Bibliographic record
Abstract
A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky. Galya Diment (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's UP, 2011) xii + 438 pp Translator of over thirty books from Russian to English (including seven for the Hogarth Press), nurturer of literary talent for the nearly fifty years lived in London, and passionate friend or staunch enemy of many Bloomsbury artists and writers, Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky (1880-1955) has long seemed silent center of British modernist history. While rendered into English the voice of, among others, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, Koteliansky withheld his own voice from print. When entreated by Stephen Spender in 1952 to write his memoirs, Koteliansky demurred, explaining that was not a real writer (328). His afterlife has been limited: has made cameos in others' memoirs, informed scholarship on the Hogarth Press, and haunted his friends' biographies with the stern face that stares out of photographs. Galya Diment's handsome biography delivers the voice of the man as well as the complexity of his life. Complementing its engaging narrative are abundant photographs, useful appendices, and well-organized index. That his voice has been little known until now might have satisfied Koteliansky. Kot, as was known to his English-speaking friends and as Diment calls him, lived ascetically and scorned pursuit of renown. He chose to be cremated and refused tombstone (298). Yet that his voice has been recovered might have pleased him, too. Frieda Lawrence, one of Kot's arch-enemies, wrote, he always pretends is humble person, but in his heart thinks is very (68). Whichever his response might have been, could hardly have asked for more rigorous and thoughtful scholar to write his biography. Diment is Nabokovian who has also published on Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and Bloomsbury's reception of Tolstoy. Dual expertise in Russian literature and British modernism allows Diment to write with confidence and clarity on Kot's Russian Jewish background and on the British literary world in which, as an adult, found home. Her writing depends on research far-flung and intensive: Diment pursued Kot's letters in public and private archives from Israel to New Zealand; interviewed Kot's family and the descendents of his close friends; visited his small hometown in the Ukraine; and studied the research materials of George Zytaruk, the editor of Dorothy Brett and D. H. Lawrence's letters to Kot. This book, almost ten years in the making, is triumph of both archival research and friendly collaboration between biographer and living sources. What does Kot's voice sound like? is firm and pithy, betraying its owner's frank and emotional personality (as well as his non-native language skills). If you only knew what sometimes means the desire to be, to talk, to commune with one, who understands, and how painful sometimes is loneliness, writes to Mark Gertler (93). To Sarton, writes of Virginia Woolf, [when] V. is at peace, her face is lit up with great beauty (141). Kot's voice gains command from formality and existential claims. To John Middleton Murry, writes, Here is my notion of truth ...: truth felt, seen by great men, chiefly by writers, is truth, and such truth is always reticent and shy (153). This voice reveals unsuspected pleasure in the senses. Kot recalls that Russian cherries used to be twice the size and fifty times as good as English ones (113), and mourns Mansfield, It is her being ... the aroma of her being, that I love (121). Another surprise is playfulness, as when Kot rhapsodizes for paragraph about which side prefers of two-tone quilt given by Ottoline Morrell (224) and when addresses Sarton as Maylume, blend of May and luminous (248). This playfulness tempers the many aching reports about what Kot called his black moods. With the plaintiveness of child, writes, But, Ottoline, what can I do to get out of this utter darkness and despair? …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".