In her Epilogue to The Vogue for Russia: Modernism and the Unseen in Britain 1900–1930, Caroline Maclean refers to “the network of ideas that may have originated in the West, but gained intellectual authority by being rerouted through the East” (169). Her statement equally describes the network of ideas she explores in this ambitious study. Maclean establishes significant connections among a number of aesthetic movements, theories, artistic works, and their creators who flourished during the early decades of the twentieth century. In a tightly argued analysis, she connects painting, literature, and cinema with the then-current vogue of the “unseen” in Russia and Britain—theosophy, mysticism, the occult, and the “fourth dimension.” She emphasizes that aesthetic and esoteric ideas are not simply circulated across cultures but are also altered by them. Of the four major chapters, two focus closely on modernist aesthetics—Bloomsbury and Russian—and two explore art and cinema in relation to the fourth dimension, in which time and space converge as “hyperspace” (104) or “spatialised time” (130).

In Virginia Woolf’s quoted phrase, “‘Splinters and Mosaics’: Bloomsbury Aesthetics Reconsidered,” Maclean summarizes the history of Russian art exhibits in nineteenth-century Britain to provide context for the aesthetically radical First and Second Post-Impressionist Exhibitions in London (1910 and 1912) curated by Roger Fry. That works by Russian painters were increasingly regarded as “external expressions of inner spirituality” (40) was analogous to the adoring British response to Fedor Dostoevski, Lev Tolstoi, Anton Chekhov, and other Russian writers whose works appeared in English translation during the same time period: Woolf and her literary peers insisted that the Russians were more “spiritual” than their western counterparts. Maclean also links Bloomsbury aesthetics to Byzantine sources; mosaics created by Russian émigré Boris Anrep illustrate this connection, as does—more abstractly—Woolf’s fiction. In Jacob’s Room, Woolf’s first experimental novel, “Fragments are built up to create temporary structures and then are broken down again & ” (57), while The Waves is the writer’s most “mosaic-like book” (57).

In another chapter, Maclean explores Russian aesthetics as theorized in British avant-garde periodicals, particularly Rhythm, edited by John Middleton Murry between 1911 and 1913. The title word functioned as a multi-sensory concept, coupling material and spiritual responses to aesthetic experiences. The pairing suggests synesthesia—a popular concept at the time—manifested in such sensory crossovers as smelling colors and seeing sounds. The multiple senses of “rhythm” are most notably represented by the Russian artist and theosophist, Vasilii Kandinskii, whose shift to abstract painting resulted not from “a rejection of realism as style” but from the artist’s struggle to describe “the unseen” (80). By contrast, British short story writer Katherine Mansfield resisted her contemporaries’ enthusiasm for the occult. Enthralled by the Russian writers, however, Mansfield published several poems in Rhythm under a Russian pseudonym while playfully identifying herself as their translator.

The chapters that focus on the fourth dimension are somewhat difficult to grasp because the concept, referenced in such diverse disciplines as physics, non-Euclidian geometry, cinema, and theory of objects, is resistant to language. Maclean undertakes the difficult task of identifying commonalities between science and mysticism. Regarding the latter, Mary Butts, a minor modernist writer, was inspired by the theosophist Petr Ouspensky, whose influential work, Tertium Organum (1911), offered “a Russian mystic’s exposition of higher space with an emphasis on art and perception” (121). Butts particularly appreciated Ouspensky’s paradoxical statement that “that which can be expressed cannot be true” (129).

Maclean further explores such conundrums in the final chapter, examining the fourth dimension in the context of film theory. The technique of cinematic montage was developed by Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and applied by British filmmaker Kenneth Macpherson in his experimental film Borderline. Maclean contends that Eisenstein’s idea of cinema as a four-dimensional space reflects both the materialist position—Einstein’s theory of relativity—and Ouspensky’s mystical conception of the fourth dimension.

The Vogue for Russia is nothing if not intellectually stimulating. Maclean distills her prodigious research—nearly twenty percent of the book’s 205 pages consists of endnotes and Works Cited—into close analysis of the influence of Russian art and the “unseen” during the modernist movement in Britain. Her sharp focus on the “specifically occultist discourse through which Russomania and Russophobia were mediated” (168) modifies the existing discourse on the relationship between the arts of nineteenth-century Russia and modernist Britain. Not only offering an original intellectual mosaic of her own, Maclean concludes by suggesting directions for further scholarship in the rich, multidisciplinary vein she has developed and extended.