In 2014, the New York Times published a pair of contributions from Francine Prose and Benjamin Moser on the question “What Makes the Russian Literature of the 19th Century So Distinctive?” Both Prose and Moser point to an elemental quality that can surpass difference. Indeed, the literature of nineteenth-century Russia tends to occupy a peculiar place in the popular Anglophone imagination, where the books’ condemnations of the West are largely abstracted into vague pronouncements about the soul, conveniently roped off from discourses about race, gender, or empire. Still, I am interested in how, across these essays, Russia enables a critique of Western civilization and English society that need not refer to the British colonies. There are countless things wrong with Woolf’s assertions-students of Russia’s venerable poetic tradition in particular will have gasped in horror. Despite the veneer of European sensibility, Russians, their English readers asserted, were, deep down, wild and uncouth, and, as such, perhaps also wise. In these essays, Russia figures as a country on the cusp of both Europe and Asia, its citizens white with an all-important asterisk, suggestive of depth.

The soul of the Russian, Woolf wrote, was “confused, tumultuous, incapable, it seems, of submitting to the control of logic or the discipline of poetry.” Like Lawrence, Woolf describes Russian literature as a kind of primitivist antidote to the strictures of Victorian society. In an essay titled “The Russian Point of View” (1925), Virginia Woolf tried to account for her generation’s Russomania. Lawrence was part of a generation of English writers who were in rapture over “the Russians.” In the early twentieth century, English-speaking readers had been introduced to the Russian literary giants of the nineteenth century, thanks largely to the tireless efforts of Constance Garnett (1861–1946), who nearly went blind translating seventy volumes of Russian literature into English. And the inflammation and irritation comes forth as literature.” Lawrence writes that Shestov’s work provides a “real clue to Russian literature.” “With us,” Lawrence explains to his English readers, “ is our very blood and bones, the very nerve and root of our psyche.” The Russians, however, “have only been inoculated with the virus of European culture and ethic,” Lawrence claims, adding: “The virus works in them like a disease.

IN AN ESSAY ABOUT the Russian existentialist philosopher Lev Shestov, best known for his “philosophy of despair” (exactly what it sounds like), D.

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