Abstract
During the era of Russia's modernisation and industrialisation which spans from the death of Nicholas I to the Revolution of 1917, Russian thinkers saw Britain as a rival and a society to emulate. The concern with Britain found its way to the pages of Russia's literary prose fiction in the form of English characters and images of England's society. The dissertation gives an analytical study of the English in Russian literature, examining how they become the textual other in the quest to identify Russia's national self between 1855 and 1917. The dissertation argues that the promulgation of stereotypes of Englishness in Russia's prose literature relies upon images that had been established by the travel narrative in the initial stages of Russia's quest to define its national identity. Early attempts to define Russia's selfhood through travellers' perceptions of England between 1790 and the 1840s fostered an essentialised image of Englishness which the later writers cemented. The theoretical investigation of identity creates a foundation upon which our assessment has been formed. It involves the exploration of Russian national identity as it is implied through the images of England and the English: Evoking the critical framework of Said and the theories of Orientalism and Occidentalism, this dissertation studies the Russian literary productions of England and the English, of religion in England, of 'Englishness' as a form of social respectability, and also of the British Empire and the exportation of English values abroad.