April Fitz Lyon - Literary Career

Literary Career

Fitzlyon learned Russian from her husband's mother. In the 1950s, she approached a publisher with translations of stories by Anton Chekhov which were unknown in the UK, which she had produced jointly with her husband. They were published in 1953 as The Woman in the Case and Other Stories. This was a great success and was quickly followed later the same year by translations of three short novels by Leo Tolstoy (Three Novellas, 1953). Of these, she translated two herself. She continued to translate literature from Russian, French and Italian, but began to concentrate on historical biographies. She published the first life of Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart's librettist who had been a revolutionary in Venice, debunking Ponte's own unreliable memoirs (The Libertine Librettist, 1955). After that, she translated Emile Zola's Au bonheur des dames (Ladies Delight, 1957), the correspondence between Romain Rolland and Richard Strauss, and some recent French novels. She produced biographies of two Spanish singers, the daughters of Manuel del Pópulo Vicente García: firstly of Pauline García-Viardot, who was a star of nineteenth century France (The Price of Genius, 1964), and later a new life of Pauline Viardot's sister Maria Malibran, one of the most notable opera singers of the century (Maria Malibran: diva of the romantic age, 1987).

In researching her book on Viardot, FitzLyon found much on the singer's long relationship with Ivan Turgenev, and in 1983 she wrote the catalogue for the London Theatre Museum's centenary exhibition 'Turgenev and the Theatre'. In 1975 she published Nobody: or, The Disgospel according to Maria Dementnaya, a translation of a Russian samizdat novel, Nikto, which was about the seamy side of the life of Bohemian dissidents and had been smuggled out of Russia in 1966. She went on to translate verse from Russian into both English and French, contributed to Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and wrote articles and reviews, including work for Encounter, the Times Literary Supplement and The Literary Review.

The FitzLyons visited Russia both before and after the collapse of Communism. For about twenty-five years before her death, April FitzLyon was the General Secretary of the Russian Refugees Aid Society, and she made many broadcasts for BBC Radio. At the time of her death, her publisher John Calder called her "a scholar of the old school".