Caroline Maclean. The Vogue for Russia: Modernism and the Unseen in Britain 1900–1930. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Pp. 240. £70.00 (cloth).

Abstract

The Vogue for Russia offers readers an insight into British intellectuals' engagement with Russian culture in the early twentieth century. Caroline Maclean surveys modernist art, literature, and film, using representations of the "unseen" to investigate the diffusion of Russian culture in Britain in this period. Maclean's definition of the unseen incorporates a variety of artistic practices that, she argues, reflect evolving notions of spirituality in the early years of the twentieth century.The Vogue for Russia offers a useful new addition to the growing field of study that considers a more interactive relationship between Russian and British intellectuals, artists, and political activists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, an earlier version of one of Maclean's four chapters was published in the groundbreaking collection Russia in Britain, 1880 to 1940: From Melodrama to Modernism (2013, edited by Rebecca Beasley and Phillip Ross Bullock. In this new offering, Maclean aims to deconstruct the assumption that Russian culture was popular in Britain simply because it was Russian (4). She argues that British intellectuals absorbed crucial notions of Russian cultural theory-concepts that shaped representations of the unseen in British modernist art, literature, and film. Each chapter is structured around theories developed or popularized by Russian artists and intellectuals because Maclean believes that it is important to investigate cultural transfers in terms of the whole, rather than simply mapping single elements or motifs (3). Her approach is particularly significant because of what it reveals about the influence of Russian ideas in Britain at large and not simply upon individuals or specific works of art or literature.Maclean's first and second chapters both look at methods of representing the world beyond the limits of physical form. She attends first to the practice of mosaicism in Virginia Woolf 's novels, arguing that Russian artists such as Boris Anrep influenced British writers' adoption the idea that observations of the physical world can only produce fragmented visions of reality, through which they aspired to Byzantine mysticism and spirituality.She then turns to the influence of Vasily Kandinsky's theory of art, focusing on discussions in the journal Rhythm of Kandinsky's argument that sketching out the artist's vision is more meaningful than depicting physical form. In the third and fourth chapters, Maclean focuses on British literature and film influenced by ideas of the fourth spatial dimension, first exploring how silence and disruption of narrative in literature were used to suggest the existence of this fourth dimension. The fourth chapter focuses on Sergei Eisenstein's theory of montage, a technique used to create a sense of the fourth dimension in observation. Both of Maclean's chapters on the fourth dimension suggest that it was used to create a heightened vision of reality.The Vogue for Russia offers both an analysis of hitherto neglected sources in addition to a new interpr...