Love and Russian Literature: From Benjamin to Woolf - Paperback

by Ira B. Nadel (Author)

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.

Author Biography

Ira Nadel is UBC Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a prolific critic and biographer whose previous publications include David Mamet: A Life in the Theatre (Methuen Drama, 2008) and Modernism's Second Act (2013)