The significance of Russian culture for the Bloomsbury group and their role in its dissemination in Britain is the focus of this chapter. British fascination with Russian culture peaked in the 1910s and 1920s and, because this was precisely when members of the Bloomsbury group came to prominence in their respective fields, their interpretation of Russian culture had considerable influence. Particular attention is paid to Boris Anrep’s curation of the “Russian Section” for Roger Fry’s Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition (1912); the role of the Ballets Russes in Bloomsbury conceptions of “civilization”; the 1917 Club, founded by Oliver Strachey and Leonard Woolf; John Maynard Keynes’ and Leonard Woolf’s engagement in political debates about post-revolutionary Russia; and the significance of Russian literature to Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press.

This chapter makes the case that Bloomsbury acted, crucially, as both the receptacle and the conduit for emerging ideas of psychoanalysis in Britain in the 1910s and beyond, with Bloomsbury functioning as a major vehicle for assimilating, disseminating, publishing, and translating emerging psychoanalytic ideas about feeling, emotion, and the unconscious to and for early twentieth-century British literature and culture. Bloomsbury figures read, reviewed, and translated Freud, trained as psychoanalysts, and held psychoanalytical gatherings, while Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press was the first to publish Freud’s work in English. Psychoanalytic texts would become central to the Hogarth Press’ lists, with the Press publishing texts including Freud’s Collected Papers and The International Psycho-Analytical Library, and books or lectures by early interpreters and practitioners of psychoanalysis and psychology, including Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi, Melanie Klein, René Laforgue, Charles Mauron, and Anna Freud. Further, this chapter argues that in a parallel and equally stunning act of “translation” from continental European thought into British culture, Bloomsbury also brought Post-Impressionist art to the English-speaking world during roughly the same period, with Roger Fry using language inflected by emerging psychoanalysis about “emotion” and “feeling” to describe both the production and the readerly reception of Post-Impressionist works of art.

This chapter addresses the diverse modes in which poetry is found in and around Bloomsbury by focusing on three different aspects. First, it charts the presence of poetry and poets across different Hogarth Press series (the Hogarth Essays, the Hogarth Lectures on Literature, and Hogarth Living Poets). Second, it considers poetry both as a genre and as a critical issue in the debate on form in art, for example in Woolf’s numerous essays on prose and on the novel, in which her discourse on the subject is inextricably linked to her reflections on poetry, or in the work of Roger Fry, Charles Mauron, and Julian Bell on Mallarmé. Third, it focuses on Julian Bell’s practice of and critical discourse on poetry as they develop in crucial moments for the Bloomsbury group more at large. By addressing these points, the chapter outlines a network of people across generations whose discourse on, or writing of, poetry intersected in one way or another with the cultural and aesthetic practices of the group, thus illuminating some of the fertile tensions and contradictions within it.

This chapter explores the significance of a bookshop set up in Bloomsbury in 1919 by the writers David Garnett and Francis Birrell. Drawing upon archival material at the Bodleian, Oxford – including catalogues, order histories, correspondence, and financial documents – it deepens and nuances the emerging understanding of modernist bookshops as private enterprises that were also public spaces of intellectual, artistic, and cultural exchange. The first part outlines the bookshop’s links with its Bloomsbury customers and, most notably, the Hogarth Press. The second part then turns to the international custom base and professional networks to show how the bookshop, like the Hogarth Press, challenges narratives of the Bloomsbury group as an insular clique. In considering how friendship and business mixed, the chapter therefore demonstrates two key features of modernist bookshops set out by Huw Osborne in his edited volume The Rise of the Modernist Bookshop (2015), whereby they exist “on the threshold of commerce and culture,” and where they are “locally fixed in cities and towns and yet tied into transatlantic and global networks” that complicate the very division between the local and the global.