Natalie Duddington

Nataliya Aleksandrovna Ertel was born in Voronezh on 14 November 1886, to the author Alexander Ertel. She was Ertel's oldest daughter and considered intelligent as a child. When the English translator Constance Garnett visited Ertel in the summer of 1904,[2] she was much impressed by Natalie, who began studying at Saint Petersburg University the following year. When the university was temporarily closed due to student unrest in the 1905 revolution, Garnett encouraged Natalie to come to England.[3] She came to England in 1906 and attended University College London (UCL) on a scholarship,[4] graduating with a first-class degree in philosophy in 1909.[3] At UCL she was a student of the philosopher Dawes Hicks who wrote that she had helped to advance Russian philosophy through her translation of two substantial works of Russian philosophy (by Alexander Lossky and S. L. Frank).[5]

Through her interest in Theosophy, Natalie met John "Jack" Nightingale Duddington, who had been appointed Rector of Ayot St Lawrence in 1905. He divorced his wife in 1911 and began living with Ertel.[6][3] She married John; they had two children.[1]

While in England, Duddington began to assist Constance Garnett, whose eyesight was very poor, in making translations from Russian. Duddington would read her the Russian text, sentence by sentence, and write down the English translation to Constance’s dictation.[7] She elucidated difficult passages and provided background information; thus the final version was the result of close collaboration between the two of them. Natalie was one of very few people of whom Constance could say that their minds met, and they became life-long friends.[8]

Duddington greatly admired Dostoyevsky's novels and successfully campaigned for their translation. Heinemann gave Garnett a contract at the end of 1910,[9] and by 1920 they had completed all twelve volumes, about two-and-a-half million words in all. In the end, Garnett translated around seventy Russian literary works, and Duddington was closely involved with about half of them. When Garnett's productivity eased off after 1920, Duddington undertook more than two dozen works by herself. Among the writers that she translated, Nikolai Berdyaev, Semyon Frank, and Nikolay Lossky were intellectuals expelled by the Bolsheviks from Russia in 1922 on what is known as the Philosophers' ships. Lossky was personally known to her: "Through 1920 and 1921, at the height of the famine which killed millions on the lower Volga and thousands in the cities, [the Lossky family] survived only with the help of food parcels sent by . . . Natalie Duddington."[10]

Her partner, Jack, initially helped check that her English was idiomatic; in fact some of her first translations were actually attributed to him. (For instance, in 1908 the Stage Society put on The Bread of Others by Turgenev, "translated by J. Nightingale Duddington" – who at this point knew no Russian.) Richard Freeborn, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of London, wrote of Duddington's translation of Oblomov, for instance, that "in its particular sensitivity to the subtlety of Goncharov's Russian, in its liveliness and its elegance, it has about it a freshness of manner that admirably matches the same enduring quality in the original."[11]

Duddington was the first to translate several works by Russian authors into English, including Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin's The Golovlyov Family, and a volume of Anna Akhmatova's Forty-Seven Love Poems.[1] Her obituary in The Times wrote that she deserved "much of the credit for spreading an appreciation of Russian literature in England."[1]

Duddington had an interest in philosophy.[1] In 1916 she, along with philosophers Beatrice Edgell, and Susan Stebbing were some of the first women to be elected to serve on the Executive Committee of the Aristotelian Society.[12] In 1918 she read a paper on "Our Knowledge of Other Minds" to the Aristotelian Society.[13] It was critically reviewed in an issue of Mind, to which she wrote a considered response: "Do we know other minds mediately or im-mediately?"[14][15][16] Duddington considered some of her translations of Russian philosophers her "most worthwhile" work.[1]

• A First Russian Reader. 1943[41]
• Intermediate Russian Reader. 1949[42]
• Russian short stories: XIXth century (an "Oxford Russian Reader") 1953[43]
• Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, Lev Tolstoy, Selections. 1959[44]