As part of the UK-Russia Year of Culture 2014, the exhibition “Oscar Wilde. Aubrey Beardsley . A Russian Perspective” was on show at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (23 September–30 November 2014). Six items from the British Library collections travelled to Moscow and were on display there this autumn.

 Red leather dispatch box given to Lord Alfred Douglas by Oscar Wilde with the inscription ‘Bosie from OW’. (Add Ms 81833 A)

Draft of Oscar Wilde’s poem ‘In the Gold Room’, [1881]. First published among ‘Flowers of Gold’ in Wilde’s Poems (1881). - (Zweig MS 199)

‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, 1897-1898. Printed proof sheets with autograph corrections for the first edition. (Add MS 81634)

 Photograph of the Hotel D' Alsace, where Wilde died (Add MS 81786)

A letter from Oscar Wilde to Edmund Gosse, dated 23 February 1893 and sending a copy of his Salomé (Ashley MS 4610) and a lithographed design by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec for the programme for the first performance of Salomé in Paris in 1896, with a portrait of Oscar Wilde  (Add MS 81794) were also shown in the Moscow exhibition.

As a gift from the Museum the British Library received the exhibition catalogue, in which the curators Zinaida Bonami, Anna Poznanskaya, Olga Averyanova and Alexey Savinov explain that “in Russia, Wilde and Beardsley’s artistic aesthetics were a major influence on the formation of the style and concept of the Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) movement  in St. Petersburg in the 1890s”.

Mir iskusstva, cover by Konstantin Korovin (P.P.1931.pmb. and P.P.1931.pmo)

However, the first response to Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic views as formulated in his book Intentions (the British Library holds multiple copies of the 1891 edition, including copies with various inscriptions by owners and the author) was given in an article published in 1895 by the literary critic Akim Volynsky in the journal Severnyi vestnik (The Northern Herald;  RB.23.b.6255, also available on microfilm, Mic.F.622). Zinaida Hippius, at that time a young poet and recent literary debutant, was also close to the journal and in 1896 published a novella Zlatotsvet  (Oxeye) (No 2-4, 1896), where “the story’s main character, the Decadent Zvyagin, presents a paper on Wilde’s aesthetic theory (apparently based on Intentions) to a circle of wealthy literary dilettantes”. Published eight months after Wilde’s trial, the story “provides a lively satirical picture of the St Petersburg artistic circles that had begun to discuss both Wilde’s writings and his reputation”  (Evgenii Bernstein).

The first exhibition of English and Scottish watercolour painters was organised in St Petersburg by Diaghilev and  influenced the young Russian artists who formed the artistic circle of Mir iskusstva, such as Alexandre Benois, Léon Bakst, Konstantin Somov and others. The Moscow journals Skorpion (The Scorpion), Vesy (The Scales) and Zolotoe runo (Golden Fleece)  also paid tribute to both Wilde and Beardsley.

      Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings for Oscar Wilde’s tragedy Salomé

Vesy. Cover by N. Feofilaktov (Available on microfilm, Mic.F.430).

One of the Russian artists Nikolai Feofilaktov, as well as working in a style close to Beardsley’s (see the example of his work above),  even tried to look like Beardsley in one of his profile portraits. Some of the images of the British Library collections of modernist Russian journals are available via the Russian Visual Arts project website.

Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead Curator Russian Studies

References:

Oskar Uail'd, Obri Berdslei: vzgliad iz Rossii [Exhibition catalogue]. (Moscow, 2014) YF.2014.b.2604

Evgenii Bershtein. ‘Next to Christ’: Oscar Wilde in Russian Modernism, in The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe, ed. Stefano Evangelista. (New York, 2010) p. 289. YC.2010.a.8522 and 18 (2010) 1765.882485).

Literary Journals of Imperial Russia, ed. by Deborah A. Martinsen.  (Cambridge, 1997)   YC.1998.a.1041 and m03/41941

Obri Berdsleĭ: izbrannye risunki, predslovīe i kommentarīĭ A. A. Sidorova (Moskva, 1917) LB.31.b.14196 and C.190.c.13

Sidorov, A. A. Obri Berdsleĭ: zhizn' i tvorchestvo (Moskva, 1917) C.190.c.14.

Evreinov, N. N. Berdsleĭ (S.-Peterburgʺ, 1912) YA.1994.a.12090