ENGLAND AND RUSSIA

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 98, 27 April 1935, Page 24

ENGLAND AND RUSSIA

The Moscow correspondent of the London "Observer" reports that more than 150 unpublished letters of famous British authors, including some from Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Walter Scott, and Lord Byron, have been discovered in Leningrad by Professor I Alexeyev, of the Institute of Eussian Literature of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, in the course of his researches in "Anglo-Russian Literary Relations" the subject of a series of books he is now writing. In the first volume of this work (now ready for publication) Professor Alexeyev advances the theory that contact between Russia and England began not in the sixteenth century, when Richard Chancellor reached the Court of Ivan the Terrible, but some five or six. hundred years earlier. The professor points out that in the sixteenth century, following the period when British merchants wera granted the right of free trade by Ivan the Terrible, and English trading posts were organised from Archangel to Moscow, there was to be found in the literature of the Elizabethan era frequent allusions to Muscovy. Shakespeare's "A Winter Tale," says Professor Alexeyev, is influenced by the marriage of the Moscow Grand Duke Basil to a Lettish princess, while the I idea of disguising the heroes of "Love's Labour Lost" as Muscovites was evijdently suggested to the playwright by the arrival of the Russian Embassy in London. The recently-found unpublished letters of, famous British authors are to be utilised by Professor Alexeyev in the second volume of his "Anglo-Russian Literary Relations," on which he is now working.