Lydia Pasternak Slater (1902–1989)

Lydia Pasternak Slater was born in Moscow, the daughter of Leonid Osipovich Pasternak, a Russian Impressionist painter, and his wife Rozalia Isodorovna Kofman, a concert pianist. Boris Pasternak and Alexander Pasternak were two of her brothers. Lydia studied medicine at the Second Moscow University, but switched to chemistry, physics and botany. She continued her studies at the University of Berlin after she and most of the Pasternak family had fled to Germany following the Russian Revolution. She earned a doctoral degree in chemistry in 1926 and two years later joined the German Research Institute for Psychiatry in Munich. With Irvine H. Page, an American guest scholar at the institute, she studied the influence of chemical substances on the brain and published several articles in the journal Biochemische Zeitschrift. After the Nazi regime came to power, the research group broke up and Lydia Pasternak left Germany for Great Britain, where she joined Eliot Trevor Oakeshott Slater, a British psychiatrist whom she had met in Munich. The two married in 1935. She became a poet, writing in German, Russian, and English, and also translated into English the poems of her brother Boris, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958. She became an important member of Oxford’s literary and artistic society.