Introduction

Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky (‘Kot’ to his friends) was a Ukrainian Jew, born and raised in Ostropol, a shtetl within the Pale of Settlement. After four years (1906–10) at the Kiev Commercial Institute, he left for London in July 1911, never to return home. ‘I came for three months, and I stayed for ever,’ he recalled. By 1912 he had found work as a translator at the Russian Law Bureau in High Holborn. Had he not met and been befriended by D. H. Lawrence in 1914 on a walking tour of the Lake District, he might have had far fewer opportunities to exercise his self-proclaimed capacity for friendship. He had certain temperamental affinities with DHL – not least an Old Testament moral absoluteness – and became one of his most frequent correspondents, and perhaps his most trusted. Leonard Woolf, who also worked with Kot on a number of translations for the Hogarth Press, recalled, soon after Kot’s death in 1955, lengthy arguments over a single word in search of ‘the exact shade of meaning’ and admitted ruefully: ‘You only learned to the full Kot’s intensity and integrity by collaborating with him in a Russian translation.’

There is some uncertainty about the circumstances of KM’s first meeting with Kot. However, the dramatic account by Beatrice, Lady Glenavy, in Today We Will Only Gossip (1964) is widely cited. In October 1914, while Kot was staying with DHL and Frieda in their cottage (The Triangle, Bellingdon Lane) near Chesham, Buckinghamshire, Frieda quarrelled with DHL and fled on foot some three miles to the Murrys’ Rose Tree Cottage in The Lee, Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. Some time later, a rain-soaked young woman in Wellington boots with her skirt tucked up (KM) appeared at DHL’s door to announce that Frieda would not be returning. Though this version of events – whose source was almost certainly KM herself – does not specify that Kot was introduced at the time, he soon became an important figure in her life, and one whose influence JMM would come to regret and later deemed ‘quite pernicious’ because ‘Kot fed what was false in her’.