Canadian Store (CAD)
You are currently shopping in our Canadian store. For orders outside of Canada, please switch to our international store. International and US orders are billed in US dollars.
The following is excerpted from Bloomsbury’s Rabbi by Matthew Ackerman:
A translator stands between two languages and between the two worlds that the languages represent. If he does his job well, he may belong in neither place. Such was the fate of Samuel Koteliansky, an emigré Russian Jew in London, who translated Chekhov, befriended D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield, and circulated on the fringes of the Bloomsbury group. These activities, portrayed by Galya Diment in her new biography of Koteliansky, A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury, did not add up to much in the way of literary accomplishment. But Koteliansky—Kot, his English friends called him—saw a great deal of the literary lions whose accomplishments and personal lives burnt on through the entire 20th century.
(…)
His most important literary friendships were with Lawrence and Mansfield, lasting until their early deaths of tuberculosis. The relationships seem to have rested mostly on Kot’s devotion to the talent and success of these major authors—and his motherly opposition to their romantic partners. He was also a “combination bookkeeper, errand boy, and mailing clerk” for Lawrence’s literary magazine, the Signature. Lawrence, for his part, allowed himself to be used in Kot’s sometimes-quixotic literary promotion schemes, which often reached publication stage only because Kot was able to assure a publisher of Lawrence’s participation or an introduction to other famous writers.
But Kot had successes as well—mostly in the early 1920s, beginning with his translation of Gorky’s Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy for Hogarth Press. The book turned Hogarth from a small vanity shop into a proper enterprise—thanks in part to its salacious content, such as Gorky’s recollecting Tolstoy stories of “indefatigable” whoring.
But, then, indefatigable whoring seems to have pervaded much of Bloomsbury. Their primary sport, gossip, focused on shifting heterosexual and homosexual liaisons, overlaid with a preening sense of moral progress. Bloomsbury played a significant part in making this the governing style of our own morally fractured age.
Readings and book signings for Galya Diment’s A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury:
To learn more about A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.
No comments yet.