Register of the Ivy Litvinov papers

Processed by Natasha Porfirenko

Hoover Institution Archives

Stanford University

Stanford, California 94305-6010

Phone: (650) 723-3563

Fax: (650) 725-3445

Email: archives@hoover.stanford.edu

Register of the Ivy Litvinov papers

Hoover Institution Archives

Stanford University

Stanford, California

Processed by:: Natasha Porfirenko
Date Completed:: 2008
Encoded by:: ByteManagers using OAC finding aid conversion service specifications and Elizabeth Konzak

Descriptive Summary

Title: Ivy Litvinov papers

Dates: 1911-1997

Collection number: 87075

Creator: Ivy Litvinov

Collection Size: 14 manuscript boxes (5.8 linear feet)

Repository: Hoover Institution Archives

Stanford, California 94305-6010

Abstract: Acquired by the Hoover Institution in 1987, the Ivy Litvinov papers contain information relating to the life of Ivy Litvinov in Great Britain and the Soviet Union, her marriage to the Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov, and British and Russian literature. Also includes papers of her daughter Tatiana Litvinov.

Physical location: Hoover Institution Archives

Languages: Languages represented in the collection: English Russian

Administrative Information

Access

The collection is open for research

The Hoover Institution Archives only allows access to copies of audiovisual items. To listen to sound recordings or to view videos or films during your visit, please contact the Archives at least two working days before your arrival. We will then advise you of the accessibility of the material you wish to see or hear. Please note that not all audiovisual material is immediately accessible.

Publication Rights

For copyright status, please contact the Hoover Institution Archives

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], Ivy Litvinov papers, [Box no.], Hoover Institution Archives

Acquisition Information

Materials were acquired by the Hoover Institution Archives in 1987

Accruals

Materials may have been added to the collection since this finding aid was prepared. To determine if this has occurred, find the collection in Stanford University's online catalog at http://searchworks.stanford.edu/ . Materials have been added to the collection if the number of boxes listed in the online catalog is larger than the number of boxes listed in this finding aid.

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

Scope and Content of Collection

Acquired by the Hoover Institution in 1987, the Ivy Litvinov papers contain information relating to the life of Ivy Litvinov in Great Britain and the Soviet Union, her marriage to the Soviet Foreign Minister Maksim Litvinov, and British and Russian literature. Also includes papers of her daughter Tatiana Litvinov.

The collection is organized into five series: Diaries, Correspondence, Speeches and writings, Miscellany, and Sound recordings.

The papers include annotations, literary reviews, autobiographical, fictional, and other writings. She wrote the stories at the age of 81. She claimed total recall, saying it didn't matter if an event was recorded four of forty years later. She avoids the need for totally accurate recall by terming her work "sorterbiography" a mixture of fact and fiction.

Set in Russia and England, the stories range from the absorbing to the ordinary. Switching between countries, she cleverly illustrates how universally people live and relate to one another. The Russian stories are her best. She makes it quite clear the "scientific characteristics of communist economy" did not interest her. Instead, we are given domestic dramas, the concerns of people in small towns, often by the seaside or in country dachas. What makes the stories interesting is not only their perceptiveness about "ordinary" human emotions, but the Stalinist shadow which hangs over them.

Arrangement

The collection is organized into 5 series: Diaries, Correspondence, Speeches and writings, Miscellany, and Sound recordings

Indexing Terms

The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in Stanford University's online catalog.

Subjects

Litvinov, Maksim Maksimovich, 1876-1951

British literature

Authors, English – 20th century- Biography

Soviet Union – Social conditions

Container List

Box/Folder: 1

Diaries, 1945-1997

Scope and Content Note

Ivy and Tatiana diaries. Contain description of life, politics, and social conditions in Great Britain and the Soviet Union. (Numbered 1-57 by Tatiana Litvinova, daughter of Ivy Litvinov). Contains description of life, politics, and social conditions in Great Britain and the Soviet Union, arranged chronologically by date. Each handwritten holograph includes a typewritten transcript. Arranged chronologically

Box/Folder: 1 : 1

Number 1, 1945 June - July

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 1-29)

Box/Folder: 1 : 2

Number 2, 1943-1949

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 30-60)

1950-1951.

Note

See Diary number 7

Box/Folder: 1 : 3

Number 5, 1953 September - December, and undated

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 271-323)

Box/Folder: 1 : 4

Number 6, 1953 June – August

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 324-377)

Box/Folder: 1 : 5

Number 7, 1950, 1951

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 378-397)

Box/Folder: 1 : 6

Number 8, circa 1953

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 398-419)

Box/Folder: 1 : 7

Number 9, 1953, 1954

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 420-439)

Box/Folder: 1 : 8

Number 10, 1954 June – July

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 440-452)

Box/Folder: 1 : 9

Number 11, 1954 February – March

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 453-477)

Box/Folder: 1 : 10

Number 12, 1954 August 4

Scope and Content Note

(p. 478)

Box/Folder: 1 : 11

Number 13, 1954 May

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 479-491)

Box/Folder: 1 : 12

Number 14, 1954 July – August

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 492-508)

Box/Folder: 2 : 1

Number 15, 1954 March – May – August

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 509-516)

Box/Folder: 2 : 2

Number 16, 1954, 1955

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 517-542)

Box/Folder: 2 : 3

Number 17, 1955 January

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 543-552)

Box/Folder: 2 : 4

Number 18, 1955 March – September

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 553-560)

Box/Folder: 2 : 5

Number 19, 1955 July

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 561-569)

Box/Folder: 2 : 6

Number 20, 1955, 1956

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 570-581)

Box/Folder: 2 : 7

Number 21, 1956 April – December

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 582-601)

Box/Folder: 2 : 8

Number 22, 1956, 1959

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 602-617)

Box/Folder: 2 : 9

Number 23, 1957 June – July

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 618-627)

Box/Folder: 2 : 10

Number 24, 1957 July – September,

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 628-650)

Box/Folder: 2 : 11

Number 25, 1957 October

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 651-658)

Box/Folder: 2 : 12

Number 26, 1958 March - April, 1959 July - August

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 659-681)

Box/Folder: 2 : 13

Number 27, 1958 January – June

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 682-820)

Box/Folder: 3 : 1

Number 27, 1958 January – June

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 682-820)

Box/Folder: 3 : 2

Number 28, 1959 June – July

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 821-836)

Box/Folder: 3 : 3

Number 29, 1958, 1959

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 837-947)

Number 30

Box/Folder: 3 : 4

1959-1960, 1962-1965, 1970

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 61-155)

Box/Folder: 3 : 5

1960 January - February

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 156-180

Box/Folder: 3 : 6

1960 March – April

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 181-203)

Box/Folder: 4 : 1

1960 March – April

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 204-227)

Box/Folder: 4 : 2

1960 April – July,

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 228-251)

Box/Folder: 4 : 3

1960 July – September

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 252-270)

Box/Folder: 4 : 4

Number 31, 1960-1962, 1972

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 956-991)

Box/Folder: 4 : 5

Number 32, 1960-1962

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 992-1067)

Box/Folder: 4 : 6

Number 33, undated

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 1068-1079)

Box/Folder: 4 : 7

Number 34, 1962 June, 1967 January

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 1080-1085)

Box/Folder: 4 : 8

Number 35, 1952 October – December

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 1086-1091)

Box/Folder: 4 : 9

Number 36, 1955 September - November

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 1092-1096)

Box/Folder: 4 : 10

Number 37, undated

Scope and Content Note

(p. 1097)

Box/Folder: 4 : 11

Number 38, 1961-1974

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 1098-1101)

Box/Folder: 5 : 1

Number 39, 1962 September – October,

Scope and Content Note

includes English version (pp.1102-1119)

Box/Folder: 5 : 2

Number 40, 1963 January – February

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 1120-1129_

Box/Folder: 5 : 3

Number 41, 1963 February – March

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 1130-1144)

Box/Folder: 5 : 4

Number 42, 1963 March – November, 1965 September – October

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 1145-1230)

Box/Folder: 5 : 5

Number 43, 1963 December 15

Scope and Content Note

(pp. 1231-1233)

Box/Folder: 5 : 6

Number 44, 1963

Note