Suchergebnisse

European modernism underwent a massive change from 1930 to 1960, as war altered the cultural landscape. This account of artists and writers in France and England explores how modernism survived under authoritarianism, whether Fascism, National Socialism, or Stalinism, and how these artists endured by balancing complicity and resistance

Virginia Woolf and Russia has been examined but not fully studied. Entirely overlooked has been her response to Russian cinema and dance, particularly the Ballets Russes. This paper addresses that gap through an account of Woolf's response to, and interest in, both Russian film and dance, while also accounting for how she incorporates her admiration of Dostoevsky, Turgenev and other Russian writers into her work. Her study and translations with the Russian Jewish émigré Samuel Koteliansky, a formative influence on her continuing absorption with matters Russian, is also analyzed, as well as the importance of Russian cinematic techniques, notably sound, drawn in part from such Russian directors as V. I. Pudovkin, as well as montage, originating with Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein.

The multiple and occasionally contradictory response of Bloomsbury to the Orient is the focus of this essay which also considers the reverse: the Orient's response to Bloomsbury and the promotion of their texts in the East. From Roger Fry to G. L. Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and Vanessa Bell, the Orient became a source of aesthetic interest and problematized politics. French Orientalism and Proust initially corroborated the experiences of Woolf in Constantinople and Leonard Woolf in Ceylon, soon to be revised by new views of Imperial authority. Yet Bloomsbury and the Orient artistically depended on each other, at one point Fry scolding Bloomsbury and England that 'we can no longer hide behind the Elgin marbles and refuse to look at the art of China'. And look they did, from attending museum shows to collecting Oriental art and furniture, while adopting Oriental fashions – and, when possible, traveling to China and Japan marked by visits by Bertrand Russell, William Empson, and Harold Acton. The response of individual Bloomsbury writers to the Orient mixes curiosity and jealousy. To her nephew Julian Bell, teaching at Wuhan University, Woolf wrote that 'you are much to be envied. I wish I had spent three years in China at your age'.