Baring, Orwell, Gogol and Grossmith

*

In one of his last ‘As I Please’ columns of 1944 (1^st December) George Orwell praised the work of Maurice Baring in bringing Russian literature to the attention of the English-speaking world (as John P. Lethbridge has noted on the Orwell Society website). Orwell wrote:

Maurice Baring, in his book on Russian literature, which was published in 1907 and must have been the means of introducing many people in this country to the great Russian novelists, remarks that English books were always popular in Russia. Among other favourites he mentions The Diary of a Nobody…

As John Lethbridge noted Orwell had his dates wrong: Baring’s Landmarks in Russian Literature was published in Britain in 1910 (by Methuen), and then in the USA a year later by Macmillan. It was in Chapter III, titled ‘Gogol And The Cheerfulness Of The Russian People’, that Baring made his reference to British comic writers, where he wrote:

Besides this power of making the best of things, the Russians have a keen sense of humour. The clowns in their circuses are inimitable. A type you frequently meet in Russia is the man who tells stories and anecdotes which are distinguished by simplicity and by a knack of just seizing on the ludicrous side of some trivial episode or conversation. Their humour is not unlike English humour in kind, and this explains the wide popularity of our humorous writers in Russia, beginning with Dickens, including such essentially English writers as W. W. Jacobs and the author of The Diary of a Nobody, and ending with Jerome K. Jerome, whose complete works can be obtained at any Russian railway station.

All these elements are fully represented in Russian literature; but the kind of Russian literature which is saturated with these qualities either does not reach us at all, or reaches us in scarce and inadequate translations.

The greatest humorist of Russian literature, the Russian Dickens, is Nikolai Vasilievitch Gogol. Translations of some of his stories and of his longest work, Dead Souls, were published in 1887 by Mr. Vizetelly. These translations are now out of print, and the work of Gogol may be said to be totally unknown in England. In France some of his stories have been translated by no less a writer than Prosper Mérimée…

In 1914, four years later, though, Baring published a second book on Russian literature, which – given the series in which it was published – was much more likely to have been widely read. This was An Outline of Russian Literature, published as part of Willams and Norgate’s Home University Library. The Home University Library was a non-fiction series of original works on subjects of contemporary interest, written for an audience who wanted detailed and authoritative accounts written by experts. It was in this series, for instance, that G E Moore published his Ethics in 1912, nine years after his Principia Ethica. The series was ultimately acquired by Oxford University Press, where it became the basis of the Press’s Opus imprint today.

Gogol re-appeared in Baring’s Outline, but in rather different circumstances. Baring now wrote in Chapeter IV, ‘The Age of Prose’:

Gogol’s temperament was romantic. He had a great deal of the dreamer in him, a touch of the eerie, a delight in the supernatural, an impish fancy that reminds one sometimes of [E.T.A.]Hoffmann and sometimes of R. L. Stevenson, as well as a deep religious vein which was later on to dominate and oust all his other qualities. But, just as we find in the Russian poets a curious mixture of romanticism and realism, of imagination and common-sense, so in Gogol, side by side with his imaginative gifts, which were great, there is a realism based on minute observation. In addition to this, and tempering his penetrating observation, he had a rich streak of humour, a many-sided humour, ranging from laughter holding both its sides, to a delicate and half melancholy chuckle, and in his later work to biting irony.

Reference to British humourists disappeared, mention of of humour reduced, and emphasis instead placed on the eerie, the supernatural, and imagination. If one returns to Orwell’s column, though, one finds that just as Baring swapped – between his two books – emphases, so too does Orwell as Orwell moves from discussing the influence of English humourists to the underlying subject, and frequent pathos underlying supposedly comic characters, among whom Orwell mentions Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Shakespeare’s Falstaff. And Orwell managed to make the transition, not as Baring did it over four years, but in the few lines of a magazine column.

The Home University Library was published in the USA by Henry Holt; in a similar way Dent’s Everyman’s Library was distributed in the USA by Dutton

When Orwell spoke of Baring’s ‘book on Russian literature’ he was citing examples from the first work, but it was probably the second that had the widest circulation and introduced the reading public of Britain and the USA to classic Russian literature.