I am a professional writer who joined Brasenose as the Royal Literary Fund Fellow in 2024. I pursued an academic career for fifteen years after completing my DPhil at Oxford, and continue to maintain an active scholarly profile in the fields of Russian literature, music and art. I became a full-time writer, translator and lecturer in 2006, since when I have produced biographies of Chekhov and Tolstoy, and translations of their fiction, also writing the introduction and notes for the editions I have published with Oxford World’s Classics. As well as being commissioned to write programme notes for major opera houses, theatres and concert organisations, I have lectured extensively on the arts, and take part in regular broadcasts

As a cultural historian specialising in the arts of Russia and Eastern Europe, my work ranges across disciplines. My doctoral thesis explored the influence of Wagner in Russia, with particular reference to the Symbolist period. It became the subject of my first book, and has led to a longstanding interest in the history of opera in Russia and the Soviet Union. I have published several articles on this topic, including on Verdi reception, the Futurist opera [ital] Victory over the Sun, operatic life in 1920s Leningrad, and Eisenstein’s production of [ital] Die Walküre. My current book project focuses on the revolution in the arts which took place in early 20th-century Moscow, St. Petersburg and the Russian diaspora, and its connection to European modernism.

Another area of my research has been inspired by the experience of writing biographies of Tolstoy and Chekhov while simultaneously translating their fiction. I have published several articles on the musicality of Chekhov’s prose, including on the apparent use of sonata form in “The Black Monk”, and on his distinctive musical use of punctuation. I have written about the creative engagement with Chekhov’s life and works of both Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich and about aspects of Tolstoy’s literary style in [ital] Anna Karenina.