Russia in Britain takes its place among a cluster of recent works that address the reception of Russian culture in Britain during the long nineteenth century and beyond, including Galya Diment's A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky (2011); A People Passing Rude: British Responses to Russian Culture (2012), edited by Anthony Cross; and Caroline Maclean's forthcoming The Vogue for Russia: Modernism and the Unseen in Britain 1900–1930 (2015). In his 1956 study of British–Russian literary relations, Gilbert Phelps asked whether the Russian contribution to British letters could more accurately be described as a far-reaching renaissance or a high-burning, but ultimately short-lived, fever. Recent contributions to the field continue to navigate between these two extremes, weighing in on how much of an impact can plausibly be ascribed to the reception of Russian culture in Britain.

Russia in Britain opens with an ambitious theoretical Introduction by Beasley and Bullock, which rejects the traditional influence-based paradigm of British–Russian cultural relations in favour of questions of circulation, translation and mediation within institutional contexts. The Introduction further argues for a shift from exclusively literary topics to a multidisciplinary approach. A central concern of the volume is the role that Britain plays as a host culture, and it seeks to articulate Russia's place in the cultural landscape of Britain. From its ‘foreignising’ approach to transliteration to its methodological framework, Russia in Britain aims to defamiliarise established approaches to the reception of Russian culture in Britain.

The product of a conference held in 2009 at the London Institute for English Studies, Russia in Britain is made up of somewhat eclectic individual contributions, but they have been carefully arranged and cross-referenced to provide coherence and continuity. The first cluster of chapters focuses on the theatre: Laurence Senelick offers a study of early British melodramatic productions with Russia as their setting, and Michael Newton addresses the role of the Russian background of Wilde's Vera: or the Nihilists. Later in the volume, Stuart Young provides an account of the fate of non-Chekhovian drama on the British stage.