Angela Byrne’s latest book is a considerable feat, spanning more than two centuries of Irish-Russian activities from the ascent of Peter the Great in 1682 to the First World War. It is full of surprising characters, such as Jacobite mercenaries like Count Joseph O’Rourke who led in ‘Russian campaigns of aggression and territorial expansion’ (11) and created a dynasty within the Russian Empire. Over twenty very different individuals are discussed within these pages, including soldiers, diplomats, travel writers, radicals, migrants and explorers. Many with the capital to undertake travel to Russia were drawn from the social elite. Arthur McMurrough Cavanagh fashioned a type of Russian Grand Tour, while Henry Gore-Booth completed vanity projects in the guise of expeditions to the Russian Arctic. Gore-Booth’s travels ‘betrayed a vision of the Arctic as a space devoid of human life, erasing indigenous people from the record’ (32).
The subjects of this book range from the very well known (for example, Gore-Booth’s daughter, Constance Markievicz; Maude Gonne also gets a passing mention) to the barely remembered. The author selected individuals not on the basis of their achievements, but rather their connection to Russia, which facilitated the inclusion of Jenny O’Reilly, who restyled herself Evgeniya Ivanovna Vyazemskaya upon marriage. Some enjoyed the employ of the Russian state, while others were passing observers using Russia and the Russians as a subject for memoirs and travel writing (to varying degrees of success and originality). Across the social classes of Irish people who found themselves in Russia during this long period, Byrne observes a general tendency towards Orientalism.
To put order on her subjects, Byrne divides the book into five sections, which are both thematic and chronological. The first section charts the careers of Irish mercenaries and ambassadors in the eighteenth century, while the last deals with those who spent time in Russia immediately preceding the revolution. In between, there are sections on those drawn to Russia by personal relationships, in search of adventure or for scientific purposes. Byrne’s experience of analysing travel writing has enriched this study. Her discussion of Selina Bunbury’s work (b. 1802), for example, expands on Irish views on Russia as well as Bunbury’s ability to support herself as a female middle-class author. There are unavoidable silences due to sparce source material, and the foregrounding of wealthier representatives is not unconscious. Byrne laments the impossibility of accessing the experiences of Irish foot soldiers in Russia’s early wars of expansion or indeed the female relations of the early Jacobite exiles. Other subjects, like Eleanor Cavanagh and Margaretta Eager, are drawn from the working and middle classes. These women travelled to Russia as domestic servants to fulfil employment obligations, with Eager acting as a nanny to the last tsar’s children.
For some subjects, like Lily Boole, Russia was central to their lives. Already well-versed in the Russian language, Lily spent two years in Russia from 1887 and upon returning to London continued to work in Russian radical circles, eventually marrying Mikhail Wilfrid Voynich, who had escaped from Siberia. Her 1897 novel, The gadfly, continued to be a best seller in the U.S.S.R. into the mid twentieth century. Anarchy and authority raises questions about identity and Irishness. Lily Boole, for example, spent only her infancy in Ireland. Several of the diplomats discussed in the book benefitted from British appointments. They were British, rather than Irish, in their interactions with Russia. Sir David Barry self-defined as British and was sent to Russia by the British government. In contrast, Anthony O’Hara, who was born in France and lived in Russia from the age of seven years, constructed an Irish identity for himself to advance his career. The four women discussed in section two ‘identified at various times as Irish or English’ (36). It is interesting to observe that Irish women could find employment providing childcare to the most elite nineteenth-century Russian families, at a time when Irish aristocrats actively sought British or European women to remove the early brogue from their own households.
The cover artwork is powerful and eye-catching. Readers (like myself) less familiar with Russian history would have appreciated if conversions of sums of money listed in rubles, or distances measured in ‘versts’ (70), were provided.
The book is fittingly dedicated to Byrne’s son, Donnchadh. It was completed during his infancy as he nursed or slept in the crook of Byrne’s arm. The acknowledgements show the incongruous nature of modern academic life as people devote their unpaid ‘spare time’ over many years to complete the books by which they are professionally measured. The author is to be commended for drawing such a large project together. Upon completing this book, the reader is left with a sense that the international is an essential aspect in exploring Ireland’s past. It would be interesting to see a companion book exploring Russians in Ireland, or examining Ireland within the Russian imagination, but that is a job for another day.
