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The Forgotten Ambassadors: Russian Fiction in Victorian England
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 January 2017
Extract
Surely we may reckon as remarkable the English cultism for Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, which reached a high level before traditionalism reasserted itself; but fully as remarkable were the ambassadors, now largely forgotten, who mediated between Russian and English cultures, and who, in part, were responsible for the popularity of several Russian novelists in Victorian England. As a footnote to history, this review of their accomplishments can be brief, but I believe it deserves to be appended somewhere in the still-continuing story of the assessment of values in comparative literature. In the belief that we may see best their mode of operation in terms of a specific individual, I have chosen a figure about whom relatively little has been written by English or American scholars during the last two decades: Maxim Gorky.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1953
References
1 Smith, J. Allan, “Tolstoy's Fiction in England and America,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of English, University of Illinois, 1939; Antonina Yassukovitch, ed., Tolstoy in English, 1878–1929 (New York, 1929); Muchnic, Helen, Dostoyevsky's English Reputation, 1881–1936, “Smith College Studies in Modern Languages,” XX (Northampton, Mass., April and July, 1939), passim.Google Scholar
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