Looking for Woolf, Mansfield and modernist aesthetics in Koteliansky's co-translations can resemble the same sort of will-o’-the-wisp quest that Woolf evokes when trying to seize Mrs Brown; their objective truth must remain ‘a dancing light’, ‘and illumination’, ‘gleams and flashes’ from which the critic tries to build a solid, coherent narrative (EVW 3: 387–8). In fact, this dancing play of possible truths that can never be pinned down is very much consonant with the two writers’ reception of Russian literature. Despite her archetypally English name, Mrs Brown emerges in Woolf's essay as the ‘compelling embodiment of the enduring impact of Russian writers and their subjects on Woolf's imagination’ (Rubenstein 2009: 155). And the image of catching not will-o’-the-wisps but sunbeams was one Woolf herself had co-translated:

Meanwhile Chekhov is the writer remembered by Gorky for having tried to catch sunbeams in his hat (Gorky 1990: 135). However elusive the sunbeams, the quest has a certain poetic and ethical resonance, like Woolf's butterflies in the dahlias evoked above. And so it is with the co-translations – we must race after rays of light, persuaded they played a part in the makings of the writers and perhaps the shaping of an era, yet with no formal, material evidence that can settle the matter once and for all.