Gertrude Vakar

Who is Gertrude Vakar?

Gertrude Clafton Vakar was born in Revel, Estonia, to English family that had been in Russia since 1795 and grew up in Arkhangelsk, Russia.

During the Russian Revolution, the Clafton family moved to England, while Gertrude—the oldest of five girls—went to the Russian lycée in Paris on a scholarship. She graduated at the top of her class in 1923. On a visit back to Paris, she met Nicholas Vakar, a former White Army officer, then a writer for the Russian language daily Poslednie novosti. They married in 1926 and settled in Paris. They had two daughters, Catherine in 1927 and Anna in 1929.

Vakar, trilingual since childhood, translated some 37 novels into Russian, from French or English, perhaps also German, for serialization in the Russian newspapers. She also translated a number of academic works from Russian into English., including many of the works of the psychologist Lev Vygotsky.