Authors

Muireann Maguire¹;  ¹ University of Exeter, UK

Discussion

This paper will contrast the disruptive effects exerted by Russian literature (and Russian history) on the writing careers of Richard Aldington (1892-1962) and William Gerhardie (1895-1977). As a critic, editor, and translator, Aldington was vitally aware of the new Russian and Soviet authors appearing in translation, from Dostoevsky to Andreev; he was even credited as a co-translator of Sologub. Aldington’s own writing was translated into Russian, where he remained popular all his life: Gorky considered his polemical 1929 novel Death of a Hero ‘full of sinister despair’. Yet, with T.S. Eliot and Ford Madox Ford, Aldington remained part of what Rebecca Beasley has characterized as the British reaction against Russian literary style. William Gerhardie was born to a British industrialist in St Petersburg, experienced the 1917 Revolution at first hand, and served in the British Military Mission to Siberia. His subsequent career would be sustained by these encounters with Russia, as reconfigured in his first novel Futility (1922) or the haunting, partially autofictional The Polyglots (1925); Gerhardie also engaged with Russian cultures in his nonfiction, including historical biographies of Chekhov and the Romanovs. This paper explores how Russia both disrupted and enriched the lives of these literary contemporaries.