Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View (review)

Reading Roberta Rubenstein’s Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View is a bit like peeking over the shoulder of a great writer reading. Like Tatyana in Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1825–32), we come along with belated curiosity, eager to read the marginalia of someone we adore—initially more interested in the reader herself than what she read. And as with Tatyana reading Onegin’s notes, there can be an element of disappointment or confusion as we struggle to reconcile Virginia Woolf’s reading of Anton Chekhov or Leo Tolstoy with the authors whose worlds we may already have come to inhabit deeply. Rubenstein, in her essays and reproductions of marginalia, gives us a series of glimpses of how Woolf read “the Russians”—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, and Ivan Turgenev; how the experience may have affected her own practice as a writer; and how her infatuation and subsequent disinterest followed a trajectory not unrelated to that of the British literate public as they “discovered” Russian writers in translation in the 1910s and 1920s.

Rubenstein considers each writer in turn and suggests a variety of ways in which Woolf may have learned from the Russians’ narrative practices. She notes the ways in which Woolf’s reviews of emerging translations (most by Constance Garnett, without whose heroic labors none of this would have happened) and inclusion of the Russians in her seminal The Common Reader (1925) coincided with her own work on Jacob’s Room (1922) and Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and how the Russians’ unconventionalities strengthened her own resolve to articulate states of inner consciousness, fragmentary awareness, and perceptions of reality as unfinalized. Chekhov, Rubenstein suggests, was temperamentally closest to Woolf, with his middle-class characters, the malaise and inconclusiveness of the everyday, and a radically new drama in which our sense of reality builds slowly and indirectly from accumulated voices and the intangibles of mood. Dostoevsky suggested to her new ways of representing inner consciousness, a model for the remaking of time in narrative, and license to explore mental instability and characters on the verge of suicide. Tolstoy was the undisputed master, whose use of detail to evoke psychological depth Woolf notes again and again in passages that make clear that she reads as a writer. Finally, Turgenev—who on first reading in the 1920s seemed to Woolf the “least” of the great Russians (p. 132)—ultimately grew on her so that by the time of her essay on him, “The Novels of Turgenev” (1933), she had deep praise for his “restraint,” his complex but delicately communicated understanding of human psychology, and his eye for detail (p. 140). All of this was, for Woolf, the art of a “seer who tries to understand” (p. 146).

There are moments in the pages of Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View that strike a Russianist as odd—though they are Woolf’s oddities, not Rubenstein’s. It is interesting, for example, that Woolf rates The Idiot (1869) so highly—a novel which Dostoevsky himself, and many readers, have found imperfect. The Idiot is a social novel pushing toward a new form of narrative, like Anna Karenina (1878), a novel whose double plot Woolf found awkward and whose moral tragedy failed to move her (she comments in a letter to Vita Sackville-West that “[we] have no real condemnation in our hearts any longer for adultery as such”—adultery being the “support” on which Tolstoy “hoists” the book, p. 110). While Rubenstein does not bring it up, one wonders if it was precisely that sense of remaking the conventional novel of society that drew Woolf to both these narratives. Curious, too, is Woolf’s note in her diary (she was working on The Years, 1937) that she does not remember how War and Peace (1869) ended (p. 104): curious because the novel has two endings: one in which the vibrant Natasha has become a hausfrau, and the other in [End Page 483...