Confused Categories: Russia and the East-West Divide in William Plomer’s Sado

Abstract: The East-West divide in literature from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s can be significantly reconceptualized by focusing on the role of Russian novels in William Plomer’s Sado (1931). At a time when conflict between Russia and Japan was casting the East-West dichotomy into doubt, the spread of translated nineteenth-century Russian novels in Western Europe and Japan established Russian culture as an important mediator between the two halves of Eurasia. Yet this function of Russia as an ostensibly semi-Asiatic region that frustrates categorical distinctions has largely gone unstudied in the context of global modernism. Sado deploys this image of Russia to ironize its characters’ numerous assertions that East and West are self-contained entities, an image that is less concerned with the actual state of Russia than with the inadequacy of geopolitical categories in the interwar period.