European studies blog

One of the curious aspects of working with the material book is the sudden confrontation of its physical properties, the weight of proofs, the storage of sheets and missing gatherings – and its combustibility.

I was reading a work by Hugh Walpole, written in Russia during the First World War. A copy of the first edition of this novel, The Dark Forest, published in 1916 is in the British Library, and contains two curious pieces of evidence: a printed dedication to Konstantin Somov, and a pencil annotation stating that almost the whole of the edition was destroyed in a fire at the printer’s warehouse.

Hugh Walpole, The Dark Forest (London, 1916) C.134.c.9. Front endpapers with a note describing the fate of the edition and a handwritten dedication by Walpole to Sir Gerald Kelly

Fires were not, unfortunately, uncommon in the printing trade at that time and accounts abound with records of losses or inventories depleted by smoke damage. More commonly mice or cats are blamed for the loss of sheets or full gatherings. However, I had been reading about Walpole’s experiences writing a novel and attending to proofs in the conflagration of the Eastern front, so a fire in what was the safe shores of ‘home’ was all the more shocking.

Walpole was a popular, though now largely forgotten, English writer who, in the First World War, travelled to Eastern front as a volunteer for the Russian Red Cross. He stopped in Petrograd before joining his ‘Otriad’ on a tour of duty near Lviv in May 1915. He managed to get a position as a ‘sanitar’ (medical orderly) and in his memoir ‘The Crystal Box’ he vividly described the conditions in which he wrote his novel at the Galician front:

Standing beside some carts in the Galician lane, my knees trembling with terror, the wounded moving restlessly on their straw, the afternoon light like the green shadow of a dried-up conservatory, I found a pencil and, steadying my shaking body against the cart, I wrote.

After his tour ended in October 1915 Walpole returned to the UK to publish his novel, excited by what he had achieved. The Dark Forest and his second novel The Secret City: ‘capture an atmosphere that would I know escape me afterward. … they are not bad books because as records of a foreigner’s apprehension of a country at its most critical time, they are true.’ In 1916 he went back to Russia to found the Anglo-Russian Bureau in Petrograd, part of a British initiative to counteract German propaganda.

Walpole’s time in Russia was formative of his literary taste. On 28 March 1915 he noted in his diary that he was with Arthur Ransome, Hamilton Fyfe, Konstantin Somov, and other Russian friends debating that ‘realism no good any more for Russia – Symbolism also dead. Alexis Tolstoi most interesting new novelist.’

 After Walpole left the Anglo-Russian Bureau, his friend Arthur Ransome continued to report on the situation as in this pamphlet, The Truth about Russia (London, 1918) 8286 f. 17.

Walpole’s mentor in Russia was the acclaimed painter Konstantin Somov. A former member of the ‘Pickwickians of the Neva’, the circle whose ideas were to be key in the creation of innovative magazines such as Mir Isskusstva (‘The World of Art’), and of the Ballets Russes, Walpole was a sentimentalist and his reaction to the Russian Modernists is complex: in his appreciation of plays at home or in Russia he frequently mentions the emotion of specific scenes, individual actors or joint performances. He was not ‘highbrow’ and also went with Somov to watch wrestling and barebacked riding, and his enthusiastic observations are drawn into his novel: ‘I adore a circus; and when I can find one with the right sawdust smell, the right clown, and the right enthusiasm, I am happy.’ Yet he was drawn to the idealism of the Russian Revolution.

 Illustration by Somov from Frans Blei Das Lesebuch der Marquise: ein Rokokobuch (Munich, 1923) YA.1994.a.19985. Somov was working on this book when Walpole was in Russia.

Somov had not followed Diaghilev to the West, finding for the time being artistic fortune in his own country. Escorted by Somov, Walpole was thus able to socialise with leading representatives of Russia’s new culture, such as Sologub, Glazunov and Scriabin, and to see legendary stars such as Tamara Karsavina in La Fille Mal Gardée, recording that she ‘seemed inspired’. In addition to the Anglo-Russian Bureau in Petrograd, Walpole set up a small office in Moscow with R.H. Bruce Lockhart which had good relations with Moscow’s cultural life. As Karsavina recalled in her memoir Theatre Street, entertainments continued, Lockhart gave banquets, wrote stories for the wide-circulation Russian trench newspapers and took propaganda films to the Russian troops. Walpole himself reported on the build-up to the October Revolution, writing the official report for the British government, and portraying it in his second novel The Secret City which won the inaugural James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1919.

Picture by Edmund Dulac of Tamara Karsavina in the ballet Parade in 1920, reproduced in Karsavina’s memoir, Theatre Street (London, 1930) 010795.d.46. in which she records her friendship with Walpole.

The development of his taste in Russia would lead to Walpole’s re-evaluation of the role of cultural production and his desire for a ‘broadbrow’ view of the arts. He recalled his Russian experiences in the forewords to his works on Russia, recommended Lockhart’s A British Agent to the British Book Society, and wrote an introduction for an edition of Saki's Reginald and Reginald in Russia. His experiences also gave him a lifelong collecting habit; he filled his house in Cumbria with paintings, books and sculptures and later donated works to the Tate and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

On his return to Britain Walpole helped Russian friends who came over after the Revolution, seeing Somov again on his way to New York for an exhibition of Russian revolutionary art in January 1924. Somov urged Walpole to support the artists by writing magazine articles, but Walpole had moved on.

Somov was disappointed in their US reception: the American public were more interested in pre-revolutionary art and icons. He moved to France he continued to paint and produce illustrations. He corresponded briefly in his later years with Walpole, offering to sell him paintings to add to his collection, something Walpole could not resist.

Illustration by Somov from Longus Daphnis et Chloé translated by Paul Louis Courier. Grande Collection du Trianon, No.8 (Paris, 1931) 012403.f.38.

Giannandrea Poesio and Alexis Weedon, University of Bedfordshire

This work is part of a larger project and forthcoming article ‘The origins of the ‘Broadbrow’: Hugh Walpole, Konstantin Somov and Russian modernism’ co-authored by Giannandrea Poesio and Alexis Weedon.

References

Hugh Walpole, ‘The Crystal Box: Fragments of Autobiography’, in The Bookman (Feb 1923) PP.6479.e.

Hugh Walpole, The Secret City: a novel in three parts. (London, 1919) NN.5340