Beyond Holy Russia: The life and times of Stephen
Graham
Michael Hughes
Open Book Publishers £19.95
(978-1-78374-012-3)
THIS comprehensive biography of a forgotten writer might have
been called A Long Way Beyond Holy Russia. Stephen Graham
was a remarkable man, who was considered to be the British expert
on Russian Church and society in the years leading up to the
Revolution of 1917, but he more or less abandoned his interest
afterwards, when he could no longer receive a visa to travel to the
Soviet Union.
Graham's travels in Russia as a young man resulted in five books
between 1911 and 1913, the most remarkable of which was With
Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem. Anyone who reads this today
will be uplifted at the description of Russian popular piety and
the author's identification with his subject. As a result, he was
frequently consulted about the "real" Russia by leading
politicians, though not so much, it seems, by archbishops.
Graham was in a unique position to expose Bolshevik persecution
of religion, but he did not. His interests were deflected by
travelling in the United States, while he transferred his spiritual
allegiance to the Serbian Orthodox Church, describing Stalin as "a
man of sagacity and will who carried the revolution to its present
stage".
Michael Hughes has researched exhaustively throughout the
voluminous but scattered archives that Graham left at his death in
1975, aged 90, by which time he had long been forgotten as a figure
of influence. Hughes lists 51 full-length books, comprising novels,
historiography, and autobiography, as well as a lifelong stream of
travel writing. In the early part of his life, he was employed as a
full-time roving journalist, not least for The Times (53
other newspapers and magazines are listed).
Surveying this massive oeuvre in detail, Hughes gives us the
impression that his subject was a superb journalist and travel
writer, but little better than a third-rate novelist (he actually
withholds such a judgement). At heart, it seems, Graham never
completely abandoned his early allegiance to theosophy, a
pseudo-religion that was popular a century ago.
Beyond Holy Russia is a masterly biography. Graham's
weaknesses and strengths leap from the page; and, though the focus
is on one man, an era (the inter-war period) opens out before us:
the book is compulsively readable.
Canon Michael Bourdeaux is the President of Keston
Institute, Oxford.