Tanya Litvinov was born to a Jewish-English mother and a Russian father in Hampstead, England in 1918. After the arrest of her father on suspicion of espionage, Litvinov moved with her family to Moscow (in the then USSR), where she remained for many years as she developed her flair for creativity and translation in English and Russian. With increasing political pressure from the Soviet government, Litvinov moved back to England to be with her daughters and mother, and settled in Brighton where she became a lively and unconventional figure in the visual arts.
Artist and translator Tanya Litvinov was born in 1918 in Hampstead, London to a Jewish-English mother and a Russian father. Her father, Maxim Litvinov, had worked closely with Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin, playing an important role in the Russian Revolution of 1917, and as a result, the newly-created Soviet government had placed him as their representative in London. Litvinov’s mother was Ivy Low, a lively, outgoing, progressively-minded and well-respected English-Jewish writer. She was famously a friend of D.H. Lawrence, and likely a great source of Litvinov’s creative inspiration. Maxim and Ivy had met in London. In 1918, shortly after Tanya’s birth, Maxim was arrested and imprisoned on suspicion of spying for the Soviet regime. The Soviet government agreed to exchange Maxim in return for the release of diplomat, Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart, and he was deported back to Moscow. Tanya, her brother, and her mother remained living in London until around 1923, when they moved to join Maxim in Moscow, and where she remained for many decades.
Litvinov describes that, as a child, she had a great interest in art, which her idealistic school teachers nurtured, seeing contact with culture and the arts as important for their students. Her mother also greatly encouraged her daughter’s literary flair, and working together they translated the works of Pushkin, Turgenev, and Tolstoy from Russian to English, while Litvinov single-handedly undertook English to Russian translations of the likes of Daniel Defoe, George Meredith, and John Cheever. Maxim Litvinov had been made the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs in 1930, but as tensions grew in the build-up to the Second World War, he struggled with maintaining his role in government. He was initially forced out of his position in 1938 by growing anti-Semitism as the Soviet leader, Josef Stalin, aligned the USSR with Hitler’s Nazi forces, but was later reinstated to government as Germany invaded Soviet Russian territories in 1941. Tanya Litvinov has described that, as a teenager, she fervently supported the concept of worldwide workers' revolution, and that she found her father’s penchant for cigars and cars both bourgeois and distasteful. She met her husband, the sculptor Ilya Slonim, in 1943 and put her linguistic skills to use in the Russian war effort as a translator. Together, Litvinov and Slonim had two daughters, and as a couple they enjoyed contact with Moscow’s creative community, counting the composer Dmitri Shostakovich among their friends. Litvinov often assisted her husband with exhibitions of his work.
Following her father’s death in 1951, the surviving Litvinov family members faced growing political pressures from the Soviet regime. Litvinov’s nephew, Pavel Litvinov, was arrested for participating in a demonstration against the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and imprisoned in Siberia. Her daughter Vera and activist husband Valery Chalidze were expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 for their work in human rights. After Ilya died in 1972, Litvinov utilised her dual-nationality status to move to live in London in 1976 at the request of her mother, as by that time both of her daughters were also already settled there. Litvinov then moved with her mother to Brighton, where her mother died in 1977. Litvinov famously took up residence at one of Britain’s most iconic examples of modernist architecture, Embassy Court, located along the seafront.
Litvinov spent the rest of her life in Brighton and developed her artistic practice and reputation for a bohemian lifestyle, plying visitors to her small flat at Embassy Court - which also functioned as her studio space - with vodka. She produced multiple charcoal drawings inspired by her daily life, including views of Brighton West Pier, as well as creating still lifes whose forms were infused with a characteristic inner liveliness. Litvinov befriended many artists and writers to become a well-known artistic and intellectual figure in the south of England. Her work was shown at a group exhibition, Territory, featuring works from Brighton-based painters and sculptors described loosely as the ‘Sussex Expressionists’, held at the Phoenix Gallery, Brighton, in 1996. Litvinov featured in the TV documentary Red Empire, which was broadcast on ITV on 5 August 1990, recalling growing up as Maxim Litvinov’s daughter, as he served as the Foreign Minister in Stalin’s government. Tanya Litvinov died in Brighton, England on 4 December 2011. Her oral history testimony is held in the Imperial War Museum in London. Her artworks are not held in any UK public collections.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Tanya Litvinov]
Publications related to [Tanya Litvinov] in the Ben Uri Library