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Foreword
In 1790, Baron Melchior von Grimm wrote to Catherine the Great of a future in which two empires, Russia and America, would share “all the advantages of civilisation, of the power of genius, of letters, arts, arms and industry”. Then, the peoples of Europe between them would be “too degraded, too debased, to know otherwise than by a vague and stupid tradition what we have been”. Much later, after the First World War, von Grimm’s prediction looked freshly apposite, as the first intimations emerged of the rivalry between the USSR and the USA that was to lead to the Cold War in the wake of the second great global conflict. The scene was clearly set by what we might call the great antithesis, the clash of the ideas of Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin: on the one hand, a world made safe for democracy; on the other, a world ripe for revolution; and Europe in between. Meanwhile, the literary heritage of the future superpowers also appeared in a new light. For D.H. Lawrence, “Two bodies of modern literature seem to me to have come to a real verge: the Russian and the American.”