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Fowler (1926) criticized the position of unlike in:
M. Berger, however, does not appear to have— unlike his Russian masters— the gift of presenting female characters.
As with many negatives, the placing of unlike is important; standing where it does, it must be changed to like; unlike would be right if the phrase were shifted to before “does not appear”.
What is actually wrong with unlike in that position?
The biggest problem is that it is ambiguous whether unlike describes "have ... the gift" or "does not appear to have ... the gift". Logically, this problem shouldn't be resolved by changing "unlike" to "like", but "like" binds more closely with "have" in this instance.
The deeper issue is that employing multiple negations that are only indirectly related is cognitively difficult, or at least not as easy as using at most one negation or using directly-related or completely unrelated negations.
Compare:
There's nothing wrong grammatically with the last example (or any of the above examples), but the indirectly-related negations introduce several grammatical possibilities that need to be considered.
Even the parsing is ambiguous:
Then there's the question of how "by" interacts with "not taking his bus" - means? manner? purpose?
Your Russian masters example carries similar kinds of grammatical and semantic ambiguities.
Based on what I read of Fowler when doing some research for another question some time ago, I have the impression that clarity of speech was very important to him. As such, it would not be surprising for him to criticise such an awkward construction.
At @WS2’s suggestion, here’s an unambiguous, simplified version of the Russian masters example:
In my opinion there is no grammatical problem and hardly any problem of style. What could be remarked is a first degree of difficulty in understanding, as explained in this answer.
‘M. Berger, however, does not appear to have — unlike his Russian masters — the gift of presenting female characters.
The preposition occurs in the following sentence in a slightly different syntactic context: the phrase that it introduces is set off by commas instead of dashes or parentheses, and it does not split the predicate.
(ref.) Unlike the French, we did not revise the calendar to rid it of every element of a religious tradition — beginning the year at the autumnal equinox, ...
It is fairly clear that in this sentence what is meant is that the French did revise the calendar. Perhaps this seems sufficiently clear because of the more frequent form of the sentence, so that the problematic occurrence of several negations has been smoothed over. There is, however, no fundamental grammatical difference between this sentence and the following two: whatever the means for introducing a pause the meaning must be the same.
We — unlike the French — did not revise the calendar to rid it of every element of a religious tradition — beginning the year at the autumnal equinox, ...
We (unlike the French) did not revise the calendar to rid it of every element of a religious tradition — beginning the year at the autumnal equinox, ...
It must be concluded that, for the sentence in the query, the same type of conclusion obtains: the Russian masters did appear to have the gift of presenting female characters. I do not believe that there is an ambiguity (as claimed in the answer referred to above),I believe on the contrary that the negative force of the preposition has to bear upon the whole verbal phrase.
