Reveals diverse notions of distributed cognition in the early Greek and Roman worlds

A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury looks at the remarkable influence that an outsider had on the tightly knit circle of Britain's cultural elite. Among Koteliansky's friends were Katherine Mansfield, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Mark Gertler, Lady Ottoline Morrell, H.G. Wells, and Dilys Powell. But it was his close and turbulent friendship with D.H. Lawrence that proved to be Koteliansky's lasting legacy. In a lively and vibrant narrative, Galya Diment shows how, despite Kot's determination, he could never escape the dark aspects of his past or overcome the streak of anti-Semitism that ran through British society, including the hearts and minds of many of his famous literary friends.

A biography of Katherine Mansfield, which exposes her life-long obsession with Russia - its music, literature, fashion and people.

H. G. Wells and All Things Russian is a fertile terrain for research and this volume will be the first to devote itself entirely to the theme. Wells was an astute student of Russian literature, culture and history, and the Russians, in turn, became eager students of Wells’s views and works. During the Soviet years, in fact, no significant foreign author was safer for Soviet critics to praise than H. G. Wells. The reason was obvious. He had met – and largely approved of – Lenin, was a close friend of the Soviet literary giant Maxim Gorky and, in general, expressed much respect for Russia’s evolving Communist experiment, even after it fell into Stalin’s hands. While Wells’s attitude towards the Soviet Union was, nevertheless, often ambivalent, there is definitely nothing ambiguous about the tremendous influence his works had on Russian literary and cultural life.

Explores the influence of Russian aesthetics on British modernistsIn what ways was the British fascination with Russian arts, politics and people linked to a renewed interest in the unseen? How did ideas of Russianness and the Russian soul - prompted by the arrival of the Ballets Russes and the rise of revolutionary ideals - attach themselves to the existing British fashion for theosophy, vitalism and occultism? In answering these questions, this study is the first to explore the overlap between Slavophilia and mysticism between 1900 and 1930 in Britain. The main Russian characters that emerge are Fedor Dostoevsky, Boris Anrep, Vasily Kandinsky, Petr Ouspensky and Sergei Eisenstein. The British modernists include Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf, Mary Butts, John Middleton Murry, Michael Sadleir and Katherine Mansfield. Key Features: Draws on unpublished archive material as well as on periodicals, exhibition catalogues, reviews, diaries, fiction and the visual artsAddresses the omission in modernist studies of the importance of Russian aesthetics and Russian discourses of the occult to British modernismChallenges the dominant Western European and transatlantic focus in modernist studies and provides an original contribution to our understanding of new global modernismsCombines literary studies with aesthetics, modernist history, the history of modern esotericism, film history, periodical studies and science studies

This book maps the ecologies of Mansfield's influences beyond her modernist and postcolonial contexts, observing that it roams wildly over six centuries, across three continents and beyond cultural and linguistic boundaries.

Katherine Mansfield’s French Lives explores how both the literary, cultural, editorial and biographical influence of French arts and philosophy, and life as an émigré in France shaped Mansfield’s evolution as a key modernist writer, while setting her within the geographies and cultural dynamics of Anglo-French modernism. Mansfield’s many stays in France were decisive in intellectual, personal and psychological terms: discovering ‘Murry’s Paris’ and the Left Bank; escaping to the War Zone to join Francis Carco; living as a civilian in wartime during the bombardments of Paris; travelling and finding lodgings as a single woman in war-ravaged towns; the experience of bereavement and debilitating ill-health abroad; and the joys and pitfalls for an outsider of a foreign land and idiom.

Virginia Woolf always stayed ahead of her time. Championing gender equality when women could not vote; publishing authors from Pakistan, France, Austria and other parts of the world, while nationalism in Britain was on the rise; and befriending outcasts and social pariahs. As such, what could have possibly interested her in the works of nineteenth-century Russian writers, austere and, at times, misogynistic thinkers preoccupied with peasants, priests, and paroxysms of the soul? This study explains the chronological and cultural paradox of how classic Russian fiction became crucial to Woolf’s vision of British modernism. We follow Woolf as she begins to learn Russian, invents a character for a story by Dostoevsky, ponders over Sophia Tolstoy’s suicide note, and proclaims Chekhov a truly ‘modern’ writer. The book also examines British modernists’ fascination with Russian art, looking at parallels between Roger Fry’s articles on Russian Post-Impressionists and Woolf’s essays on Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev.