Ivy Litvinov

Ivy Litvinov (1889-1977)

Of Pisemskii’s six long novels — A Thousand Souls (1858), Troubled Seas (1863), Men of the Forties (1869), In the Whirlpool (1871), The Bourgeois (1877), and The Masons (1880) — I think, and let me know if I’ve missed something, that the only one you can find in English is A Thousand Souls, translated by Ivy Litvinov. I’ve been curious about her since I got excited about Pisemskii, and Sarah J. Young has a detailed post about her life, her original fiction, and her extensive work as a translator. There’s even a bibliography to go with it. Besides Pisemskii, she translated Chekhov, Dostoevskii, Goncharov, Gor’kii, Pushkin, Lev Tolstoi, A. N. Tolstoi, and some less famous names, like Elena Uspenskaia.

Litvinov (1889-1977) was a generation or two younger than Isabel F. Hapgood (1851-1928) and Constance Garnett (1861-1946), and must have been a contemporary of Juliet M. Soskice (whose dates I don’t have, but who was younger than her brother Ford Madox Ford, born 1873; married David Soskice in 1902; and published a translation of Nekrasov in 1917). If I’m not mistaken Litvinov published more original work than any of the other three. I guess Fred Whishaw (1854-1934) is another translator/writer, but he didn’t translate as much as Litvinov.