The Difficult Foxtrot: A Study on the Writing Mechanism of Maurice Baring’s Literary History of Russia

Abstract

In the early twentieth century, the British writer Maurice Baring reconstructs the cultural image of Russia through an “art of distance” that negotiates the tension between imperial gaze and intellectual ethics. Writing as diplomat, war correspondent, and literary scholar, Baring sets out to dismantle Britain’s three-century-old, frozen Orientalist imagination of Russia and to capture the transient, polysemic character of Russian culture amid the turbulence of the 1905 Revolution. This essay argues that, although his political commentary was marginalised, Baring achieves a methodological paradigm shift in the more fluid domain of literary history through a strategy of “unfinished writing.” Adopting a stance of “impartial partiality,” he shortens the observational distance to render his subject intelligible, narrating a Russia deeply influenced by Europe and later reciprocally enriching it; guided by his aesthetic principles, he then strategically lengthens that distance to respect cultural difference. Because no static strategy can accommodate so volatile a context, Baring continually readjusts along synchronic and diachronic axes — a dynamic “foxtrot” that, even as it strains toward self-consistency, exposes the limits of expression and cognition. His decision to end the history in 1905 is therefore not a lapse of scholarly rigour but a conscious declaration of interpretive limits; it is precisely this unfinishedness that constitutes his highest tribute to the cultural other.