 | H.G. Wells and All Things Russian 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. Galya Diment is the Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities at the University of Washington, USA, where she teaches Russian and comparative literature. The author of The Autobiographical Novel of Co-Consciousness: Goncharov, Woolf and Joyce (1994), Pniniad: Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szeftel (1997, 2013) and A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky (2011, 2013), Diment has published more than fifty articles. In addition, she has edited/co-edited Between Heaven and Hell: The Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture (1993), Goncharov's 'Oblomov': A Critical Companion (1998), MLA Approaches to Teaching 'Lolita' (2008) and Katherine Mansfield and Russia (2017). Her articles have also appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Magazine and New York Magazine. |
