Russia in Britain, 1880-1940: Reception, Translation and the Modernist Cultural Agenda



25-26 June 2009




A two-day conference hosted by the Institute of English Studies, University of London




Keynote Speakers: Olga Kaznina (Gorky Institute of World Literature and Art, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow), Laura Marcus (University of Edinburgh), Laurence Senelick (Tufts University)

Organisers: Rebecca Beasley (School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London), Philip Ross Bullock (Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford)



This major international conference will examine the profound impact of Russian and Soviet culture on British modernism. In 1915, Rebecca West declared that 'Russia is to the young intellectuals of to-day what Italy was to the Victorians', and the diverse influences of the Ballet Russes, Constance Garnett's translations, and Soviet cinema are routinely cited in studies of modernist writers as different as H.D., Wyndham Lewis, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. British modernists played a central role in the dissemination of Russian literature and culture: reviewing, editing, publishing and translating. However, there has been surprisingly little sustained attention to the structural details of this engagement. This conference aims to map an intricate and wide-ranging set of interdisciplinary relations, and will trace the transformative effect of Russian and Soviet culture from the first translations of Russian realist novels in the 1880s, to 1940, the eve of the Soviet Union 's involvement in the Second World War. This 'long modernist'
perspective is intended to encourage contributions on a broad spectrum of topics, from the simple life and socialist communities of the late nineteenth century, through the cosmopolitanism of high modernism, to the early reception of Soviet literature, cinema and theatre, the impact of socialist realism, and the rise of professional Russian studies in Britain.



Please submit a title, 300 word abstract, and brief CV by 15 December 2008 to r.beasley@bbk.ac.uk or philip.bullock@wadh.ox.ac.uk.





Further information is available at
http://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/conferences/2009/Russia/index.htm




Source
Dr Polly Jones
Lecturer in Russian
School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES-UCL) University College London Gower St London WC1E 6BT
0207 679-8723
P.jones@ssees.ucl.ac.uk; polly.jones@gmail.com



http://www.ssees.ucl.ac.uk