Lydia Leonidovna Pasternak (Russian:Лидия Леонидовна Пастернак; March 8, 1902 – May 4, 1989), married name Lydia Pasternak Slater, was a Soviet research chemist, poet and translator. [1]
Lydia Leonidovna Pasternak (Russian:Лидия Леонидовна Пастернак; March 8, 1902 – May 4, 1989), married name Lydia Pasternak Slater, was a Soviet research chemist, poet and translator. [1]
Lydia Pasternak was born in Moscow, then the second most important city of the Russian Empire, the daughter of the Russian impressionist painter Leonid Pasternak and of Rozalia Isodorovna Kofman, a concert pianist. She was the sister of the poet and novelist Boris Pasternak, the author of Doctor Zhivago , and of the architect Alexander Pasternak. [2] [3]
Lydia Pasternak began to study medicine at the Second Moscow University, but changed to chemistry, physics and botany. She continued her academic career in Berlin, after most of the Pasternak family had migrated to Germany as a result of the October Revolution, and received a doctoral degree in chemistry in 1926. Her first career was as a chemist, and in 1928 she joined the German Research Institute for Psychiatry (Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Psychiatrie), a Kaiser Wilhelm Society institute in Munich, where she was an assistant to Irvine H. Page. Together they studied the influence of chemical substances on the brain and published several articles on their results in the journal Biochemische Zeitschrift. Lydia Pasternak left the group in 1935 as the Nazis came to power.
Pasternak sought exile in Britain, joining Eliot Trevor Oakeshott Slater, a psychiatrist she had met in Munich. The two married later in 1935 and settled in Oxford, where they were joined by Lydia's parents, then by her sister Josephine and her family. [4] They had two sons and two daughters, including Ann Pasternak Slater, before divorcing in 1946. [2] Her new family responsibilities meant that Lydia Pasternak could not continue her work in biochemistry, but she went on to become a published poet in German, Russian, and English, and she translated the poems of her brother Boris, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1958, into English. [2] [5]
Lydia Pasternak Slater continued to live in Park Town, North Oxford, until her death in 1989. As the years went by, she was increasingly able to make visits to her native Russia to visit friends and relations there, although her brother Boris was never allowed to visit his family in England.
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian poet, novelist, and literary translator. Composed in 1917, Pasternak's first book of poems, My Sister, Life, was published in Berlin in 1922 and soon became an important collection in the Russian language. Pasternak's translations of stage plays by Goethe, Schiller, Calderón de la Barca and Shakespeare remain very popular with Russian audiences.
Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was a Russian poet. Her work is considered among some of the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it. In an attempt to save her daughter Irina from starvation, she placed her in a state orphanage in 1919, where she died of hunger. Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922 and lived with her family in increasing poverty in Paris, Berlin and Prague before returning to Moscow in 1939. Her husband Sergei Efron and their daughter Ariadna (Alya) were arrested on espionage charges in 1941; her husband was executed. Tsvetaeva committed suicide in 1941. As a lyrical poet, her passion and daring linguistic experimentation mark her as a striking chronicler of her times and the depths of the human condition.
Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam was a Russian and Soviet poet. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school.
Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova, was one of the most significant Russian poets of 20th century. She was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1965 and received second-most (three) nominations for the award the following year.
Lilya Yuryevna Brik was a Russian author and socialite, connected to many leading figures in the Russian avant-garde between 1914 and 1930. She was known as the beloved (muse) of Vladimir Mayakovsky. Lilya Brik was married for a long time to the poet, editor and literary critic Osip Brik (1888–1945), and she was the older sister of the French-Russian writer Elsa Triolet (1896–1970). Pablo Neruda called Lilya "muse of Russian avant-garde". Her name was frequently abbreviated by her contemporaries as "Л.Ю." or "Л.Ю.Б." which are the first letters of the Russian word "любовь" lyubov, "love".
Lydia Lopokova, Baroness Keynes was a Russian ballerina famous during the early 20th century.
Kathleen Jessie Raine CBE was a British poet, critic and scholar, writing in particular on William Blake, W. B. Yeats and Thomas Taylor. Known for her interest in various forms of spirituality, most prominently Platonism and Neoplatonism, she was a founding member of the Temenos Academy.
Izabella Akhatovna Akhmadulina was a Soviet and Russian poet, short story writer, and translator, known for her apolitical writing stance. She was part of the Russian New Wave literary movement. She was cited by Joseph Brodsky as the best living poet in the Russian language. She is known in Russia as "the voice of the epoch".
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Park Town is a small residential area in central North Oxford, a suburb of Oxford, England. It was one of the earliest planned suburban developments in the area and most of the houses are Grade II listed.
Lydia Korneyevna Chukovskaya was a Soviet writer, poet, editor, publicist, memoirist and dissident. Her deeply personal writings reflect the human cost of Soviet repression, and she devoted much of her career to defending dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. The daughter of the celebrated children's writer Korney Chukovsky, she was wife of scientist Matvei Bronstein, and a close associate and chronicler of the poet Anna Akhmatova.
Doctor Zhivago is a novel by Boris Pasternak, first published in 1957 in Italy. The novel is named after its protagonist, Yuri Zhivago, a physician and poet, and takes place between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and World War II.
Elaine Feinstein was an English poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, biographer and translator. She joined the Council of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007.
Andrei Navrozov, poet and writer, was born in Moscow in 1956, grandson of the playwright Andrei Navrozov (1899–1941) and son of the essayist and translator Lev Navrozov (1928–2017).
Eliot Trevor Oakeshott Slater MD was a British psychiatrist who was a pioneer in the field of the genetics of mental disorders. He held senior posts at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, Queen Square, London, and the Institute of Psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital. He was the author of some 150 scientific papers and the co-author of several books on psychiatric topics, notably on disputed 'physical methods'. From the mid-50s to his death, he co-edited Clinical Psychiatry, the leading textbook for psychiatric trainees.
Titsian Tabidze, was a Georgian poet and one of the leaders of Georgian symbolist movement. He fell victim to Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, was arrested and executed on trumped-up charges of treason. Tabidze was a close friend of the well-known Russian writer Boris Pasternak who translated his poetry into Russian.
Dr Ann Pasternak Slater is a literary scholar and translator who was formerly a Fellow and Tutor at St Anne's College, Oxford.
Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya was a Soviet poet and writer. She was friend and lover of Nobel Prize-winning writer Boris Pasternak during the last 13 years of his life and the inspiration for the character of Lara in his novel Doctor Zhivago (1957).
The Last Summer is a novella by the Russian writer Boris Pasternak. Originally published in 1934 under the Russian title Povest, the book relates the reminiscences of Serezha, a young Muscovite spending the winter of 1915-16 with his sister's family in the foothills of the Ural Mountains. Serezha's flashbacks to the summer of 1914, when he worked as a tutor in the house of a wealthy Moscow merchant and associated with various women, form the bulk of the novella. The book was translated into English by George Reavey and was first published in English in Cecil Hemley's magazine in book form Noonday in its first, 1958 issue, then by Peter Owen Publishers in 1959, before being reprinted in the Penguin Modern Classics series in 1960. The introduction was written by Pasternak's sister Lydia Slater.
Vera Klavdievna Zvjaginceva or Zvyagintseva was a Russian actress, poet, translator and memoirist. She translated poetry from Armenian to Russian including the poetry of Gevorg Emin, and that of Rachiya Ovanesyan.
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