Ignat Avsey obituary

Ignat Avsey taught Russian and later became a distinguished translator, specifically of Dostoevsky’s function.

Ignat Avsey, who has died of cancer aged 75, was a distinguished translator from Russian. He breathed new life into not only two of Dostoevsky’s very best-known novels (The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot) but also two of his least-known (The Village of Stepanchikovo and Humiliated and Insulted). Ignat’s knack of lighting on forgotten gems to translate did not stop at Russian literature: his translation of an early thriller by the Viennese writer Alexander Lernet-Holenia, I Was Jack Mortimer (1933), has just been published and well acquired.

Ignat was born in Latvia, of Russian parentage. His family members settled in Britain after the 2nd planet war. For most of his doing work daily life, Ignat, bilingual and with a thorough understanding also of German, was a instructor of Russian, initial of technical Russian and translation at the Holborn University of Law, Languages and Commerce and, later on, when this school became the Polytechnic of Central London and then the University of Westminster, literature as well. He was a gifted and entertaining instructor.

I very first met Ignat in 1982 when presented, as a publisher, his 1st translation, of Dostoevsky’s black-comic novel The Village of Stepanchikovo. With his obsessions, limitless ambition, unpredictable mood swings and unquenchable movement of language – which I learned to stem on event with a deft movement of the hand – he seemed to walk straight out of that novel.

He believed profoundly in the translator’s function as a inventive figure and leader of taste, and paid the price tag for this perfect in his unsuccessful lawsuit towards the University of Westminster (settled out of court) for not crediting his translations as “authentic study”. For him, nonetheless, translation – including decisions on what to translate – was original study. And his translations of Dostoevsky manufactured actually authentic contributions in revealing the total extent of his humour and showing the most disregarded of his performs really to be far much more significant than hitherto realised.

Ignat is survived by his wife, Anastasia, his sister, Ina, and his brother, Leon.

Ignat Avsey obituary