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H. G. Wells and All Things Russian is a fertile terrain for research and this volume will be the first to devote itself entirely to the theme. Wells was an astute student of Russian literature, culture and history, and the Russians, in turn, became eager students of Wells’s views and works. During the Soviet years, in fact, no significant foreign author was safer for Soviet critics to praise than H. G. Wells. The reason was obvious. He had met – and largely approved of – Lenin, was a close friend of the Soviet literary giant Maxim Gorky and, in general, expressed much respect for Russia’s evolving Communist experiment, even after it fell into Stalin’s hands. While Wells’s attitude towards the Soviet Union was, nevertheless, often ambivalent, there is definitely nothing ambiguous about the tremendous influence his works had on Russian literary and cultural life.
The book reminds us of the contingency of the personal passions and antipathies which shape cultural exchange. H. G. Wells and All Things Russian takes its place in the burgeoning field of recent scholarship on Anglo-Russian relations, a field to which its editor has already made so many significant contributions. — H. G. Wells and All Things Russian, Reviewed by P. R. Bullock, Slavonic and East European Review, 99, no. 2, April 2021, 341-342
Introduction: ‘The Wells Effect’, Galya Diment; WELLS IN RUSSIA PRE-WORLD WAR II; 1. Yevgeny Zamyatin and the Wellsian Utopia, Maxim Shadurski; 2. Time Machines and Metamorphoses: H. G. Wells’s Influence on Mikhail Bulgakov and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Muireann Maguire; 3. ‘The Wellsian Twist’ in Nabokov’s ‘Terra Incognita’, Zoran Kuzmanovich; POST WORLD WAR II; 4. ‘Unregenerate Mass Nature’ in H. G. Wells and the Brothers Strugatsky, Richard Boyechko; 5. Culturology: Yuly Kagarlitsky’s Life of Wells, Patrick Parrinder; 6. ‘Come and Visit Us in Ten Years’ Time!’: Representation of H. G. Wells on the Russian Stage and Screen, Olga Sobolev and Angus Wrenn; RUSSIA IN WELLS; 7. Russia and H. G. Wells’s ‘Babes in the Darkling Wood’, David Rampton; 8. Wells and Gorky, Ira Nadel; 9. Odette Keun versus H. G. Wells on Russia, Galya Diment; Appendix. Translations; 1. V. D. Nabokov on Visiting Wells in England in 1916 (trans. Galya Diment); 2. Alexander Amfiteatrov on Wells’s Visit to Russia in 1920 (trans. Veronica Muskheli); 3. Alexander Belyaev on the Wells-Lenin debate about ‘Utopias’ (trans. Galya Diment); 4. Karl Radek and Solomon Lozovsky to Stalin (trans. Galya Diment); 5. Yury Olesha on His Love for Wells (trans. Galya Diment); 6. Yuly Kagarlitsky on Being a Soviet Biographer of Wells (trans. Veronica Muskheli); Bibliography; Index.