Kyril Zinovieff

Kyril Zinovieff (sometimes Fitzlyon), born in St Petersburg in 1910, came to Britain with his family in 1920. In the Thirties, he worked in Denmark and Czechoslovkia for the British Foreign Office. During the war, he fought in the Middle East, subsequently joining the Joint Intelligence Board, where he worked for some twenty-five years in the MOD. 1977 saw the publication of his social history of the last years of Imperial Russia: Before the Revolution (with Tatiana Browning). Thereafter, he became a full-time translator (mainly Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoevsky) and reviewer of books about Russia. In 2003 his Companion Guide to St Petersburg (with Jenny Hughes) was published to coincide with the tercentenary of that city. His last translation (also with Jenny Hughes) was Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat, published by Alma Classics in 2011 when he was over a hundred and quite blind.