Virginia Woolf’s Portraits of Russian Writers: Creating the Literary Other
Virginia Woolf always stayed ahead of her time. Championing gender equality when women could not vote; publishing authors from Pakistan, France, Austria and other parts of the world, while nationalism in Britain was on the rise; and befriending outcasts and social pariahs. As such, what could have possibly interested her in the works of nineteenth-century Russian writers, austere and, at times, misogynistic thinkers preoccupied with peasants, priests, and paroxysms of the soul? This study explains the chronological and cultural paradox of how classic Russian fiction became crucial to Woolf’s vision of British modernism. We follow Woolf as she begins to learn Russian, invents a character for a story by Dostoevsky, ponders over Sophia Tolstoy’s suicide note, and proclaims Chekhov a truly ‘modern’ writer. The book also examines British modernists’ fascination with Russian art, looking at parallels between Roger Fry’s articles on Russian Post-Impressionists and Woolf’s essays on Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev.
Dr Darya Protopopova, DPhil, PhD, is a writer and researcher on Russian and British modernism. Her research interests include Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, translations from the Russian, and bilingualism. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Changing English, the Bodleian Library Record, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, and the Times Literary Supplement. She recently published a story about her great-great-grandfather Mikhail Mikhailovich Chekhov (a cousin of Anton Chekhov) in the prestigious Russian magazine La Pensee Russe. The first instalment of her novel 1982 appeared in the Russian online literary journal Koltso A. She is a member of the Union of Moscow Writers.
“It is a work that those of us familiar with Protopopova’s rich, doubly inflected Anglo-Russian, Russo-English writings have long been awaiting, and the volume proves that it was worth the wait. While in many ways a graceful continuation of the growing body of criticism focusing on Anglophone modernists’ complex, extended engagement with Russian literature in the context of a far broader Russophilia in the early twentieth century, Protopopova’s work also shifts in focus slightly. Her objective is indeed only tangentially literary; her concern is less to trace the Russian themes and patterns in Woolf’s novels than to revisit the representations of the Russian literary figureheads in biographies, essays, and translators’ prefaces, and to reconstruct the context in which Russian literature was rediscovered by the modernists. She thereby invites a number of revisions of the era and of Woolf’s Russian readings, which greatly enrich both our larger view of the scene and our intimate insights into the complexity of the Russians’ reception in Great Britain, over the course of more than half a century’s tumultuous history and cultural renaissance. The volume thus provides both a richly documented and generous contribution to ongoing scholarship, and a splendid panorama for advanced level students and young researchers first venturing into the field of how British modernists grappled with “Russianness”. […] Protopopova’s book will become as requisite a contribution to critical scholarship devoted to the Anglophone modernists’ reception of Russian culture as Woolf’s “interpretations of Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev have become, like the four writers themselves, an indispensable part of the literary canon” (194).”
Claire Davison
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Woolf Studies Annual, Volume 26, 2020
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