Background
Elizaveta Grigoryevna Beketova was born in December, 1834 in Orenburg, Russian Federation. She was a daughter of a traveler and naturalist Karelin Grigory Silych.
Elizaveta Grigoryevna Beketova was born in December, 1834 in Orenburg, Russian Federation. She was a daughter of a traveler and naturalist Karelin Grigory Silych.
Elizaveta Grigoryevna was self-educated and fluent in the main European languages.
From the 1850s Elizaveta Grigoryevna was engaged in translation activities. The first major publications were translations of the novels "Danielle" by George Sand and "Uncle Tom’s Cabin" by G. Beecher-Stow, published as appendices to the magazine "Russkiy vestnik" in 1857.
Translated "Mary Burton" by E. Gaskell ("Vremya", 1861), "Daniel Deronda" by J. Eliot (Saint Petersburg, 1877), "Journey Around the World on the Beagle" by Charles Darwin (Saint Petersburg, 1865). Elizaveta Grigoryevna intensified her translation activity in the 1890s. In the supplement to the journal "Vestnik inostrannoy literatury", her translations of the books by G.M. Stanley "In the Wilds of Africa" (1892) and "My Black Companions and Their Outlandish Stories" (1894), novel M. DeLand "Sidney" (1895).
Shortly before her death, Elizaveta Grigoryevna also composed popular essays about the English mechanics G. Iodsley, J. Stephenson and R. Stephenson, J. Nesmit in the book "Heroes of Labor". Some of Beketova’s translations continued to be reprinted in the 1950s and 1960s, for example, an abbreviated version of David Copperfield by Dickens and Ivanhoe by Walter Scott.
Elizaveta Grigoryevna died on October 14, 1902, in Saint Petersburg. She was buried at the Smolensk Orthodox Cemetery, in 1944 her ashes were reburied at the Literary bridges of Volkovo Cemetery.
Quotes from others about the person
A.A. Block said a lot about grandmother in the autobiography: "Her worldview was surprisingly lively and individual, her style was imaginative, her language was precise and bold, denouncing the Cossack breed ... Her character was extremely distinct and combined with her thought, clear as summer village mornings, in which she sat down to work before the light ... She knew how to rejoice just the sun, just fine weather, even in the very last years, when she was tormented by diseases and doctors.