Lydia Pasternak Slater

Lydia Pasternak Slater (March 8, 1902 – May 4, 1989), formerly Lydia Leonidovna Pasternak, was a Russian research chemist, poet and translator. (Alternatively, Lidija Leonidovna Pasternak-Slejter

Life

She was born in Moscow, then the capital of the Russian Empire, the daughter of the Russian impressionist painter Leonid Osipovich Pasternak and of Rozalia Isodorovna Kofman, a concert pianist. She was the sister of the poet Boris Pasternak, the author of Doctor Zhivago, and of the architect Alexander Pasternak.[1][2]

Lydia Pasternak began to study medicine at the Second Moscow University, but changed to chemistry, physics and botany. She continued her academic career in Berlin, after most of the Pasternak family had migrated to Germany as a result of the October Revolution, and received a doctoral degree in chemistry in 1926. Her first career was as a chemist, and in 1928 she joined the German Research Institute for Psychiatry (Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Psychiatrie), a Kaiser Wilhelm Society institute in Munich, where she was an assistant to Irvine H. Page. Together they studied the influence of chemical substances on the brain and published several articles on their results in the journal Biochemische Zeitschrift. Lydia Pasternak left the group in 1935 as the Nazis came to power. Pasternak sought exile in Britain, joining Eliot Trevor Oakeshott Slater, a psychiatrist she had met in Munich. The two married later in 1935 and had four children before divorcing in 1946. Her new family responsibilities meant that Lydia Pasternak could not continue her work in biochemistry, but she went on to become a published poet in German, Russian, and English, who also translated the poems of her brother Boris, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, into English.[1][3]

Selected publications

Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Lydia Pasternak Slater, Poet, Is Dead at 87". The New York Times. May 19, 1989.
  2. ↑ Sheldon, Richard (August 27, 1963). "The Poetry of Pasternak". The Michigan Daily.
  3. ↑ George Butchard, Poet Lydia Pasternak steps out of the shadow dated August 22, 2012, at rbth.ru, accessed 28 October 2012

References