Nicolas Pasternak Slater presents and reads extracts from his new translation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Maya Slater, the Picture Editor, will present some of the 68 illustrations by Leonid Pasternak (the author’s father and translator’s grandfather), discussing their stories and explaining some of their unexpected associations with the novel.

Nicolas Pasternak Slater

My family is half Russian – the Russian Impressionist artist Leonid Pasternak was my grandfather, and the poet Boris Pasternak my uncle (my mother’s brother). I was brought up speaking Russian, and went on to study Russian in the Navy during my National Service, and then at Oxford University. After two years doing research in applied linguistics in Milan, I changed careers and studied medicine. I spent my working life as a doctor, ending up as Consultant Haematologist at St. Thomas’s Hospital, London. After retirement I returned to languages and took up translating. I have published translations of Pasternak’s Family Correspondence 1921-1960, Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, Pushkin’s A Journey to Arzrum, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and other stories, and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, all for OUP; and Chekhov’s The Beauties: Essential stories for Pushkin Press. My latest project has been translating my uncle Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago for The Folio Society; this book has now appeared in a beautiful Limited Edition. I am currently translating short stories by Turgenev.

Maya Slater

I read French at Oxford University, and went on to have a career as a University Lecturer in French at Westfield College and later at Queen Mary University of London. I am a Senior Research Fellow of Queen Mary. My publications include Humour in the Works of Proust, The Craft of La Fontaine, and other works on French literature. I have translated Molière’s Le Misanthrope, Tartuffe and Other Plays into English verse, and also Three Pre-Surrealist Plays, both for Oxford World’s Classics. Since retiring I have edited my husband’s translation of Pasternak’s Family Correspondence 1921-1960, and published a novel, Mr Darcy’s Diary. I edited my husband’s translation of Doctor Zhivago, and was responsible for selecting and presenting the illustrations by Pasternak’s father, the Russian Impressionist painter, Leonid Pasternak.