Love and Russian Literature: From Benjamin to Woolf

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Description

Russia haunted the British cultural imagination throughout the 20th century whether as a romantic source of literary and political inspiration or as a warning of creeping totalitarianism. In this new book, Ira Nadel, charts the story of that influence through the work of some of the key figures in British literature across the century, including Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, Jane Harrison, Virginia Woolf, and H.G. Wells. Framed by the story of two romantic encounters, between Walter Benjamin and the actress Asja Lacis in Moscow in 1926 and between Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova in 1945, Love and Russian Literature casts a vivid new light on the ways in which responses to Russia shaped the history of British modernism.

Reviews

To paraphrase James Joyce, this is a book about how love loves to love Russian love, or how prominent Anglo-American cultural figures in the first half of the 20th century got swept away by human and literary manifestations of Russianness. * Galya Diment, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Washington, USA *
Ira Nadel takes readers on a dizzying journey to the mysterious, intoxicating world of love & literature, passion & politics. Embodied in nine paradoxical stories of thinkers, writers, diplomats, fermented with the live yeast of Russians catastrophic history, the book plunges you into the thunderstorm atmosphere of a century of upheaval. A fantastic celebration of Modernisms centennial! * Olga Panova, Lead Research Fellow, Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia *

Author Bio

Ira Nadel is UBC Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a prolific critic and biographer whose previous publications include David Mamet: A Life in the Theatre (Methuen Drama, 2008) and Modernism's Second Act (2013)