Wodehouse and Contemporary Russian History

In Monday begins on Saturday, the fantastic novel of the remarkable Russian writers the Strugatsky brothers, there is a chapter in which the hero, using a time machine, visits the so-called ‘describing future’ and is very surprised when he finds out that the most of the people are nearly naked. Then he realises that the cause of this phenomenon is the habit of authors describing a typical character as ‘a man in a cap and spectacles’.

In the same way, Russia appears in the first works of Wodehouse as a scantily attired person. It is quite understandable – there was no place for contemporary Russia in the early school stories. From time to time English schoolboys recalled Napoleon’s exploits, but no more than that. In the course of time, however, Wodehouse clothed Russia in more contemporary dress, though – we have to say – dress of rather gloomy, bloody-red colours.

Here I must stress one point. Although the world of Wodehouse is extremely sweet and light, even parts of this world are penetrated here and there by representatives of different left-wing movements. But neither Psmith with his socialist ideas, nor Vanessa Cook leading protest marches, nor George Cyril Wellbeloved with his strongly communistic views, nor even Bingo Little at the time of his membership of the ‘Red Dawn’ could be counted as contributing Russian references unless and until other characters begin – correctly or not – to mention their names in connection with their colleagues, pals or tutors from Moscow.

Neither do I include the anarchists with bombs who were mentioned in Summer Lighting, ch12, since I suppose there were enough Anarchists in other countries. However, a brace of bombs coming in through the window and mixing themselves up with the breakfast egg of Vladimir Brusiloff in ‘The Clicking of Cuthbert’ is right within my brief.

One of the first Wodehouse’s works where contemporary Russians appear, is The Swoop, a 1909 story and one of two stories where Russians are active – almost the main – participants in the plot. In The Swoop we have the Grand Duke Vodkakoff, the leader of the Russian army that, along with eight others, had simultaneously invaded Great Britain. Though fortunately this event never took place in historical reality, in reading the story we can readily imagine Russia as the country with a powerful army; a country which, together with Germany, had been playing a leading role in the interventionist coalition (Part 1, ch7). I don’t know whether British politicians took Wodehouse’s warnings into consideration, but the fact remains that during both the world wars, Great Britain joined in coalition with Russia. I leave you to draw your own conclusions!

From the pages of The Swoop we learn for the first time about the role that Cossacks had been playing in Russian army – the Cossacks of the Don, those bearded soldiers from the steppes: fierce, semi-civilised fighting machines who know no fear (Part 2, ch7). In ‘The Castaways’, from Blandings Castle, we learn more of the Cossacks’ role in Russian politic life: they were charged with punitive functions such as committing pogroms. From Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen, ch2, we realise that they had a role in stopping protesters such as Vanessa Cook from shouting certain things during a protest march, and, reading between the lines of Something Fresh, ch2, this sometimes resulted in individuals being exiled to Siberia.

So on the whole we can see that pre-revolutionary Russia is depicted in Wodehouse as a militant autocratic monarchy (see, for example, A Prince for Hire, ch9, in which the authority of the Czar was compared to that of an unscrupulous moneyed man in 1930s New York) where blood could be spilt in large quantities (A Gentleman of Leisure, 1910, ch9), a phenomenon that held some attraction for a certain part of the British populace.

Completing Wodehouse’s description of the pre-revolutionary period of Russian history, I’d like to remind readers of the writer Vladimir Brusiloff from ‘The Clicking of Cuthbert’. Though Russia never knew him as an author, he was named after the well-known Russian general Alexey Brusilov, a hero of the First World War. Another eminent but fictional cultural figure was Gotsuchakoff, whose works (alongside those of Thingummyowsky and other foreigners) were permitted (despite being modern) to be played at school concerts (The Head of Kay’s, ch4). Wodehouse does not specify Gotsuchakoff as being Russian, but Norman Murphy suggest in his Wodehouse Handbook that he was PGW’s way of referring Prince Alexander Gortchakoff, the Russian Foreign Secretary of the late 19^th century. Norman also confirmed my suspicion that to a 16-year-old schoolboy mind in 1900, Thingummyowsky was Peter Tchaikovsky.

The revolutionary events of 1917 were not described directly in Wodehouse. Only once, in the words of Archibald Mulliner’s valet Meadows, do we learn, that the revolution à la russe includes ‘massacres and all that’ (see ‘Archibald and the Masses’ from Young Men in Spats, 1935), but the attentive reader undoubtedly understands that something important was happening in Russia, after which Europe had been inundated with crowds of ‘exiled Grand Dukes and dowagers of the most rigid respectability’ (Ring for Jeeves, 1953). And if some Grand Dukes or Princes – at least, in the minds of the press-agents of gullible actresses – still had enough money to buy expensive presents (such as pet snakes) for these actresses (Indiscretions of Archie, ch7), the dowagers, on the contrary, were in the most deplorable state. Not being able to compete with English peeresses who earned fortunes by performing Greek – and even Russian – dances on the New York stage (Uneasy Money, 1916, ch6), Russian princesses had to pose before incompetent artists lying on divans in the semi-nude with their arms round tame jaguars (‘The Story of Webster’, from Mulliner Nights).

By the way, we can see from Wodehouse’s pages how the Europe of the 1930s differed from the Europe of the 1970s, by which time these Russian princesses tended to be in the absolute nude, and the tame jaguars had been replaced by tiger skins (The Girl in Blue, 1970, ch2).

Meanwhile, Wodehouse had noticed that, in post-revolutionary Russia, Petrograd had been renamed Leningrad (A Prince for Hire, ch9), and the Bolshevists, who had come to rule instead of the Czar, had settled not in Leningrad but in Moscow, even in the Kremlin. It is interesting that in 1919, in A Damsel in Distress, ch21, Wodehouse uses the word ‘Bolsheviki’, which is absolutely identical with the Russian term, but by 1921, with the revised edition of Love Among the Chickens he changed to the Anglicised version ‘Bolshevist’. Later variations included ‘Bolshevik’ and, in 1931, in If I Were You, ch3, the pretty word ‘Bolshie’.

I will be examining Wodehouse’s attitude to the Bolshevists later, but I should remind readers that though not every one of his Communists is a Russian communist, every reference to a Bolshevik certainly has a Russian origin. I have traced 12 mentions in the books and short stories from 1919 to 1957, the year when the Bolshevists themselves (as members of the Bolshevist faction, which was formed after the Party’s split at the Second Congress of the Russian Socialist-Democratic Party in London in 1903) ceased to exist. Perhaps this was because most of them – as may have been the case with Orlo Porter’s pal in Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen, ch8 (1974) – had been liquidated during a course of what Wodehouse so delicately referred to as Old Home Week in Moscow.

Naturally, life in Russia didn’t become easier under the Bolshevists. The police persecution, even after the demise of the Cossacks, still remained (The Code of the Woosters, ch4), and nobody doubted that it was these Russians who introduced the fashion of imposing substantial fines for moving pigs without a permit. And even in spite of the fact that the Wilson Hymack song ‘Mother’s Knee’ was a best-seller among the Bolshevists as well as among Borneo cannibals and Scots elders (Indiscretions of Archie, ch23), the idea of staging Broadway musicals in Moscow seemed rather impracticable (Barmy in Wonderland, ch18).

On the whole, however far Soviet Russia was situated from the Great Britain and the United States, and however light-hearted were Wodehouse’s characters, they knew that the time had come when Drama was stalking abroad in the night in the more vivacious quarters of Moscow (Bill the Conqueror, ch5). And not only in Moscow. Even in Nijni-Novgorod, as the Russian novelist Vladimir Brusiloff could witness, the internecine strife was proceeding so briskly that a brace of bombs could always happen to come in through a fellow’s window and mix themselves up with his breakfast egg (‘The Clicking of Cuthbert’).

Such attempts to cut the supply of Russian novelists, as well attempts to assassinate the Bolshevist leader V. Lenin with rewolwers (by then Russia’s great national sport), should undoubtedly be considered as by-products of the revolutionary activity of the Soviet Bolshevists, whose main purpose was a massacre of the Bourgeoisie.

An attentive reading of Wodehouse’s works forces us to the conclusion, however, that the Bolshevists must have put an end to their native Bourgeoisie rather quickly, as they seemed to be concentrating on exterminating the Bourgeoisie abroad. Even the Cloth-Capped Man from Valley Fields knew that such a Bourgeois as the City clerk didn’t swank about in a grey top-hat in Moscow and Leningrad, because Stalin was always ready to knock their heads off and stamp them into the mud (Big Money, ch6). But in London, there were plenty of City clerks and other representatives of the Bourgeoisie, which is why Moscow attached a special importance to the distribution of Red propaganda (Joy in the Morning, ch7).

The spread of Moscow agents was exceptionally versatile. One could meet not only the simple non-organised Proletarians like those Budd Street elements, who bunged turnips from the back row at Ronnie Fish and Hugo Carmody when they presented Shakespearean scenes at the Rudge-in-the-Vale annual dramatic and musical entertainment (Money for Nothing, ch7), or the charabanc driver nicknamed Weasel, who was indignant at the patrician hauteur in Jane Abbott’s voice (Summer Moonshine, ch19), but also Proletarians (sometimes even whole Proletarian families) more organised into movements like the League for the Dawn of Freedom (‘Archibald and The Masses’ from Young Men in Spats) or The Red Dawn, ready to admit into their company Bolshevists who have to go about disguised because of the police (The Inimitable Jeeves, ch11).

The Bolshevist propaganda didn’t stop, however, with the Proletariat, for it sent out its feelers into the midst of valets, butlers and their flesh and bloods (see, e.g., Spring Fever, ch.6). Moreover, we can see representatives of the upper classes in Britain citizens, and even the Mulliner family, inspired with Bolshevist ideas. We can recognize the revolutionary disposition in Archibald Mulliner’s wish to massacre the bourgeoisie, sack Park Lane, and disembowel the hereditary aristocracy, inspired by the pitiful love of the martyred proletariat. This is also seen in Mervyn Mulliner’s more mature understanding that what was wrong with the world was that all the cash seemed to be centred in the wrong hands and needed a lot of broad-minded redistribution (‘The Knightly Quest of Mervyn’, from Mulliner Nights). When we also recall Cedric Mulliner’s yearning for the day when the clean flame of Freedom, blazing from Moscow, should scorch Lady Chloe Downblotton and other wastrels to a crisp (‘The Story of Cedric’, from Mr Mulliner Speaking), perhaps we should admit that something was amiss within the Mulliner family.

Maybe the bloodthirsty intentions of lower-class characters were caused mainlyeither by a bad Shakespearean presentation, or by the patrician hauteur in a girl’s voice, or by the disgusting temper of an employer, though, to be honest, in the latter case, even the most anti-Soviet valet wouldn’t have stayed with Senator Opal for more than a week or so (Hot Water ch7).

What is there to say about the English aristocrats, who chose as a target of their bloody-minded plans their upper class equals? Even Orlo Porter’s main aggression (though he was not an ordinary Red Dawn blighter but a real Communist, probably on palsy-walsy terms with half of the big shots at the Kremlin) was aimed at the young aristocrat Bertie Wooster, even if Bertie himself believed that the more of the bourgeoisie that Orlo Porter disembowelled, the better Orlo’s pals in the Kremlin would be pleased (see Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen, ch7).

‘The Story of Cedric’, already referred to, provides us with a clue that it may be that dress was the cornerstone on which Bolshevist propaganda in England was based. Look at Wallace Chesney and his plus fours, for supporting evidence (‘The Magic Plus-Fours’, from The Heart of a Goof):

‘Miss Dix, I present a select committee of my fellow-members, and I have come to ask you on their behalf to use the influence of a good woman to induce Wally to destroy those Plus-Fours of his, which we all consider nothing short of Bolshevik propaganda and a menace to the public weal’.

If we add here the story of the top-hatted Lord Hoddeson’s meeting with the cloth-capped man in Big Money, chapter 6, the evidence seems pretty conclusive.

I must now invite readers to recall the first part of my article, in which I said that from the 1950s, Chekhov’s plays ousted the novels of Leo Tolstoy from Wodehouse’s pages. I now report a similar tendency in the historic-political record, where emphasis on the class struggle gave way to undisguised spy-mania. Thus, we can say, that – according to Wodehouse – the Russia of the first half of the 20th century was a country mainly known in Great Britain for its radical ideological philosophies, whether it was Count Tolstoy’s appeals to twiddle the fingers as an alternative to smoking or Red Bolshevist propaganda. After the Second World War, however, the situation changed, and Russia turned into an overtly unfriendly power, initiating more vigorous attempts to destabilise the situation in England by sending over its spies or by staging Chekhov’s plays.

The reason for this change of the attitude in the political sphere is quite understandable. Moscow did not have confidence in the sort of people whom they had tried to convert to Bolshevism. Yes, Syd Price had a way of twisting people’s remarks and making them recoil on his interlocutors like boomerangs because he spent half his time arguing with his Bolshie friends (If I Were You, ch3), but most of these so called Bolshevists clearly needed more support to bring about the Red Dawn. The charabanc driver Weasel has been wished Stalin were around to give Jane Abbott a piece of his mind (Summer Moonshine, ch19). Bertie Wooster’s temporary valet Brinkley, though described as Moscow’s Pride, disgraced himself by getting stewed to the gills. As for Orlo Porter, he – like Ukridge’s Bolshevist hen, which ate its head off daily at Ukridge’s expense and bit the hand which fed it by resolutely declining to lay a single egg – completely forgot his duty of murdering capitalists and the needs of hard-up proletariat, dreaming instead about a Mayfair flat, champagne with every meal, and Rolls-Royces, matters that would hardly be approved by the boys in the Kremlin (Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen, ch17). On the contrary, Orlo’s dreams, as well Archibald Mulliner’s later meditations, which were definitely hostile to the Masses, would have compelled Stalin to pursue his lips. In such conditions it was quite natural that the Moscow big shots, being disillusioned with their native British followers, preferred to make use of their own Bolshevist spies.

We don’t meet an actual Russian spy in the pages of Wodehouse, but the atmosphere of spy hysteria is described in a masterly way in many of his books. We can see that the sweet times of the 1930s, when youth (represented by Sue Brown, alias the American Myra Schoonmaker, see Summer Lightning, ch8) was brooding over the situation in Russia, have gone with the wind. Now every British citizen began to feel that he was in the secret service. So one realised that the freelance journalist Murphy was suspected of being widely known at Scotland Yard as an agent of a certain unfriendly power (i.e. Russia) under his real name Ivanovitch or Molotov, especially when he could mop up alcohol like a vacuum cleaner – an apparent requirement of all Russian secret agents, who had been trained to acquire resistance to spirits and liquors (Frozen Assets, ch6, 8, 9).

In such an atmosphere of total espionage, it was hardly surprising that a former employee of the Foreign Office could go off his onion and began to send secret official papers over to Russia, believing that he was Stalin’s nephew (Cocktail Time, ch14). Or that (in Something Fishy, ch4), the former butler Keggs set a private eye onto the son of his former employer’s friend, and when it was suggested that he become the head of the secret police in Moscow, he only declined because of the unpleasant Russian climate. Or that the publisher Cyril Grooly was ready to adopt the nom de guerre Golinsky, assumed to be a Communist spy, in order to break his engagement with a female novelist (‘Sleepy Time’, from Plum Pie).

Perhaps what was saddest in the Great Britain of the 1950s and 60s was that people had lost faith in the altruism of pro-Bolshevist compatriots. If, at the end of the 1920s, only the proletariat, armed with turnips, was accused of being in the pay of Moscow (Money for Nothing, ch7), now one (e.g., the ‘Field Marshal’, in Something Fishy, ch12) might even be suspected of this merely because they voted for Labour blisters who (in the opinion of Lord Uffenham) were nothing but a bunch of bally Bolsheviks. Moreover, not only British citizens, but even their pets, were ready to suspect that a man found sitting on a roof or prowling about the house at night was involved in a Red plot or in the pay of Moscow (Summer Moonshine, ch12; Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, ch9).

Completing the theme of Russia’s international influence, I must point out that it was not only Russian spies that kept Europe in thrall. Even the representatives of Soviet Russia at the United Nations upset other countries with the firmness by which they issued their 111th veto (Company for Henry, ch12), inspired either by the memory of Molotov politics (The Old Reliable, ch2) or by the ancient traditions of shifty Russian diplomacy once demonstrated in the remote past by Grand Duke Vodkakoff (The Swoop, Part 1, ch7).

No historian could overlook the leaders of a country with the colourful history of Russia. So Wodehouse couldn’t pass over in silence the heads of the Russian state in silence. Some have been mentioned in previous parts of the article, but I would like to recap. Wodehouse gave us descriptions of the Russian Empress Catherine the Great and referred offten to the contemporary rulers of Russia during his lifetime, starting with a casual reference to a Czar living in Petrograd (A Prince for Hire, ch9), whom we can deduce to be Nicolay II, during whose period in office Maxim Gorky began his career as a writer (The Love Among the Chickens, ch10).

Vladimir Lenin – father of the October revolution – appears twice, both times in the company of Leon Trotsky, and we have to say that as so represented, Lenin seems to be very human. He enjoys golf – even in the presence of a crowd armed by rewolwers, and even against Russian novelists (‘The Clicking of Cuthbert’). It was probably Trotsky’s idea to acquaint Lenin with Russian novelists, organizing the golf matches or inviting the novelists to lunch to meet him. Lenin was always ready to further this acquaintance, and it was not his fault that Maxim Gorky couldn’t dash off a trifle in the vein of Stephen Leacock during such a lunch (Love among the Chickens, ch10). Very likely, it was Trotsky’s fault, because he was a man who couldn’t hit a moving secretary with an egg on a dark night (Uncle Fred in the Springtime, ch12). It is Trotsky whose photograph, when added to a couple of ikons, produces the gloomy atmosphere of a Russian novel (‘The Purification of Rodney Spelvin’, from The Heart of a Goof) and whose name was considered worthy to be assumed when Bertie’s friend Oliver Sipperley was arrested by the police on Boat Race night (‘Without the Option’, from Carry On, Jeeves).

But Wodehouse paid most attention to Stalin, and I have already described some of their references. We can’t expect any tolerance from such a man, whom you never find dancing at a time when the fundamental distribution of whatever-it-is so dashed what-d’you-call-it (‘Archibald and the Masses’ from Young Men in Spats). Nevertheless, we have surprising confidence that a go-getter like Freddie Threepwood could undertake to ingratiate himself with Stalin if he gave his mind to it (‘Company for Gertrude’, from Blandings Castle). And, without doubt, every young British aristocrat would prefer to have Stalin in his employment than the unspeakable Brinkley (Thank You, Jeeves, ch22).

Although, as we know, Wodehouse’s was a timeless world, he liked to be up to date and his works reflect signs of the time. That’s why, in addition to Lenin and Stalin, Nikita Kruscheff is referred to in Frozen Assets, ch9, although regrettably Biff Christopher was unable to obtain any details about what Kruscheff was really like.

Among other distinctive marks of the 1950s and 60s we notice the reference in ‘Sleepy Time’ to students rioting in Saigon, Moscow, Cairo, Panama and other centres (although, in reality, no student was rioting in Moscow in the middle of the 1960s!). However, the real sign of the Present, which impressed and even frightened contemporaries, was the Russian Sputnik, which might hit you (see the updated version of ‘Big Business’ which appeared in A Few Quick Ones in 1958), though Lloyd’s could insure you against this (Do Butlers Burgle Banks?, ch6). Speaking of such an achievement of Russian science, we note that Wodehouse didn’t pay much attention to the scientists of Russia, his only reference to the University of Moscow having appeared in 1909 (The Swoop, Part 2, ch2)! So it is all the more pleasurable that he did not forget to mention the great Russian physiologist Doctor Pavlov and his research on induced reflexes (Galahad at Blandings, ch5).

And so we approach the end of our investigation. But Wodehouse, as a real Master, not only tells us about political life of contemporary Russia; he also provides us with information on the country’s economics. From his books we can learn about the rouble – for example, that the fees offered to an average Russian novelist for a lecture tour among English suburban literary societies, worked out in roubles, seemed just about right, especially if he knew that his principal creditors had perished in the last massacre of the bourgeoisie or fled from Russia (‘The Clicking of Cuthbert’). And though it was risky to buy roubles in 1922 (The Adventures of Sally, ch6), in 1931 you could already obtain high returns by investing some of your money in Soviet Russia (A Prince for Hire, ch2). Perhaps such divergent outcomes were due to the Five Year Plans of which adherents like Brinkley were so fond (Thank You, Jeeves, ch13).

Masha Lebedeva

Masha Lebedeva infests the environs of Moscow and suffers from the delectable affliction of Wodesousitis since 1992 or so. She is a member of both the UK Wodehouse Society and The Wodehouse Society (USA). She has written essays on Wodehouse, undertaken themed tours and has even attended as many as 4 TWS Conventions so far, hobnobbing with Plum fans on both sides of the Atlantic. With the help of The Russian Wodehouse Society (TRWS), she has organized an Old Home Week in Moscow.

The excrept you read here is a part of her scholarly research on all things Russian in the Wodehouse canon, titled ‘The Russian Salad’. The series covers the following facets: Russian Culture, Russian History and Russian Spirit. Its Russian version of her work has earlier appeared on the TRWS website; the English version having been serialized in Wooster Sauce, with huge help of accomplished Wodehouseans from different parts of the world.

Her permission to reproduce her work here is gratefully acknowledged.

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