With all due respect to France, it is safe to say that, after New Zealand and England, Russia became by far the most important country in Katherine Mansfield's evolution as a writer. The powerful fascination with Russian literature and culture was largely shared by Mansfield's entire generation at the time. As Donald Davie astutely pointed out in Slavic Excursions: Essays on Russian and Polish Literature, ‘the awakening of the Anglo-Saxon people to Russian literature – something which happened to all intents and purposes between 1885 and 1920 – should rank as a turning-point no less momentous than the discovery of Italian literature by the generations of the English Renaissance’. Such a reaction is even more startling if one bears in mind that Russia was a true latecomer to the world of European literature. The country was, after all, not even Christianised until late in the tenth century; and the first, rather rudimentary, secular works did not appear till the sixteenth century, by which point Russia's Western European counterparts were fully enjoying the fruits of the Renaissance. The first Russian ‘Shakespeare’, the multifaceted national genius Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), did not come onto the scene until the first quarter of the nineteenth century. After that, however, Russian literature started developing at a ferocious pace, not only catching up with the rest of Europe in the ensuing one hundred years, but in certain respects even surpassing it. Russia's Golden Age of literature, in the second half of the nineteenth century, which produced writers such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov, was seemingly further augmented abroad because it was still relatively unusual and even exotic to be in the company of Russian authors. Matthew Arnold firmly acknowledged that effect in the 1880s when he wrote about the influence of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in England: