SOURCE: Slatter, John. “Bears in the Lion's Den: The Figure of the Russian Revolutionary Emigrant in English Fiction, 1880-1914.” The Slavonic and East European Review 77, no. 1 (January 1999): 30-55.

In the following essay, Slatter describes the various roles played by Russian immigrant characters in English fiction, including the oppressed victim, the ideologue, and the heroic adventurer.

During the course of the nineteenth century, the century of revolutions, a succession of political events in continental Europe drove waves of revolutionary exiles to Britain, attracted by Britain's attitude of liberal tolerance and societal equanimity towards foreign residents.¹ French, German, Italian, Polish and Russian refugees² came to Britain, turning up on its shores in waves whose timing has everything to do with the vicissitudes of continental politics: the landmark dates are 1821, 1830, 1848, 1871, 1881 and 1878-90, dates which have relatively little resonance in terms of British politics but are the climactic points of that century...