The concept of Holy Russia in H.G. Wells's novel Joan and Peter: A dialogue with Russia about national ideas, holiness, and genius

Abstract

Joan and Peter is not among the most famous H.G. Wells's novels. Yet it occupies a conspicuous place in both the writer's prose works, and in the history of English literature. The significance of its place is caused not so much by its aesthetic features, rather by its connection with a profound dialogue with the time, tradition, and different national cultures: the dialogue between the narrator and the heroes. On the eve of two social and political catastrophes (for the author and the reader - in their retrospective light), they are trying to comprehend the results of the European history development and, what is probably even more important, to create an idea of a new 'cathedral' world. To reach these goals, the heroes set for a journey to the continental Europe and Russia. Russian landscape, state, culture, and people provoke not only a chain of speculations upon the 'Russian idea' and the national ideal of Holy Russia, but also an insight into the correlation between cultural forms and their meaning, between the ideal and the reality, the culture and the people, the elite and ordinary people. Getting closer to the central idea of the novel - the necessity for creating a new system of education aimed at bringing up a new man, 'mature' enough to understand the profound unity of the world, - the heroes ponder upon different British interpretations (engendered in different periods of British-Russian relations) of Russia and Russian national character, as well as upon the essential similarity between Russian and British Empires, on the one hand, and between Russian and British intellectual elite, on the other. The versions of the 'Russian idea', i.e. of the essential meaning of the Holy Russia concept, are manifested in the text in various ways, including the image of a 'Tartar camp', frozen, but ready to stretch to Europe (a version alluding to the reception of the Holy Russia concept around the middle of the 19th century), the image of an 'epileptic genius' 'holding up the cross to mankind' (an allusion to Dostoevsky and the reception of his works on the verge of the 20th century), the idea of Brotherhood (connected both with the influence of Leo Tolstoy's works on the British intellectual reader at the beginning of the 20th century, and with the big historic event of the Russian Revolution of 1917), and of wanderer, searching for the Truth (a reflection of another accent in the Holy Russia concept, relevant for the Russian literature of the 1900s and 1910s as well as for the British reception of Russian culture in this period). The versions, however, are evoked only to be dismissed as non-productive, insignificant in the face of the profound historical shifts: World War I is the reality of the heroes' existence, and the Russian Revolution is the reality of the author and readers' lives. The central idea that formed in the heroes' minds during their Russian journey is that the key to the future belongs to the genius, and that Russian and British intellectual elites are equally marked with giftedness.