S. S. Koteliansky

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S.S. Koteliansky, or Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky, (1882–January 21, 1955) was born in the small Jewish shtetl (town) of Ostropol in the Ukraine, where his first language almost certainly was Yiddish. He was educated and attended university in Russia.

[edit] Biography

By 1911, he had moved to London, where he became a great friend of D. H. Lawrence, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf. He also adored short-story writer Katherine Mansfield. Although his romantic affection for her was not reciprocated, the two maintained a close relationship in person and in letters until her untimely death in 1923.

He was business manager of The Adelphi, a prominent literary journal that published works of Lawrence, Mansfield, the young Dylan Thomas, and many other leading lights of mid-twentieth-century English letters from its founding in 1923 until Koteliansky broke with the journal's founder (and Katherine Mansfield's one-time husband) John Middleton Murry in 1924. He was an early translator into English (often with the collaboration of Leonard or Virginia Woolf) of works of a number of Russian authors, such as Dostoevsky and Chekhov, and he helped those authors achieve prominence in the English-speaking world.

Koteliansky ('Kot') was a close friend of the artist, Mark Gertler, and they corresponded extensively from 1914 until Gertler's death in 1939.

Koteliansky was a fascinating figure, who made the transition from his origins in a small Jewish shtetl to distinction in the rarefied world of English letters in the early twentieth century. Although he was not a creative writer himself, he befriended, corresponded with, helped publish, and otherwise served as intermediary between some of the most prominent people in English literary life in the early twentieth century.