In 1867, Lewis Carroll visited Russia with his friend Henry Liddon. Their visit included St. Petersburg about which he wrote: “It was full of wonder and novelty … the enormous width of the streets … the huge illuminated signboards over the shops, and the gigantic churches, with their domes painted blue and covered with gold stars – and the bewildering jabber of the natives – all contributed to the wonders.”  Then they travelled to Moscow where it is believed that Lewis Carroll came up with the inspiration for Alice Through the Looking-Glass.

Perhaps that is one reason why his work is so popular in Russia, Alice in Wonderland (1865) being first published in Russia in 1879 with the title Sonya in a Kingdom of Wonder.

And, of course, Russian artists have responded to the challenge of illustrating the books, Yuri Vashenko being one of the leading contemporary illustrators of Lewis Carroll’s work, combining traditional imagery with more modern geometric settings, hence the title of the exhibition which fills two of the rooms and runs up the elegant staircase of Puskin House in London, Geometry of Nonsense.

The lllustrations on show are for books over the last 40 years, the most recent being The Philosophical Alice (2015), a collection of essays on Through the Looking Glass and Alice in Wonderland by different philosophers and the most geometric being his series Midnight Problems Invented in the Hours of Insomnia (1971/2006).

Pushkin House is one of those hidden gems in London and this is an exhibition that makes it worth finding and exploring and, in a strange way, the Russians seem to keep alive the spirit of Lewis Carroll more than we actively do in his home country.