Reading the Russians as a gateway to a vibrant, cultural world was a dominant feature of the early twentieth-century cultural imagination and identity. In Virginia Woolf's words, writing to Janet Case in 1922:

Katherine Mansfield expresses a similar impatient sense of isolation, with no affiliation or home other than with the Russians:

There was nothing outlandish even in such excessive claims – the era's ambient Russophilia was marked by ‘astonishing hyperbole and […] absurdly exaggerated postulations’ (Rubenstein 2009: 2). Nor was this passion particularly new. Critics trace the ‘true beginnings’ of what was to become known as ‘Russian fever’, which peaked in the 1910s, back to the dawn of the Victorian Age, if not to the Elizabethan era (Cross 1985: 3). The mid-nineteenth century certainly saw a change in pace and perspective as a growing demand for Russian literature reinforced the more established attractions of trade and travel (Cross 1985: 3–52). The potential military and political weight of Russia truly struck home during the Crimean war, and would haunt the national imagination from then on, no matter how alliances and ideologies changed.