The oxymoron is that intriguing, self-reflexive figure which sets two apparently contradictory qualities side-by-side and leaves them to gently collide together. It allows no dialectical resolution. Nor can any grammatical coordinator be inserted to ease the tension between the terms. And, but or yet inserted into the nominal cluster would help an oxymoron make sense, but would at the same time annul it. And let me add, by way of a tangent, that as Nevill Forbes teaches us in his Russian Grammar, there are not one but two “buts” in Russian, marking slight and stronger antithesis.

Virginia Woolf's 1925 essay “A Russian Point of View” (E4 181-190) seemingly flaunts contradictions or ambivalence, in terms of subject as well as authorial stance, creating an underlying tension that remains unresolved to the end. The title promises to reveal what a Russian point of view is, only to of fer points of view on the Russians. And whose points of view? For all the essay's foregrounded subjectivity and its inscription in the present tense, the opening pages do not just draw on Woolf's own publications on Russian literature since 1917 but interweave her own recycled ideas with an intriguing mish-mash of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russian voices, indirectly echoing John Murry, Percy Lubbock, Maxim Gorky, Peter Kropotkin, Melchior De Vogue, Maurice Baring, Nikolai Brodsky and Arthur Clutton-Brock to quote but the most striking. It compares translated Russian to language bereft of style or people bereft of clothes, claims which can only intrigue coming from an author who not only signed translations, but who in other writing posits clothes as the most unstable of signifiers, that can disguise or obscure “the large and permanent things.” The essay's closing tangent retreats to the gentle comforts of home, although so many Woolf essays welcome a little estrangement in time or space to escape from domesticity (“Phases of Fiction” being the most striking example), not to mention that “as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world”(TG 125).

Little wonder that by the end of the essay, when Tolstoy turns his telescope on “us” (a very different Russian point of view), it inspires a sense of bewilderment.