations, and the British Museum as the cradle, as it were, for this thriving counter culture. Chapter two focuses on Free Russia, an institution of this unprecedented Anglo-Russian discourse. Having briefly introduced the importance of journalism among émigré circles, the chapter explores the genealogy of this hybrid magazine and points out its leading role in raising British interests for Russian affairs and, consequently, in triggering the construction of an Anglo- Russian space of public debate. It then pinpoints the differences between Stepniak’s and Volkhovsky’s editorial agendas, and focuses greater attention of the literary turn the magazine takes under Volkhovsky’s editorship. Literature emphasises, in fact, the blurring of national, cultural, and ideological borders that the magazine promotes, and it is with the study of poetic patterns that the chapter ends: the opposition to institutions, the motif of exile and uprootedness, 4 as well as concerns for the time-space dimensions are the crux and pivot of both émigrés’ propaganda and English modernism. Tolstoyan utopianism and its literary offshoots are extensively discussed in chapter three. Once again, the role of the Russian émigré Vladimir Chertkov is fundamental in propelling forward Tolstoy’s ideology, as well as in triggering the circulation of the Russian author’s texts. Emphasis is given to Chertkov’s Free Age Press and to the foreignizing ideal of collaborative translations. Moreover, the chapter explores alternative communities of Tolstoyan matrix in tandem with their cultural and literary implications. It reflects on the genres of utopia and romance and it reveals how Ford Madox Ford’s The Simple Life Limited (1911) and Salome Hocking’s Belinda The Backward: A Romance of Modern Idealism (1905) encapsulate the reformative stances that alternative orderings of modernity informed by Tolstoyan ideology promote. It illuminates, in fact, the significance narrative chronotopes, cottage life and agricultural land in particular, and the narrative technique of defamiliarization have in staging the problematic relationship between innovation and tradition, thereby propelling forward the resignification of geography and space and unravelling the texts’ implicit standpoints. Chapter four is a case study on the émigrés’ impact on the intellectual and literary life of the Garnett cosmopolitan coterie, which becomes as a proper workshop of Anglo-Russian literary modernity. It starts by tracing the émigrés’ reception, as well as their role as linguistic advisors and literary mentors. In particular, it shows how Stepniak’s collaboration with Constance Garnett over the English translations of Turgenev and his commentary on the Russian author’s works