Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View

This book brings together Virginia Woolf's essays and book reviews on Russian literature; her unpublished reading notes on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Turgenev; and new and insightful scholarly commentary concerning her response to each of the major Russian writers.

In 1919, Virginia Woolf wrote, "The most inconclusive remarks upon modern English fiction can hardly avoid some mention of the Russian influence, and if the Russians are mentioned one runs the risk of feeling that to write of any fiction save theirs is a waste of time." In Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View, Roberta Rubenstein examines Woolf''s responses to Russian literature over two decades and across the range of her fiction, essays, and book reviews. She argues that the Russian writers significantly influenced Woolf''s developing Modernist aesthetic and left lasting marks on her theory and practice of fiction. The book includes transcriptions of forty-eight pages of Woolf''s previously unpublished reading notes on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev, and an unpublished review in which Chekhov and the Russians figure centrally.