Rosamund bartlett biography wikipedia

Rosamund Bartlett : I wrote my doctoral thesis in Oxford on the influence of Wagner on Russian culture, so I thought I was going to have a career writing about opera and the history of Russian music. And the intense experience of translating Chekhov in turn governed my approach to writing his biography. Both activities proved to be mutually beneficial.

RBTH: Tell us more about how translation has informed your approach to biography and vice versa. B: We have this conception of Chekhov as someone who was usually quite closed when it came to personal relationships. What I discovered when translating his stories, however, is that he is very open, by contrast, when he writes about nature, and particularly the steppe landscape that lay beyond Taganrog, the southern provincial town where he grew up.

It remained his chief source of lyrical inspiration, and naturally became the subject of his first story for a serious literary journal. Rather than taking a standard life-to-death approach, therefore, I decided it would be more revealing to structure my biography of Chekhov through his relationship with place: the stifling merchant environment of Taganrog, the more stimulating one of Moscow where he worked as both doctor and writer, the astounding journey he took across Siberia to conduct a census of the penal colony on Sakhalin island — and many more.

With Tolstoy, it was the other way around, as the deeper understanding I gained of his personality through writing his biography made me more sensitive to the idiosyncrasies of his literary style when translating his prose. But I have yet to visit Sakhalin and Sri Lanka, where he stopped off on his journey home from Siberia. Last year I was excited to travel to Optina Pustyn monastery, a famous place of pilgrimage for 19th-century Russian writers, including Tolstoy, who went to consult its famous elders.

One day I hope to set eyes on the steppe landscape beyond Samara, where Tolstoy liked to spend his summers. When I got to the end of my first draft and started to revise, I found I was incredibly dissatisfied with how I had translated the earlier chapters, which perhaps indicates that I had begun to understand the novel better.

Rosamund Bartlett is a British writer, scholar, lecturer, and translator specializing in Russian literature.

He packs an awful lot into very few words. Tolstoy is generally very difficult to translate, although he is probably the easiest writer to read. He is incredibly challenging, because he writes in such a clear and natural way, using simple, conversational Russian, but he also breaks all the rules of good syntax, rebelling against conventions as he did in nearly every other aspect of his life.