Searching for the true Russia (A complicated choice for Maurice Baring)

Maurice Baring was one of those British authors whose books caused the spread of a new attitude to Russia among British readers, common and intellectual, at the beginning of the 20th century. This change of the British attitude to the Russian world was deeply rooted in a vivid reception of novels written by 'major Russians' - Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, as well as works by other Russian writers, musicians, artists. The positive reception of modern (and even ancient) Russian culture in this period characterized Britain not exceptionally: it started in France in the 1880s with the publication of the book Le Roman Russe by E.-M. de Vogue and continued throughout decades and countries until the end of the 1920s. For Maurice Baring it was supported by his own impressions formed while he was working in Russia as a journalist. Baring's books The Russian People (1911), The Mainsprings of Russia (1914), Landmarks of Russian Literature (1910) and An Outline of Russian Literature (1914) became quite widely known. All and each of them created a deeply attractive (for the British reader) image of Russia - a country of nature's charming beauty, of people's naive faith, cheerfulness and kindness. By contrast, in Baring's stories and plays (written in the same period) the reader faces the Russia of political anarchy and social aggression. Most of his Russian characters (in the stories Police Officer, The Amorphists, The Governor's Niece (1908), in the plays The Double Game and The Grey Stocking (1911)) throw bombs, commit suicides and are ready to kill people for the ideas of anarchic freedom and social justice. To assert that in this case Maurice Baring depicted just what he saw and heard in Russia and read in Britain would be to simplify the situation. The gap between his 'journalistic' - and his 'literary' Russia is too wide to be explained by the influence of historic reality, or fashion, or social atmosphere. Obviously, in his journalistic books and in his literary works Baring chose two different policies of depicting Russia. While in case of the 'journalistic' image of Russia, influenced by the positive reception of Russian literature and people in European journals and journalistic books in the period between the 1880s and 1920s, he follows the new tendency of looking at Russia's spiritual and vital 'otherness', in case of his 'literary' Russian images he writes in accordance with the long European tradition of demonizing Russia as a country of political aggression and social injustice. In British literature this tradition was formed in the 19th century - first in Romantic poetry (Byron, Moore, Coleridge), then in works by W.M. Rossetti, Tennyson, Swinburne. It has continued throughout centuries until our times.

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