Nadezhin, Nikolai Alexandrovich, 1885-1959.

Nikolai Alexandrovich Nadezhin, also known as Nicholas Nadejine, was a Russian exiled opera singer who also wrote poetry. He became a close associate of Bryher. During World War II he worked for the British government and the Russian Service of the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Nikolai Alexandrovich Nadezhin (also known as Nicholas Nadejine) was born on March 9, 1885 to a well-established family of the intelligentsia. His grandfather was Nikolai Petrovich Makarov, the lexicographer responsible for the first complete Russian/French dictionary. Nadezhin's early years were spent at the small ancestral manor called Funicovo near Tula where he was sent to be raised by his grandfather.

After matriculating from the "gymnasium" in 1905, Nadezhin began his first year at Moscow University, where he became a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and was soon involved in revolutionary activities. Early in 1906, Nadezhin was responsible for the armed hold-up of a local newspaper in order to produce a half million printed copies of the "Vyborg Manifesto." Later that year he was arrested and sentenced to life exile in Siberia, but managed to escape from captivity to Europe in 1908, never again to return to Russia. Eventually Nadezhin made his way to Italy and then to Capri.

In October 1918 Nadezhin met Compton Mackenzie, who owned a nearby villa on Capri. "Monty" Mackenzie invited Nadezhin, whom he nicknamed "Bim," to his villa as his guest. Nadezhin soon became the lover of Compton's wife, Faith Compton Mackenzie, and remained at the villa as her companion, with the complete knowledge of her husband, until 1922.

Between 1922 and 1938 Nadezhin lived in Australia, New Zealand, England and America, traveling with Russian emigrant theatrical groups as an opera singer. He wrote poetry in both Russian and English, and had three books published: Razuvieren'e (1925); Izbrannyia stikhotvoreniia (1954); and Knizhnaia Polka (1955). In 1927 he married a young Australian girl, Therese-Helen-Lydia Tritton, at the Russian Orthodox Church in London. Following Nadezhin's alleged affair with Mrs. Vera Oppenheimer, the couple were divorced in 1936. Two years later Lydia married the last Prime Minister of the Russian Provisory Government (1917), Alexandr Fyodorovich Kerensky, whom she had met through Nadezhin. That same year Nadezhin returned to Faith and helped her to move to Peace Close, a cottage in Somerset, after the sale of the villa in Capri. Nadezhin cared for Faith through her various illnesses and provided material for her writing for the rest of his life.

Sometime in the early 1940s Nadezhin met Bryher and soon began submitting his poems to her. Through their correspondence they developed a friendship that was to last until Nadezhin's death. During World War II Nadezhin served for a time as an interpreter for the British forces. Following the war, he joined the Russian Service of the British Broadcasting Corporation as a correspondent and worked in the War Office of the British government as well as other odd jobs. During the mid-1950s he assisted Compton Mackenzie with the publication of The Gramophone Monthly Review, contributing articles on Russian composers. Nadezhin died in the summer of 1959.