Tatiana Wolff, who has died aged 90, was an English teacher and author of a critically acclaimed book about the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. She was a friend of my parents and later became a kind of adopted relative to me. I described her to acquaintances as my Russian aunt.
The child of émigrés forced out of Russia in the revolutionary turmoil of 1917, Tania, as she was commonly known, was born in Hampstead, north London. She spent all but one year of her life in the same family home. There she learned Russian from her mother Evgenia (nee Khoroche) and her father Mark, a prominent St Petersburg lawyer who had made a second career for himself in London’s inns of court. She was educated at Kingsley school, Swiss Cottage, and at Cambridge University, before becoming an English teacher in 1952 at Loughton county high school in Essex, where she remained for 30 years until her retirement in 1982. Despite her very English upbringing, she always spoke with a distinctive Russian accent.
In parallel to her teaching career, Tania wrote and edited various books. Her major work was Pushkin on Literature (1971), in which she introduced and translated the poet’s views on the European writers who had influenced him. To her satisfaction, its publication opened the way to friendships with some of Pushkin’s descendants who had settled in Britain, and led to her involvement in a magnificent three-day celebration of his life in 1987 to mark the 150th anniversary of his death.
For light relief in retirement, Tania teamed up with her friend from student days Dorothy Meade, to produce Lines on the Underground (1994), an anthology of writings on each of the 270 stations of the London tube network. In 2003 she produced an excellent translation of the last, and most personal, work of the writer and Russian Orthodox bishop Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, who died that year.
At 17, Tania had adopted the Orthodox faith of her mother, and for many years she regularly attended the Russian Orthodox church in Ennismore Gardens, Kensington. Tolerant and non-judgmental, she made few demands on life other than a little love from her many friends, whom she regarded as her family.
