Ethel Lilian Voynich

Ethel Lilian Voynich (born Ethel Lilian Boole on May 11, 1864 in County Cork , Ireland ; died on July 28, 1960 in New York ) was an English writer , translator and composer.

Life

She was the youngest daughter of the famous mathematician George Boole and Mary Everest Boole (1832-1916). After the early death of her father in 1864, she grew up in relatively poor circumstances in Cork and Lancashire until a small inheritance allowed her to study piano and composition at the Berlin School of Music from 1882 to 1885. One of her teachers there was the Bach scholar Philipp Spitta . In Berlin she got to know the writings of the Russian anarchist Sergei Kravchinsky (pseudonym: "Stepniak"), which had a lasting influence on her. After he had to flee from Russia because he stabbed General Mesenzew , the chief of the police in Petersburg, there in August 1878 on the street, he lived in exile in London from 1879. There Stepniak was found by Ethel on her return to London and became her mentor and Russian teacher.

Meanwhile inflamed for the cause of the revolution and meanwhile also able to speak Russian, she went to St. Petersburg in the summer of 1887 to visit relatives of Stepniaks. On the way there she stopped in Warsaw on Easter Sunday 1887, where she was seen by her future husband Wilfrid Michael Voynich looking out of the cell window on the square in front of the citadel . She stayed in Russia until the summer of 1889, worked as a governess and teacher of English and music, and supported the family of Stepniak's sister-in-law Preskovia Karauloff.

Upon her return, she became a central figure in the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom founded by Stepniak and edited the magazine Free Russia with Stepniak . The circle of revolutionaries, socialists, exiles and writers who met in Stepniak's house also included Eleanor Marx , the daughter of Karl Marx , as well as Friedrich Engels , George Bernard Shaw , William Morris and Oscar Wilde .

When Wilfrid Voynich arrived in London in October 1890 after an adventurous escape from his captivity, he met Ethel there again, whom he had seen on the square in front of the Warsaw Citadel. The two began working together, Wilfrid helped distribute the Free Russia magazine, and along with other dissidents, the Russian Free Press Fund was formed. Forbidden literature was sent to Russia, including translations of the works of Marx and Engels.

From 1895 at the latest, Ethel and Wilfrid lived together, she called herself Ethel Lily Voynich or ELV for short , but the official marriage did not take place until 1902 in connection with Wilfrid Voynich's efforts to obtain British citizenship.

In 1895, Stepniak was run over by a train while crossing a level crossing. As a result, the Voynichs apparently withdrew a little from the revolutionary business. In 1897 Wilfrid Voynich founded an antiquarian bookshop and was soon very successful in acquiring rare and remote works. A hidden function of the antiquarian bookshop, however, was the continued distribution of revolutionary literature and the raising of funds for the Russian struggle for freedom.

The success of the antiquarian bookshop brought with it the opening of several branches abroad, including in New York, where Wilfrid Voynich settled from 1915. Ethel Voynich followed him there in the early 1920s.

In the USA she mainly worked as a composer, music teacher and devoted herself to extensive studies in music history. After Wilfrid Voynich's death in March 1930, she lived for the next 30 years with Anne M. Nill, Wilfrid Voynich's long-time secretary, in an apartment in the center of Manhattan. During this time, she translated Chopin's letters , which are still in print today.

effect

Her best-known work The Gadfly (The Sting Fly, published in the USA in 1897) had a tremendous success after the victory of the revolution in Russia. The novella about the struggles and sufferings of an international activist in Italy was a bestseller and school reading in the Soviet Union. By the time she died, 2,500,000 copies had been sold in the Soviet Union, the work had been translated into 18 national languages and countless dissertations and scientific papers were published.

In 1955 the biting fly (Russian "Ovod") was filmed by the Soviet director Alexander Fainzimmer . The film music was written by the famous composer Dmitri Shostakovich (op. 97).

It is all the stranger that Ethel Voynich, who was still living at the time, was unknown in Russia until 1955 and, conversely, the author had no idea of her fame and her huge print runs in the Soviet Union.

The work was also very popular in the People's Republic of China, where the biting fly was widespread with a circulation of more than 700,000 copies.

In addition, the biting fly was adapted for the stage by George Bernard Shaw in 1898 .

Works

Literary works

1897 The Gadfly. William Heinemann, London 1897

German editions:

The cardinal's son. Translation by Alice Wagner. New Life Publishing House, Berlin 1960

The biting fly. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1980. ISBN 3-499-14492-1

1901 Jack Raymond. William Heinemann, London 1901.
1904 Olive Latham. William Heinemann, London 1904.
1910 An Interrupted Friendship. Hutchinson & Co., London 1910
1945 Put off thy shoes. Macmillan, New York 1945.

Musical works

Babylon, Jerusalem, epitaph in ballad form (dedicated to the Irish nationalist Roger David Casement, who was hanged in Pentonville prison on August 3, 1916)
The Sunken City

Translations

1893 Vsevolod Michailowitsch Garschin : Stories from Garshin. Translated by EL Voynich. Introduction by S. Stepniak.
1894 Sergej Kravchinsky : Nihilism as it is: being Stepniak's pamphlets translated by EL Voynich, and Felix Volkhovsky's Claims of the Russian Liberals. TF Unwin, London [1894?]
1895 The Humor of Russia. Translated by EL Voynich, with an introduction by Stepniak.
1931 Frédéric Chopin : Chopin's Letters. Collected by Henryk Opienski. Translated from the original Polish and French with a preface and editorial notes by EL Voynich. AA Knopf, New York 1931.

literature

WL Courtney: The Feminine Note in Fiction: Mrs. Voynich. Chapman and Hall, London 1904
Arnold Kettle: EL Voynich: A Forgotten English Novelist. Essays in Criticism, 1957; quoted in: Desmond MacHale: George Boole - His Life and Work. Boole Press, Dublin 1985
Lewis Bernhardt: The Gadfly in Russia . In: The Princeton University Library Chronicle . 28, No. 1, August 1966, pp. 1-19.
Evgeniia Taratuta: Po sledam "Ovoda". ("Following the mosquito"; Russian) Izd-vo "Detskaia lit-ra", Moscow 1972. Biography
Gerry Kennedy, Rob Churchill: The Voynich Code. The book that nobody can read. Rogner & Bernhard, Berlin 2005. ISBN 3-8077-1009-4

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Voynich, Ethel Lilian
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Boole, Ethel Lilian (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	English writer, translator and composer
DATE OF BIRTH	May 11, 1864
PLACE OF BIRTH	County Cork
DATE OF DEATH	July 28, 1960
Place of death	New York City