# Max Hayward

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{{Short description|British lecturer on and translator of Russian literature (1924 – 1979)}}
{{for|the Australian rugby league player|Max Hayward (rugby league)}}

'''Harry Maxwell Hayward''' (28 July 1924, [London](/source/London) – 18 March 1979, [Oxford](/source/Oxford)) was a British lecturer on and translator of [Russia](/source/Russia)n literature. He has been described as "the best and most prolific translator of Russian prose into English since [Constance Garnett](/source/Constance_Garnett)".<ref>[https://books.google.com/books?id=a96N2Y8tI0QC&dq=Max+Hayward+russian+literature&pg=PA178 ''Literary Translation in Russia: A Cultural History''], The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997, p. 178.</ref>

==Biography==
After schooling in London and [Liverpool](/source/Liverpool), Hayward went to [Magdalen College, Oxford](/source/Magdalen_College%2C_Oxford) in 1942 on a scholarship to study German. He soon dropped German for Russian, graduating with a first-class degree in 1945. He remained in Oxford for two more years before being proposed by [Isaiah Berlin](/source/Isaiah_Berlin) for a scheme for young scholars to be attached to the British Embassy in [Moscow](/source/Moscow). He instead opted to study in 1946–7 at [Charles University of Prague](/source/Charles_University_of_Prague). The British Foreign Office then appointed him to the Moscow embassy and he arrived in September 1947, where he would remain for two years. When required to translate for the British ambassador on a visit to [Joseph Stalin](/source/Joseph_Stalin) in the [Kremlin](/source/Kremlin), Hayward was too dumb-struck to speak.

Returning to Oxford in 1949, Hayward became lecturer in Russian, moving to [Leeds University](/source/Leeds_University) in 1952. In 1955 he returned to work at the British Embassy in Moscow, but his posting was cut short. In 1956 he was taken on by [St Antony's College, Oxford](/source/St_Antony's_College%2C_Oxford). He supervised a number of students who went on to prominent careers, including [Strobe Talbott](/source/Strobe_Talbott).

Although Hayward published no academic monograph and his writings were widely scattered in introductions to books and articles in journals, he became a well-known authority on Russian literature. He was best known as a translator (often jointly with colleagues) of the works of [Vladimir Mayakovsky](/source/Vladimir_Mayakovsky), [Isaac Babel](/source/Isaac_Babel), [Nadezhda Mandelstam](/source/Nadezhda_Mandelstam), [Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn](/source/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn), [Boris Pasternak](/source/Boris_Pasternak), [Andrei Sinyavsky](/source/Andrei_Sinyavsky), [Andrei Amalrik](/source/Andrei_Amalrik), [Anna Akhmatova](/source/Anna_Akhmatova) and many others.

His first full-scale translation, jointly with [Manya Harari](/source/Manya_Harari), was of Pasternak's novel ''Doctor Zhivago'', a translation they began in 1957. Hayward had known Pasternak's family in Oxford and had once heard Pasternak read his poetry in Moscow in 1948.

He received the [PEN Translation Prize](/source/PEN_Translation_Prize) in 1971.

He died in Oxford, aged 54, in 1979.<ref>* Leonard Schapiro, [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1979/jul/19/max-hayward-19241979/ "Max Hayward (1924–1979)"], ''The New York Review of Books'', July 19, 1979.</ref>

==See also==
*''[Hope Against Hope](/source/Hope_Against_Hope_(autobiography))'' by [Nadezhda Mandelstam](/source/Nadezhda_Mandelstam)
*''A Spy in the Archives: A Memoir of Cold War Russia'' by [Shelia Fitzpatrick](/source/Sheila_Fitzpatrick)

==References==
{{Reflist}}

==External links==
* Leonard Schapiro, [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1979/jul/19/max-hayward-19241979/ "Max Hayward (1924–1979)"], ''The New York Review of Books'', July 19, 1979.

{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hayward, Max}}
Category:1924 births
Category:1979 deaths
Category:Translators of Boris Pasternak
Category:Translators of Anna Akhmatova
Category:Alumni of Magdalen College, Oxford
Category:Charles University alumni
Category:Academics of the University of Leeds
Category:Fellows of St Antony's College, Oxford
Category:20th-century British translators
Category:20th-century British linguists
Category:British expatriates in Czechoslovakia

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