Angela Livingstone read Russian and German for the Modern Languages Tripos at Cambridge (Newnham College). She became a lecturer in the Department of Literature at the University of Essex in 1966, and taught there for more than three decades, ending up as Professor. She published a biography of Lou Andreas-Salomé in 1984, but her main interest was always in Russian rather than German, and she has written much on 20th-century Russian literature, concentrating on the work of Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva and Andrei Platonov. Her publications include a study of Doctor Zhivago in Cambridge University Press’s Landmarks of World Literature series (1989); an annotated translation of Marina Tsvetaeva’s The Ratcatcher (Northwestern University Press, 1999); a transposition of fifty passages from Platonov’s novel Chevengur into English verse (Gilliland Press, 2004); and The Marsh of Gold: Pasternak’s Writings on Inspiration and Creation (Academic Studies Press 2008), which she translated and edited. She is now translating longer poems by Tsvetaeva and parts of her correspondence with Pasternak.
First published in 1992, her edition of Marina Tsvetaeva’s Art in the Light of Conscience was reissued by Bloodaxe Books in 2010.
