Janko Lavrin

Janko Lavrin was a Slovene novelist, poet, critic, translator, and historian. He was born in Krupa, Slovenia, in 1887 and died in 1986. He was a Professor of Slavonic Studies at the University of Nottingham. Lavrin was interested in psychoanalysis and wrote psycho-critical studies of Ibsen, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy. In 1915, he served as a war correspondent for Novoye Vremya, where he covered the Serbian army's retreat through Albania during World War I.

After World War I, Lavrin decided to stay in the UK and worked as a journalist, becoming part of the circle around A. R. Orage. In 1919, Bernard Pares helped Lavrin to get a teaching job at the University of Nottingham, which he held until his retirement in 1952. During World War II, he joined the BBC, where he broadcast to occupied Europe. Lavrin was a friend of the Russian critic D. S. Mirsky in London in the 1920s. In 1928, he married the artist and book illustrator Nora Fry

He continued to write and translate after retiring from the University of Nottingham, including works on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, and Nietzsche. He also wrote biographical surveys of Russian literature. Lavrin's writings on Russian literature and culture have been influential in the field of Slavic studies.

• "The Country in the Spring of War: Albanian Sketches" (1916)
• "Dostoevsky and His Creation: a psycho-critical study" (1920)
• "Tolstoy: a psycho-critical study" (1922)
• "Studies in European literature" (1929)
• "Pushkin and Russian literature" (1947)
• "Ibsen: an approach" (1950)