Harrison’s association with Remizov – and the encouragement of another Russian friend, D. S. Mirsky – prompted her first foray into Russian translation. In the spring of 1924, she became intrigued by a seventeenth-century memoir – considered the earliest Russian autobiography – written from prison by the archpriest Avvakum. Born around 1620, Avvakum led a rebellion against adjustments to the rites of the Russian Orthodox Church, which would have suppressed ancient customs in favour of modernised liturgy; he spent the last fourteen years of his life imprisoned in a pit at Pustozyorsk, an icy wilderness in Russia’s polar region, where he was finally burned at the stake. Harrison’s sympathy with Avvakum was born out of her fascination with popular rituals and her dislike of imposed dogma: she admired his commitment to preserving a religion based on genuine folk practice, rather than a sanitised orthodoxy divorced from what communities actually believed. Though Dostoevsky had famously declared the book untranslatable, Mirsky, whose relatives had been exiled in 1664 for their support of Avvakum, suggested that Harrison and Mirrlees attempt an English translation – their first creative collaboration, and a significant linguistic challenge.
Remizov offered to lend the women his own copy of the text, and to assist them with any difficulties deciphering the language. Throughout the summer of 1924, Jane and Hope enjoyed Monday reading parties at the Remizovs’ apartment on avenue Mozart. Over mugs of strong tea – and, for particularly knotty sections, tumblers of ice-cold vodka – they progressed haltingly, Alexei and Seraphima patiently explaining the Old Russian, and other friends occasionally interpreting when the Remizovs’ idiosyncratic English proved a barrier. In August, Harrison and Mirrlees returned to Pontigny, where they revised the manuscript a final time. On 20 August 1924, they wrote to the Remizovs, in faltering Russian: ‘We have finished Avvakum. There were many mistakes!’
The translation was published in October 1924 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, the press’s forty-first publication and ninth translation from Russian. Both Woolfs had long been fascinated by Russia: Leonard had founded the 1917 Club, a political salon for socialists in Soho’s Gerrard Street named for the February Revolution, while Virginia – who had read Crime and Punishment in French on her honeymoon and immediately declared Dostoevsky ‘the greatest writer ever born’ – had begun to learn the language in order to read and translate from the original. And their passion was enthusiastically shared, both in and beyond their circle. In the early decades of the twentieth century, British interest in Russian literature, dance, music and politics was a widely remarked-on national frenzy. The ‘savage-joyful panther-leaping’ of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes took Covent Garden by storm in 1911; that year also saw the first London productions of Chekhov’s plays, while the following autumn Roger Fry included a section of Russian art in his acclaimed Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, curated by the St Petersburg-born mosaicist Boris Anrep, whose Byzantine-inspired designs adorned the homes of many of the artist’s Bloomsbury friends.
Hope Mirrlees and Jane Harrison in Paris with bear and photograph of unidentified man, 1915
But above all, Britain was captivated by its discovery of Russian literature. In 1912, Constance Garnett’s translation of The Brothers Karamazov introduced Dostoevsky to an English-speaking readership. A former student at Newnham – where, according to her son, she had admired Jane Harrison, ‘whose short curls and freedom from the trammels of her sex aroused as much awe as envy’ – Constance had worked as a librarian and a social activist in East London until her marriage in 1889 to the editor Edward Garnett. She had come to Russian through the political exile Feliks Volkhovsky, who, while she was pregnant and bored in the summer of 1891, had given her a Russian grammar and dictionary and suggested she learn the language. Over the subsequent decades, Garnett translated into English almost the entire canon of nineteenth-century Russian literature: most of Tolstoy, all Dostoevsky’s novels, Chekhov’s plays and stories, and the works of Turgenev and Gogol. Her prolific labour meant that the nineteenth-century Russian greats were felt as contemporaries by their twentieth-century British counterparts, their releases as hotly anticipated as the latest bestseller. Virginia Woolf wrote that Garnett’s translations shattered the conventions of Victorian realist fiction by offering something grander and more profound. For D. S. Mirsky, Dostoevsky’s lack of emotional inhibition meant that, ‘together with Freud’, the publication of his work in English was ‘the most powerful single influence to give the deathblow to the Victorian mental order’.
The Woolfs were ‘immensely impressed’ by Harrison and Mirrlees’s translation, and delighted to add Avvakum to their list. Mirsky sent parcels of the book to the Russian press hoping for reviews, but the packages were returned ‘non-admis’. ‘Oh dear!’ wrote Harrison, ‘will intolerance never cease to breed intolerance?’ Hogarth’s publication of Avvakum, in the same year as Freud’s Psychoanalytic Library, demonstrated the Woolfs’ commitment to modern, internationalist publishing. It also marked a definitive new chapter in Jane Harrison’s work. Her entry into Russian translation made her a mediator between Russians in exile and the fashionable circles of Bloomsbury, and set her at the heart of an influential contemporary cultural movement. And the role formed a contrast to the closeted world of academia which she had left behind: no longer did she look inward to her position within an institution, but instead responded in her own way to events in the outside world. Harrison had always hated the idea that anyone should ‘draw your inspiration from your local soil, from the very chairs and tables and clocks and mirrors of your ancestral home’; her endless curiosity for languages (she learned eleven living and five dead) was born of a deep empathy and fascination for other cultures. When the First World War broke out, she had been perplexed to see how a perceived ‘bond of a common fellowship’ could drive men to sign up to fight against other nations; that a love of one’s country could so easily turn into an urge to force others to obey its laws, adopt its language and customs, and envelop the world in a ‘deadly uniformity’. This sort of patriotism seemed to Harrison a repression of all humanity. For thinkers in her mould, she wrote, patriotism ‘was not an inspiring word. It spelled narrowness – limitations. We aspired to be citizens of the world.’ Now, working in metropolitan centres among friends from all over the globe, translating and promoting other languages, cultures and histories, Harrison was living in harmony with her principles. And in 1926 she returned to Bloomsbury, to continue her work.
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By 1925, Jane and Hope were ready to establish a more permanent home after three exhilarating years in Paris. ‘Yes, our delightful Club at last “hoofs us out” & we go back to London in September to hunt for a flat,’ wrote Harrison to Mirsky in May. ‘I shall be sad to leave Paris but my roots are deep in England.’ Her main regret was forsaking the Remizovs, who had baked a cake ‘the size of a small mountain’ with which to send them off. Having travelled around the South of France, the pair moved back to London in the spring of 1926. Mirrlees was working hard on her novel Lud-in-the-Mist, a charming work of fantasy set in a bourgeois, law-abiding state which is thrown into disarray when fairy fruit begins to be smuggled across the border. Harrison, meanwhile, turned her mind to household arrangements. ‘We hope to get into our queer little house at the beginning of May,’ she told Mirsky, ‘& then I shall cease to think of nothing but corbels and chairs – how dreadful all the machinery of life is.’
That ‘queer little house’ was 11 Mecklenburgh Street, an extension of the square’s east side towards Heathcote Street in the north. Unlike H. D. and Sayers, Jane and Hope didn’t take rooms in a boarding house, but rather set themselves up independently. ‘We have taken a tiny mousetrap of a house and are at last installed,’ Harrison wrote to Gilbert Murray. ‘Will you come and inspect it? … We should like your blessing on our new cave.’ Number 11 Mecklenburgh Street was Harrison’s first private home in almost thirty years. Before her return to Newnham, she had shared rooms with other single wome
n, in friendly (though occasionally fraught) set-ups of mutual support. But she had much preferred living in college, where women could combine independence with companionship in a congenial atmosphere, and where her desire for personal freedom and deep need for company could both be satisfied. In Reminiscences, Harrison wrote that she had ‘a natural gift for community life’, which seemed to her ‘sane and civilised and economically right’: had she been rich, she added, she would have ‘founded a learned community for women, with vows of consecration and a beautiful rule and habit; as it is, I am content to have lived many years of my life in a college’. If Harrison’s utopia was modelled on a nunnery, it was one united not by belief in a god, but by a sincere conviction that this form of living – communal, celibate, scholarly – was best suited to allowing her talents to prosper.
College life, with its retinue of staff employed to cook and clean, had allowed Harrison to devote her time to work without the distractions of domestic duty, like the spinster dons of Sayers’s Gaudy Night. The American University Women’s Club, where they were provided with complimentary breakfasts, access to a huge garden and ‘baths galore’, had also represented a community where Harrison could flourish as one among many, and where she could live without having to worry about material comforts. As soon as they arrived in Mecklenburgh Street, they employed a housekeeper: Hope told her mother that she and Jane had realised in Paris that ‘a servant is indispensable to our permanent comfort’. This alleviated any anxiety that household management would interrupt their scholarly pursuits, but given Harrison’s aversion to domesticity it wouldn’t be surprising if she arrived in London somewhat trepidatious about these new arrangements.
But Bloomsbury proved an accommodating home. Harrison already knew several members of the Bloomsbury set, whose disregard for authority and tradition – whether in the form of war tribunals, literary censors or set dinner times – matched her own; many of them also rejected conventional family dynamics, living with friends and lovers as often as husbands or wives. The pair saw plenty of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, John Maynard Keynes and his Russian wife, the ballerina Lydia Lopokova, Ottoline Morrell, Roger Fry and Lytton Strachey, who were delighted to allow Harrison to hold court and welcomed Mirrlees warmly into their circle. Harrison, wrote Leonard Woolf, ‘was one of the most civilised persons I have ever known. She was also the most charming, humorous, witty, individual human being. When I knew her she was old and frail physically, but she had a mind which remained eternally young.’ This generation looked to her as a wise but irreverent elder, admiring her idiosyncratic humour, her fresh and unpredictable perspectives on all manner of intellectual or personal matters, and her unfailing interest in their ideas and endeavours.
In their new home, the pair worked together on a new, even more ambitious translation project, for which the idea had come about during those mirthful sessions with the Remizovs. ‘Knowing my totemistic tendencies,’ Harrison wrote to Mirsky, ‘you will not be surprised that we are writing a small book for children or persons in their dotage – to be called The Book of the Bear.’ This was to be a collection of Russian folk tales about bears, chosen and translated by Harrison and Mirrlees. The idea had arisen from the success of Avvakum and from a desire to delve further into Russia’s culture and history, but also from Harrison’s longstanding fascination with the human psyche. For years, she had been gathering evidence which suggested that early cultures saw human life reflected in plants or animals. In Themis, she had identified the earliest stage of religion with a time when ritual practice celebrated the essential co-dependence of human and non-human, with worshippers rallying around a symbol of unity – often an animal figure – in a collective dance. This totemism, Harrison argued, was not a form of worship but a state of mind; a stage of epistemology where humans did not see themselves as individuals, set against the outside world, but as part of an expansive and porous species, inseparable from the rest of existence. For Harrison, the eventual separation of human from animal was ‘pure loss’, and emblematic of man’s fateful desire to assert dominance over the world around him – to express identity in terms of difference and hierarchy, rather than of kinship. She considered this arrogance an affliction which doomed modern society; in Themis she warned that still ‘there are few things uglier than a lack of reverence for animals’.
Jane Harrison’s scholarly interest in totemism was matched by her own deep love for bears of all forms, an affection recalled, often with some bemusement, by many who knew her. Frances Partridge, a student at Newnham, remembered Harrison’s rooms being ‘full of them – pictures of bears, wooden bears, silver bears. “I love bears,” I hear her say in her deep voice.’ Harrison’s personal ‘bear-cult’ (which Mirsky called ‘the emotional residue of her anthropological studies’) began with their association with Greece and female independence: she had written animatedly about the coming-of-age rituals celebrated at the sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron, where young girls would mark their transition to womanhood by dancing for the goddess in imitation of she-bears. But as her interests shifted to Russia, Harrison saw great significance in the fact that the bear was something of a national mascot, often used in cartoons to personify the country. Though a somewhat crude stereotype, the figure of the Russian bear, Mirsky later wrote, was ‘one of the psychological starting points of her love for Russia’.
One particular bear also held special status for Jane and Hope, as a symbol and mediator of their relationship. A group of Newnham students had given Harrison a bespectacled teddy bear, which she called Herr Professor, or the Old One, or the ‘authentic plaything’, and kept in pride of place on her mantelpiece. Jane and Hope developed an elaborate private world surrounding ‘the Bear’, in which they were his Elder and Younger Wife, united in common fidelity to the venerable male. He provided a ritual outlet for their intimacy, a shared surrogate husband to whom they could address their feelings for each other at one remove. Through his medium they communicated emotions in notes – ‘the OO commands me to send a wave of his paw’ – and expressed sentiments: ‘I know the Bear is happy, he always feels in his great heart when any one really cares for him as you do.’ Together they composed a whole mythology around the bear, charted by Hope in a small blue notebook under the heading ‘Him’; a ‘sound scholar’, an anti-suffragist, a stickler for tradition, he was in many ways a foil to both of them, whose foibles allowed them teasingly to conspire against him. Later, Hope would end her published books with an image of the constellation of Ursa Major (with which they often signed off notes), in subtle dedication to Jane. In this private language, they found an expression for their affection, not easily understood by outsiders, but which embodied the devotion – and humour – which characterised their relationship.
Their game with the Bear was performative, tongue-in-cheek and playful, yet also (it’s clear from the extensive correspondence) serious and of genuine emotional significance to them both. Their love of bears endeared them to Alexei Remizov, whose study was adorned with a collection of ‘grotesque toys’: wooden birds, plush elephants, bones and branches and rag dolls dressed as witches, which he considered protective spirits (and which Jane and Hope liked to imagine him privately animating in ‘fantastic dramas’). Like theirs, Remizov’s behaviour with his animals had an element of the surreal and the spectacular. But also like them, he considered games and jokes valuable repositories of human truth, where the usual codes of society are upended, and where received opinion can be daringly ignored. In Themis, Harrison argued that it was children who still feel the strongest affinity to animals, their minds not yet having been shaped by the rational impulses which put an end to totemism and to the openness and tolerance she associated with it. And she was thrilled to discover that the worship of bears was inscribed in the most ancient Russian legend – that this rich culture held within it an empathy for animals which she felt had long been lost in the British imagination.
With Remizov’s and Mirsky’s help, sh
e began collecting tales for her and Mirrlees to translate, excavating sources including Krylov, Pushkin, Tolstoy, scriptures and the anonymous skazki or wonder-tales from the store of Russian national folklore. The Book of the Bear also contained four stories by Remizov, the only living contributor to the collection: ‘Since Aesop,’ wrote Harrison, ‘nobody has written more deliciously about beasts (especially about bears) than Remizov.’ Three of these, translated by Mirrlees, came from his 1907 collection Posolon, a surreal reworking of material from old folk tales, riddles, spells and lullabies. Posolon took its cue from the lost seasonal rituals that existed in Russia before the arrival of Christian missionaries led to widespread conversion and liturgical reform. Remizov believed that, when these ancient pagan gods were banished, their rituals became dances or children’s games, actions divested of their purpose or religious meaning. Harrison found his work immensely suggestive, and noted parallels with the shifts in Greek religion she had explored in her historical work. In the introduction to The Book of the Bear, she identified the forced Christianisation of Russia with the end of totemism, which survived only in legends of the sort she and Remizov collected. Harrison saw in Remizov’s stories – as she had in Avvakum – a moving attempt to preserve Russian identity at a time of national crisis, through revitalising the rituals which had brought its communities together in earliest times.
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