Beyond Holy Russia MICHAEL The Life and Times HUGHES of Stephen Graham To access digital resources including: blog posts videos online appendices and to purchase copies of this book in: hardback paperback ebook editions Go to: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/217 Open Book Publishers is a non-profit independent initiative. We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works. BEYOND HOLY RUSSIA The Life and Times of Stephen Graham Michael Hughes www.openbookpublishers.com © 2014 Michael Hughes This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt it and to make commercial use of it providing that attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Hughes, Michael, Beyond Holy Russia: The Life and Times of Stephen Graham. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/ OBP.0040 Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders; any omissions or errors will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available from our website at: http://www.openbookpublishers.com/isbn/9781783740123 ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-012-3 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-013-0 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-014-7 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-015-4 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-016-1 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0040 Cover image: Mikhail Nesterov (1863-1942), Holy Russia, Russian Museum, St Petersburg. Wikimedia http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nesterov_ SaintRussia.JPG 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 by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers For my parents Anne and John Hughes Contents List of Illustrations Epigraph Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Chasing the Shadow 2. Searching for the Soul of Russia 3. The Slow Death of Holy Russia 4. The Pilgrim in Uniform 5. Searching for America 6. A Rising or Setting Sun? 7. New Horizons 8. A Time of Strife 9. The Pilgrim Reborn? Final Thoughts Bibliography Index List of Illustrations Figure 1 Pen portrait of Stephen Graham by Vernon Hill, p. 36 published in Stephen Graham, Changing Russia (London. John Lane, 1913), frontispiece. Figure 2 Photograph taken by Stephen Graham in the Terek p. 39 Gorge of two Ingush women collecting water, published in Stephen Graham, A Vagabond in the Caucasus (London, John Lane, 1911), p. 140. Figure 3 Photograph taken by Stephen Graham at midnight of p. 48 the inhabitants of a village near Archangel, published in Stephen Graham, Undiscovered Russia (London. John Lane, 1912), p. 24. Figure 4 Photograph taken by Stephen Graham of elderly p. 74 Russian peasant woman on the banks of the Jordan, published by Stephen Graham, With the Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem (London. Macmillan, 1913), p. 194. Figure 5 Two of the pictorial emblems appearing in Stephen p. 115 Graham, Priest of the Ideal (London. Macmillan, 1917), pp. 151 and 165. Figure 6 Two of the illustrations by Vernon Hill in Stephen p. 181 Graham, Tramping with a Poet in the Rockies (London. Macmillan, 1922), pp. 1 and 201. Figure 7 Press photograph of Vachel Lindsay and Stephen p. 186 Graham (on the right) in 1921 (http://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vachel_Lindsay_with_ Stephen_Gwynne.jpg) [NB in the original Stephen Graham is mistakenly identified as Stephen Gwynne]. x Beyond Holy Russia Figure 8 Stephen Graham in 1926 (photographer unknown). p. 219 Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, © CC BY-NC-ND. Figure 9 Photograph of Stephen and Vera Graham on the 13 p. 306 August 1957 (photographer unknown). Courtesy Private Collection. An Englishman (‘To Stephen Graham’) I went an Englishman among the Russians, Set out from Archangel and walked among them, A hundred miles, Another hundred miles, A moujik among moujiks, Dirty as earth is dirty. And found them simple and devout and kind, Met God among them in their houses – And I returned to Englishmen, a Russian. Witter Bynner, A Canticle of Pan Умом Россию не понять, Аршином общим не измерить. У ней особенная стать, В Россию можно только верить! Fyodor Tiutchev Acknowledgements I have received a huge amount of help from around the world in writing this book. Financial support was provided at various points by the Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas), the British Academy, the University of Liverpool and the Scouloudi Foundation. I have benefitted from the generous help of archivists and librarians in more than a dozen institutions, and would like to acknowledge in particular the help of Bill Modrow and Burt Altman at the Strozier Library, Florida State University, along with Molly Schwartzburg and Bridget Gayle at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin. My work has also greatly benefitted from the feedback to papers I have presented in Athens GA, Cambridge, Canterbury, Liverpool, London, Moscow and Stockholm. I have received advice and help of various kinds from numerous other individuals including: Mike Bishop, Dr Phillip Ross Bullock, Professor Dennis Camp, Professor Anthony Cross (whose knowledge of Anglo-Russian cultural relations remains unrivalled), Professor Simon Dixon, Alan Freke, Lance Sergeant Kevin Gorman, Anil Gupta, Professor Marguerite Helmers, Dr Sam Johnson, Nicholas Lindsay, Javier Marias, Branco Omčikus, Marko Omčikus, Professor Predrag Palavestra, Dr Aleksandr Polunov, Professor Andrew Rigby, Paul Tomlinson and Mike Tyldesley (the latter representing the Mitrinović Foundation whose rich archive is housed at Bradford University). Sally Mills made generous use of her time and legal drafting skills to subject the manuscript to eagle-eyed scrutiny. Dr Alessandra Tosi at Open Book Publishers provided invaluable support and advice (and I am delighted to be associated with such an innovative enterprise). Many other people too numerous to mention have provided me with particular leads, and I hope they know how grateful I am to them. I am particularly grateful to those who have shared their memories of Graham with me. I would like to thank those who have given me permission to quote from material to which they 2 Beyond Holy Russia own the copyright. Every effort has been made to trace holders of copyright material used in this book, and I would of course be happy to acknowledge any further copyright permissions in future editions. The publication of this book has been made possible by a generous grant from the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research. I owe as ever a huge debt to Katie who has yet again put up with a distracted husband whose mind must often have seen thousands of miles and many decades away. This book is dedicated with love and affection to my parents Anne and John Hughes. Introduction On 17 April 1975 a small congregation assembled on a drizzly grey day at St Margaret’s Church, in Central London, to attend a memorial service in honour of the writer Stephen Graham. Graham had died a few weeks earlier, just four days before his ninety-first birthday, and his passing had been marked by substantial obituaries in The Times and the Daily Telegraph. It is perhaps odd that they appeared at all. Both obituaries suggested that Graham would be best remembered for the books he had written before 1917, describing his time in pre-revolutionary Russia, which in the words of The Times made him “probably more responsible than anyone else in this country for the cult of Holy Russia and the idealization of the Russian peasantry that were beginning to make headway here before 1914”.1 Although the two obituary writers acknowledged that Graham had in later life written numerous novels and travel books, as well as a series of biographies and historical works, he seemed in death to be frozen as a thirty-year old figure tramping across the vast spaces of the Tsarist Empire, in search of a half-mythical world of icons and golden cupolas. Recollections of him were bound up with hazy memories of the Ballets Russes and the cult of Tolstoy, which transfixed a swathe of the British intelligentsia on the eve of the First World War, convincing numerous artists and writers that Russia could become an unlikely source of a cultural and spiritual renaissance destined to sweep the world. Graham had certainly spent much of his time as a young man trying to persuade readers that Russia possessed a richness of spirit that had long since vanished in the industrial west. The photographs that appeared of him in the British press, dressed in a peasant blouse with soulful face turned away from the camera, hinted at an elusive persona bearing words of truth from another world. But Graham had, even 1 The Times, 20 March 1975. http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0040.11 4 Beyond Holy Russia when writing about Russia, always been a more complex and multi-faceted figure than his obituaries acknowledged. Nor did he disappear from public view for the last sixty years of his life, instead retaining his popularity as a writer long after the Bolshevik seizure of power, which separated him forever from the country that dominated his imagination as a young man. Graham’s half-forgotten life consisted of much more than acting as a cheer- leader for the religious rituals of a sprawling autocratic empire falling apart in the face of its own contradictions.