Anglo-russian Research Network: The Union of Soviet Writers and 1950s Britain

Anglo-russian Research Network: The Union of Soviet Writers and 1950s Britain

The Anglo-Russian Research Network will be holding its autumn reading group at the slightly earlier time of 5pm on Friday 5th October 2018.

We will be exploring the Union of Soviet Writers and 1950s Britain. We are delighted to welcome Dr. Henry Stead, who will be leading the session and sharing some unique archival materials with us.

“Dear Comrade Apletin…” The British Left and the Foreign Commission of the Union of Soviet Writers

This session is based on recent archival findings in Moscow’s Archive of the Muses (RGALI). There was much correspondence between the Foreign Commission of the Union of Soviet Writers and Western writers. Selected written exchanges between the Foreign Commission (particularly Mikhail Apletin and Oksana Krugerskaya) and three British writers (Naomi Mitchison, Doris Lessing and Jack Lindsay) reveal an overwhelmingly warm Anglo-Russian relationship across the Iron Curtain. It is now well documented how delegations of foreign writers were charmed by highly controlled tours of the early Soviet Union, but the genuine and open long lasting friendships that developed between international writers with shared interests and common social and literary ambitions, e.g. world peace and the poetry of Robert Burns…, have been less thoroughly explored. The reading consists of one forthcoming chapter on Anglo-Soviet relations by John Connor and a handful of letter exchanges between the three selected British writers and 52 Vorovsky Street, Moscow.

Henry Stead is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in English and Classical Studies at the Open University, UK. He is author of A Cockney Catullus (2015) and co-editor ofGreek and Roman Classics in the British Struggle for Social Reform (Bloomsbury, 2015). His current research project is called: “Brave New Classics (1917-1956)”, and it explores the impact of the Russian Revolution on British Culture through the lens of contemporary engagement with the Greek and Roman classics. The first book to come out of this project will beCecil Day Lewis and Virgil: The Making of a Laureate — forthcoming with Bloomsbury.