Event Details

In 2020-2021, we explore the global significance of Ruskin’s legacy in our seminar series ‘Ruskin Beyond Britain’.

The influence of John Ruskin on Russian culture, including Leo Tolstoy, has received expert treatment from scholars. However, the distinctly ‘Ruskinian’ construction of Russia that emerged in England in the thirty years or so before the 1917 Revolution has received less critical attention.

The Russia that existed in the British imagination owed less to Ruskin himself, than to a set of ideas that owed much to his influence, from anti-industry and urbanisation, to a belief in the importance of the aesthetic as lived experience. Ruskin himself was sometimes cited as an influence by those who presented their English-language readers with a ‘Ruskinian Russia’, most notably the journalist, essayist and novelist Stephen Graham. More often, they were simply articulating a generalised suspicion of the modern that Ruskin had helped to embed in British culture.

Professor Michael J. Hughes is Professor of Modern History at Lancaster University and a Research Fellow at The Ruskin. He is a specialist on the history of Russia and Anglo-Russian relations, with a particular interest in the development of Russian conservative thought between 1815 and 1917. He has broadcast widely on Russian history and politics, and he has published six monographs and some fifty scholarly articles and chapters in edited books.

Respondent: Professor Charlotte Alston is Professor of History at Northumbria University. She has published widely on subjects ranging from Russia's place in the wider world, with a particular focus on the connections between diplomatic and cultural relations, through to the impact of Russian literature on the development of modernism in Britain. Among her many books is Tolstoy and his Disciples: The History of a Radical International Movement (2013).

This event is part of the 2020-2021 Ruskin Seminar Series, 'Ruskin Beyond Britain'. The series will place Ruskin’s legacy in a global context, featuring presentations from an international community of researchers who are exploring how Ruskin’s ideas have affected societies from Russia to Brazil, from America to Italy, and from France to China. Each seminar will include a presentation and response, followed by questions and discussion with participants. The Ruskin Seminar Series is free, online and open to all. If you would like to join the seminar reading group, email the-ruskin@lancaster.ac.uk.