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The following is excerpted from a review of A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury by Galya Diment.
We owe it to writer Galya Diment, author of the 2011 book A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky (published by McGill-Queen’s University Press), for shining a welcome spotlight on this intriguing and worthy subject, who was an important influence on D. H. Lawrence and a friend to Katherine Mansfield, H. G. Wells, Mark Gertler and other prominent figures of his day.
Kot — he acquired that nickname because few of his British friends could spell or pronounce his full surname — was born in Ostropol in 1880 and arrived in London in 1911, having already devoured all of the major works of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky and other Russian writers in their originals. The Diaghilev Ballet was then at the height of popularity in London and the British public was just entering into a mania for all things Russian, just as it had done for all things Japanese in an earlier era.
Introduced into the fringes of Bloomsbury group, Kot’s deep understanding of Russian literature, and his passionate approach to life and art, made him — despite his Jewishness — someone worth knowing. D. H. Lawrence invited him, along with other friends, on a walking tour of the Lake District in July 1914. Kot was thereafter close with Lawrence for the rest of his life and exchanged more letters with him than anyone else outside of Lawrence’s own family.
Kot’s friendship with Lawrence thrived, Dimant writes, despite Lawrence’s penchant for biting anti-Semitic remarks. Apparently few people in that era regarded expressions of racial hostility as politically incorrect: there was no need for anyone to curb their tongues or keep their discriminatory thoughts to themselves. Even Leonard and Virginia Woolf occasionally made anti-Semitic jibes about Kot, somehow forgetting the fact that Leonard was himself a highly assimilated Jew.
To learn more about A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.
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