“For Fear of Bears”: Ruskin in Russia (A Biblio-Historical Sketch)

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of late imperial Russia’s cultural engagement with Ruskin. Excluding Tolstoy and his immediate followers from the survey, it identifies the other translations and translators of Ruskin. It argues that in preaching a gospel of art in which beauty is held to be a social necessity, Ruskin suggested to key members of a broad creative élite, especially the Symbolist artists and writers of Russia’s “Silver Age,” strategies for connecting otherwise fragmented ideas in an increasingly divided, modernizing society. Ruskin’s vilification of con-temporary Britain, and his celebration of a more harmonious and creatively successful past, simultaneously provided a stark warning of an ever-more degraded future and offered new hope at the turn of the century that such a fate might be avoided in Russia. Ruskin’s ideas were also discussed among Russian political economists, architects, and supporters of traditional handicrafts. He was known to some industrial workers and was even hero-worshipped by a leading stage actress. Ruskin’s cultural presence in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia is almost completely unknown, and to recover it helps us more fully to understand both the history of this period of Russian culture, and the nature of Ruskin’s international influence.