Of Blizzards, Pistol Shots, and Fair Smugglers: Russian Fiction and Middlebrow Strategies in the Strand

In 1915 Montagu Montagu-Nathan, who contributed a series of essays on translated Russian fiction to the Egoist: An Individualist Review, proclaimed Russian fiction a discovery of the "past decade" and argued that just two years ago the "student of Russian was regarded as infinitely more daring than the pilgrim to Petrograd."¹ This view is echoed by John Gould Fletcher in a 1916 review of Fyodor Sologub's freshly translated novel The Created Legend (1907), where he describes the Victorians' limited experience with Russian prose: "Twenty years ago England still pictured Russia as accurately depicted in novels such as Michael Strogoff: castles in the snow, serfs, wolves, plots, Siberia, bells of the Kremlin, and ikons."² These comments raise interesting questions about how British notions of Russian literature evolved in the transitional period between the late-Victorian and modernist eras. Whereas the 1910s and 1920s are frequently described as the decades of the modernist Russian craze, it is more challenging to identify the niche for Russian literature on the British literary and periodical market of the 1890s and 1900s, especially in the context of middlebrow magazines.

The study of the modernist fashion for Russian culture has become a blooming field in recent years, as represented by the research of Caroline Maclean, Claire Davison, and Rebecca Beasley (as well as other researchers involved in the AHRC-funded project Russomania: British Modernism and the Translation of Russian Culture, run by Beasley). But because most scholars focus on elitist literary magazines or intellectual trendsetters associated with the Bloomsbury Group (such as Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, or the Russian-born émigré translator Samuel Koteliansky), they offer conclusions about a comparatively small fraction of readers and journalists.³ Scholars such as Maclean and Davison date the roots of "Russophilia" back to the late-nineteenth century, suggesting that the last Victorian decades assisted in preparing the ground for the forthcoming "craze."⁴ Others have considered the reception of Russian writers and their oeuvre in Victorian England, but the majority of studies in this area focus on individual authors and interactions (explicit or implicit) between major novelists of the two empires, as can be seen in Glyn Turton's monograph on Ivan Turgenev and England or Muireann Maguire's exploration of Dostoevskian motifs in works by Gissing, Stevenson, and others.⁵ These studies provide a valuable overview of the Russian authors' reputation in mid- and late-Victorian literary circles and their influence on the work of famous English-language authors, but they are not intended to explore the relationship between Russian literature and the mainstream readership. And while Maclean comments on a recent paradigm shift in Anglo-Russian studies towards the history of institutions rather than the individuals involved in the "dissemination of Russian culture" in Britain, the role of the middlebrow in this context still often remains undiscussed.⁶

In this study, I examine the appropriation and representation of Russian literature through a serial reading of the Strand Magazine. By focusing on a popular rather than declaratively elitist magazine, I avoid concentrating solely on the modernist coterie and reconsider the ever-changing tastes of the broader public. While the middlebrow can be hard to define—as Virginia Woolf famously quipped, middlebrows are "not highbrows, whose brows are high; nor lowbrows, whose brows are low"—Kate Macdonald suggests a comprehensive definition that can be used to characterise the nature of late-Victorian middlebrow journalism.⁷ According to Macdonald, the middlebrow "transcends the fixed linear cultural continuum" and offers "experiences anchored not to a desire to be considered intellectual or fashionable, but to the enjoyment of the individual."⁸ This understanding of the middlebrow agenda allows one to view the Strand's integration of Russian literature as part of the New Journalism's experiments in providing entertainment. In the Strand's case, this meant trying to maintain a balance between high quality and the commercial potential of published materials. Thus, when the Strand introduced mainstream readers to new fiction, including translations, the editors followed rigorous selection policies to achieve this balance. My study outlines the Strand's...