April FitzLyon

April FitzLyon (22 April 1920 – 17 September 1998) was an English translator, biographer, and historian.

Early life

Born Cecily April Mead, at

In 1941, aged 20, she married Kyril Zinovieff, a Russian émigré who took the surname FitzLyon and who worked at the Ministry of Defence. The couple had two sons, Sebastian, who became a business man in France and later in Russia, and Julian, an information specialist. The family lived in Golders Green and later in Chiswick, moving in literary circles and having many Russian friends.^[1]

Literary career

FitzLyon learned Russian from her husband's mother. In the 1950s, she approached a publisher with translations of stories by

The FitzLyons visited Russia both before and after the collapse of Communism. For about twenty-five years before her death, April FitzLyon was the General Secretary of the Russian Refugees Aid Society, and she made many broadcasts for BBC Radio. At the time of her death, her publisher John Calder called her "a scholar of the old school".^[1]

Selected publications

• The Woman in the Case and Other Stories (1953), translation of stories by Anton Chekhov (jointly with Kyril FitzLyon)^[1]
• Three Novellas (1953), translations of three short novels by Leo Tolstoy (one of the three jointly with Kyril FitzLyon)^[1]
• The Devil and Family Happiness, translation from Leo Tolstoy (London: Spearman & Calder, 1953, 2nd edition 1954)
• The Libertine Librettist (1955), a biography of
  Lorenzo da Ponte^[1][3]
• Ladies Delight (1957), translation of Émile Zola's Au bonheur des dames^[1]
• The Price of Genius (1964), a biography of
  Pauline García-Viardot^[1][2]
• Blaze of Embers (Calder and Boyars, 1971), translation of novel by André Pieyre de Mandiargues^[4]
• Nobody: or, The Disgospel according to Maria Dementnaya (1975), novel translated from the Russian
• Maria Malibran: diva of the romantic age (1987), a biography^[1][2]
• A month in the country: an exhibition presented by the Theatre Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, and arranged in conjunction with April FitzLyon (with Alexander Schouvaloff) catalogue of the Victoria and Albert Museum's Theatre Museum Ivan Turgenev centenary exhibition (1983)^[1]

References