Ivy Litvinov

Biography / Administrative History

Ivy Low, born in London in 1889 of the unlikely union of a Jewish intellectual and the daughter of an Indian army colonel, grew up to be a writer and a rebel. The man she met in 1914 and married two years later was the Bolshevik revolutionary, Maksim Litvinov (born Meyer Genokh Wallakh to Orthodox Jewish parents). He became one of the most important figures in the Soviet Union and was ultimately Stalin's Minister of Foreign Affairs and ambassador to Washington.

Ivy spent most of her long life in Moscow. She never took to being the Commissar's wife, but devoted herself to literature. Her writing is almost without exception a heightened autobiography, the collection of short stories depicting her daily life and observations.

The fact that she survived under Stalin is remarkable, although there was an unexplained year when she was virtually in exile in the Urals, separated from her husband and two children.

The happiest time of her life was when Maxim was ambassador ambassador to the United States, and she and America fell in love with one another. Her dynamic, bohemian personality entranced Americans and she was fêted by artists, film stars, writers and statesmen alike. It is perhaps appropriate that many of her stories were first published in the New Yorker . They were collected in 1971 under the title She Knew She Was Right .

"She also translated into English her husband's speeches and party tracts and later such Russian classics as Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov."*

"Her final years were spent adding to a disorderly pile of unpublished manuscripts, but never producing the volume of memoirs about high life in the Kremlin that was expected of her. In fact, she always remained something of an outsider, and her fifty-year sojourn in the Soviet Union owed more to personal loyalty to her husband, and later her children, than to sympathy with Communist ideology."*

Her biographer John Carswell ( The Exile: A Life of Ivy Litvinov, London, Boston, 1983) does attempt to explain why Ivy did not produce more writing over the years, mentioning her interest in her English past over her Russian present, and the obsessive perfectionism that kept her working on successive drafts of the same piece. Inhibiting still was the habit of discretion acquired as a diplomat's wife in a police state.

* Quotes from a review of Carswell's biography The Exile: A Life of Ivy Litvinov by Anita Grossman, published in Commentary, September, 1984