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A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky. Galya Diment (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's UP, 2011) xii + 438 pp
Translator of over thirty books from Russian to English (including seven for the Hogarth Press), nurturer of literary talent for the nearly fifty years he lived in London, and passionate friend or staunch enemy of many Bloomsbury artists and writers, Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky (1880-1955) has long seemed a silent center of British modemist history. While he rendered into English the voice of, among others, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, Koteliansky withheld his own voice from print. When entreated by Stephen Spender in 1952 to write his memoirs, Koteliansky demurred, explaining that he was not "a real writer" (328). His afterlife has been limited: he has made cameos in others' memoirs, informed scholarship on the Hogarth Press, and haunted his friends' biographies with the stem face that stares out of photographs. Galya Diment's handsome biography delivers the voice of the man as well as the complexity of his life. Complementing its engaging narrative are abundant photographs, useful appendices, and a wellorganized index.
That his voice has been little known until now might have satisfied Koteliansky. "Kot," as he was known to his English-speaking friends and as Diment calls him, lived ascetically and scorned pursuit of renown. He chose to be cremated and refused a tombstone (298). Yet that his voice has been recovered might have pleased him, too. Frieda Lawrence, one of Kot's arch-enemies, wrote, "he always pretends he is a humble person, but in his heart he thinks he is very great" (68). Whichever his response might have been, he could hardly have asked for a more rigorous and thoughtful scholar to write his biography. Diment is a Nabokovian who has also published on Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and Bloomsbury's reception of Tolstoy. Dual expertise in Russian literature and British modernism allows Diment to write with confidence and clarity on Kot's Russian Jewish background and on the British literary world in which, as an adult, he found a home. Her writing depends on research far-flung and intensive: Diment pursued Kot's letters in public and private archives from Israel to New Zealand; interviewed Kot's family and the descendents of his close friends; visited...