St Peter’s Basilica as seen from the gardens of the Villa Doria Pamphili, by Carl Ludwig Rundt (c. 1824)
This article is an abbreviated version of Marland, R., Valova, O. M., & Shcherbakova, T. V. (2025) A memoir of Oscar Wilde by Robert Ross, The Wildean, 66, 4–29
The photograph of Ross that accompanied his memoir in Morning of Russia. Ross is described below the photograph as ‘the famous english art expert – critic, friend of Oscar Wilde’.
Ivan Turgenev (early 1880s). Image: LOC
Robert Ross has been justly described as Oscar Wilde’s most devoted friend. He was present when Wilde was arrested for ‘gross indecency’ and, after Wilde had served two years’ hard labour and gone into self-imposed exile on the continent, Ross administered his allowance. When Wilde lay dying in a Parisian hotel, it was Ross who arranged for a priest to receive him into the Catholic Church. Ross later acted as Wilde’s literary executor, bringing together his dispersed copyrights and overseeing the publication of his prison letter De Profundis (1905) and his Collected Works (1908).
In the years after Wilde’s death, several of his friends wrote book-length biographies of him. Ross was tempted to write a book, but never yielded to that temptation. ‘I would not care for it to appeal to morbid curiosity,’ he told a friend, ‘and I remember Mr. Wilde’s remark that “it is always Judas who writes the biography.”’ He occasionally shared brief anecdotes about Wilde in his newspaper articles or in introductions to books, and wrote reminiscences of Wilde’s first days of post-prison freedom and of his last days in Paris. These writings are tantalising, and have left Wilde scholars wanting more.
In an article in the January 2025 issue of The Wildean, the journal of the Oscar Wilde Society, I and my co-authors Olga M. Valova and Tatyana V. Shcherbakova publish for the first time in English a little-known memoir of Wilde that Ross wrote for a Russian newspaper during a 1913 visit to Moscow. This memoir has never been cited by scholars outside of Russia, and is the longest of Ross’s memoirs of Wilde.
In it, Ross tells of his visit to Rome with Wilde in the spring of 1900, when the men sat in the garden of the Villa Doria Pamphili and looked at the dome of St Peter’s Basilica, which Wilde compared to the golden domes of Moscow’s Kremlin. The memoir contains the only evidence that Wilde met the Russian author Ivan Turgenev, whose short story ‘A Fire at Sea’ Wilde would translate from the French and publish as his first narrative prose piece (Wilde asked Turgenev why he had not named any of his novels ‘Kremlin’ – ‘if only because the word sounds so wonderful’). The memoir sheds light on Wilde’s social life during his final years, on his attitudes to his peers, and on those peers’ attitudes to him. Ross concludes with a summary of the events surrounding Wilde’s death, which differs in some respects from his better known accounts.
Interviewed in Moscow, Ross claimed that in 1912 he had offered Harper Pennington’s portrait of Wilde – a portrait that had once hung in Wilde’s drawing room – to London’s National Portrait Gallery: ‘I received a polite refusal.’ The portrait now hangs in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles.
You can read the full memoir by joining the Oscar Wilde Society or checking if your local institutional library subscribes to The Wildean.