H.G. Wells and All Things Russian

A study of Wells’s interest in Russian culture and development and the influence of his work on Russia and the Soviet Union

‘H. G. Wells and All Things Russian' examines Wells’s keen interest in Russian culture and development, and how Russia and the Soviet Union were, in turn, profoundly influenced by his works and his visits to the country.

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.