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Galya Diment is today’s guest blogger. She is the author of A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky. Samuel Koteliansky fled the pogroms of Russia in 1911 and established himself as a friend of many of Britain’s literati and intellectuals. Among Koteliansky’s friends were Katherine Mansfield, Leonard and Virginia Woolf – for whose Hogarth Press he translated many Russian classics – Mark Gertler, Lady Ottoline Morrell, H.G. Wells, and Dilys Powell. But it was his close and turbulent friendship with D.H. Lawrence, with whom he had copious correspondence, that proved to be Koteliansky’s lasting legacy.
A year before he died in 1930, D.H. Lawrence privately published a book of light verse called Pansies in which one can find the following item which, after some consideration, I did not include in my book but now wish I did:
Fate and the Younger Generation
‘It is strange to think of the Annas, the Vronskys, the Pierres, all the Tolstoyan lot wiped out.
And the Aloyshas and Dmitris and Myshkins and Stavrogins, the Dostoevsky lot all wiped out.
And the Tchekov wimbly-wombly wet-legs all wiped out.
Gone! Dead, or wandering in exile with their feathers plucked,
anyhow, gone from what they were, entirely.Will the Proustian lot go next? And then our English intelligentsia?
Is it the ‘Quos vult perdere Deus’ business?Anyhow the Tolstoyan lot simply asked for extinction:
‘Eat me up, dear peasant!’ – so the peasant ate him.And the Dostoevsky lot wallowed in the thought:
’Let me sin my way to Jesus!’ – So they sinned
themselves off the face of the earth.And the Tchekov lot: ‘I’m too weak and lovable to live!’-
So they went.Now the Proustian lot: Dear darling death, let me
wriggle my way towards you like the worm I am! –So he wriggled and got there.
Finally our little lot: ‘I don’t want to die
but by Jingo if I do!’
– Well, it won’t matter so very much either.’ (Pansies, 1929)
For better or for worse, this poem, I would suggest, would have not been possible without Samuel Koteliansky’s participation in Lawrence’s education in the field of Russian literature and, is, in many ways, the culmination of it.
Readings and book signings for Galya Diment’s A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury:
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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