Article

Name: Tea Es (N. N. Sokolova, 1888–1968) Materials for Biobibliography

Authors: V. V. Nekhotin

A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature RAS, Moscow, Russian Federation

In the section Literary Life: Plots and Destinies

Abstract:

This article reveals the life of biography of Russian poet and translator Natalia Nikolaevna Sokolova, who made her debut in poetry under the pseudonym “Tea Es”. The reliable dates of her life (1888–1968), based on archival documents, are revealed for the first time. The daughter of high-ranking pedagogical officials, niece of the well known Russian and then British medievalist-legist Sir Paul Vinogradov (1854–1925), Sokolova completed higher education as an actress in Moscow and as a philologist at the University of Zurich. Having entered the literary life during the First World War as the author of poems about Italy (written in the traditionalist manner yet) and translations from Giacomo Leopardi, Sokolova then joined the Moscow literary group “Zhatva” (“The Harvest”). However, her new poems, already announced, could not be published then due to the paper and printing crisis caused by the war and revolution. In the first Soviet years Sokolova served as a secretary of famous theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. At the same time she began working as a fiction translator, she made the first complete Russian translation of William Morris’s novel “News from Nowhere” (1923). At the beginning of 1924, Sokolova managed to publish several new poems (demonstrating the evolution of her poetics) in the ephemeral typewritten magazine “Hermes” (the complete set is reproduced here).

By the end of the 1920s Sokolova had prepared a book containing her 120 original poems (meanwhile, no more than a dozen of them are known now), but this publication was not allowed by the Soviet censorship and, highly likely, these texts were irrevocably lost. Since the early 1930s Sokolova completely switched to translation works, which successfully continued for almost four more decades. Some significant details are also contained in the correspondence between Sokolova and the poet and novelist Boris Sadovskoy, also presented in this publication (including a few poems by Sadovskoy).

Keywords: Italy in Russian poetry, Giacomo Leopardi, William Morris, Innokenty Annensky, Arseny Alving, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Boris Sadovskoy, typewritten magazine “Hermes”

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