Love and Russian Literature - From Benjamin to Woolf

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.>

List of contents

Introduction: 'Magnanimous Despair'
Prelude: Walter Benjamin in Love
Ch. 1 Somerset Maugham: 'Love and Russian Literature'
Ch. 2 H. Bruce Lockhart: Love and Revolution
Ch. 3 Jane Harrison: In Love with Language
Ch. 4 William Gerhardie: Flattery is Not Enough
Interlude: Edmund Wilson: In Love with Lenin/ EdmundWilson Russian Love
Ch. 5 H.G. Wells: Triangles
Ch. 6 Virginia Woolf: The Sound of Russian Love
Postscript: Isaiah Berlin: From the Finland Station
Index

About the author

Ira Nadel is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a UBC Distinguished University Scholar and a winner of the Medal for Canadian Biography. Based at the University of British Columbia, he has lectured throughout Europe, North America and Asia. His works include Love and Russian Literature, From Benjamin to Woolf (2024), Philip Roth, A Counterlife (2021), Virginia Woolf (2016), Double Act: A Life of Tom Stoppard (2002) and Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen (1996).

Product details

• Authors: Ira Nadel, Ira B Nadel, Ira B. Nadel, Nadel Ira
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 29.05.2025
• EAN: 9781350425583
• ISBN: 978-1-350-42558-3
• No. of pages: 264
• Dimensions: 154 mm x 232 mm x 16 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; LITERARY CRITICISM / Comparative Literature, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, 1917–1923 (Russian Revolutionary period), LITERARY CRITICISM / Russian & Soviet