‘Kissienska’: Katherine Mansfield’s Russian obsession

Katherine Mansfield is recognised today as one of the leading exponents of the modernist short story. Interest in her work is at an all time high and her collections of short stories have never been out of print since her death at the age of 34 in 1923. Her literary debt to the Russian writer Anton Chekhov is well documented; perhaps less well known was her lifelong obsession with all things Russian, culminating in her death whilst at an émigré Russian community in Fontainebleau, headed by George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. As a young writer Mansfield toyed with Russian sounding pseudonyms: Katya, Katerina, Kissienka, Katoushka and Katerina, wore Russian costume, smoked Russian cigarettes and attended Russian concerts and the ballet. As co-editor with John Middleton Murry of one of the earliest modernist magazines, Rhythm (which later became The Blue Review), she was able to bring her fascination with all things Russian to the attention of others. Using the Russian pseudonym ‘Boris Petrovsky’, she placed two of her own poems in issue four of Rhythm (Spring 1912). By issue seven in August 1912, the magazine could boast its own Russian Correspondent: one ‘Michael Lykiardopoulos’. In 1914 she met the Russian émigré Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky (1880-1955), to whom she remained devoted (despite the occasional period of estrangement), until her death. Together they worked on translations from the Russian. Unpublished collaborations included ‘Maxim Gorky’s Journal of the Revolution’ in 1918. In April 1919, the first of a thirteen part series of collaborative translations of Chekhov’s letters appeared in the Athenaeum. In 1922, the pair worked on a translation of Gorky’s Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev which was eventually published in a limited edition in 1928. This paper will examine the impact of Russian culture on the life of Katherine Mansfield and demonstrate how this influence came to embed itself in her own modernist inventions within the realm of the twentieth-century short story