Russia, Britain & Modernism

A CONFUSING PARADOX of modernism is that it often drew its source material from anything but the modernity its name invokes. Instead, modernists frequently found their inspiration in the preindustrial. Take African art: Lawrence used an African carving as the basis for a scene in Women in Love, and Picasso used tribal masks as one basis for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, to say nothing of Conrad’s broader use of African iconography in Heart of Darkness. By building on art and ideas of the distant past, many artists believed they could cut through the dross of modern pretensions, even if it seems to us they ran a risk of treating the source material condescendingly.

In The Vogue for Russia: Modernism and the Unseen in Britain 1900–1930, Caroline Maclean discusses another source of premodern inspiration, yet one contemporary with the modernists: Russia. No matter that Russia was a world power or that Russia was leading the way in music, dance, and literature during the period. Maclean reveals a Virginia Woolf in 1912 so admiring of Dostoevsky that she is driven facetiously into anxiety: “if he chooses to become horrible what will happen to us? Honeymoon completely dashed.” Others expressed their admiration in more patronizing terms. British artists and critics frequently took this Russian success in the avant-garde as a sign of Russian artists’ purity, their untrammeled spirituality and mysticism. The Russian occupies a “world of dreams,” according to a 1916 book called The Soul of the Russian; or as Roger Fry put it to a bemused Dmitry Mirsky: “All Russians seem to me to suffer from hypertrophy of the soul.” “It was perhaps Fry and his contemporaries,” Maclean notes drily, “who were suffering from hypertrophy of the Russian soul.”

The idea of Russians being uniquely in touch with their souls, as opposed to the material world, made them particularly attractive figures during a period when mysticism and the occult were all the rage in Britain, from informal séances to full-fledged secret societies such as the Theosophical Society and the Order of the Golden Dawn. The vogue for the occult, like the vogue for Russia, was not unique to modernist authors and artists—these were widespread trends—but Maclean’s thesis is that it was the modernists who derived the greatest influence from the combination of these trends. Against the classical account that modernism entailed a move away from realism and symbolism and toward abstraction and formalism, Maclean says that the unseen suggests “abstraction as another form of realism,” and she explores the way in which this model was influenced by Russian ideas and aesthetics.

The first two chapters in support of this thesis both follow a somewhat frustrating pattern: they progress from only moderately influential modernist figures (at least from the perspective of a literature scholar) who fit the chapter very well to major modernist figures (Virginia Woolf in chapter one, Katherine Mansfield in chapter two) who fit it only after a strained fashion. The bulk of chapter one is devoted to showing the Russian influence on the postimpressionist aesthetics of Roger Fry and his followers, while chapter two shows the importance of Russian aesthetics, especially those of Kandinsky, on the art and literature periodicals which helped define the modernist movement. The evidence in these sections, particularly the visual evidence provided by viewing Russian and British paintings and illustrations side by side, is convincing and engaging. When it comes to Woolf and Mansfield, though, Maclean is forced to make much more attenuated claims: Woolf may have “mocked those who dabbled in mysticism” and made fun of the period’s Russophilia to boot, but Maclean nonetheless attempts to “trace a spiritual post-impressionism in Woolf’s fiction” by, for instance, arguing that The Waves was written with a mosaiclike structure just as Fry exhibited modern Russian mosaics. Mansfield, too, “had strong aversions to the clichés of mysticism”; nevertheless, “her early fiction is underpinned by a romantic yet mysterious belief in the potency of things.” While...