Patrick Miles (writer)


Patrick Miles is an English writer and translator. He was born in Sandwich, Kent and attended Sir Roger Manwood's Grammar School, then read Russian and German at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, graduating in 1971.
He taught Russian and German language/literature for all Cambridge colleges from 1971 to 1977 and 1987 to 1993, as well as researching early Chekhov with a period spent in Moscow 1972 to 1974, meeting leading Russian literary critics including Mikhail Bakhtin. He has been a writer, translator, and researcher since then, and worked in the theatre, including being artistic director of the Cambridge Chekhov Company and Russian consultant to the Royal National Theatre. He was also a Senior Research Associate at Cambridge University 1984–87, after which he ran an information consultancy and a European translation agency 1991–99.
In 2010 Miles was awarded a Cambridge PhD for his publications on Russian literature, especially the work of Anton Chekhov.
He currently resides in Cambridge, UK, where he continues to write books, articles, poems and plays.

Selected works

Books

  1. Chekhov on the British Stage
  2. Mikhail Gromov, Chekhov Scholar and Critic: An Essay in Cultural Difference
  3. Brief Lives: Anton Chekhov
  4. George Calderon: Edwardian Genius
  5. What Can We Hope For? with John Polkinghorne

    Plays and Stage Adaptations

  6. Ivanov
  7. Happiness!, a programme of Chekov's one-act plays
  8. The Cherry Orchard
  9. The Most Absolute Freedom, an entertainment about the young Chekhov
  10. Rabbits, a one-act play
  11. Last Summer in Chulimsk
  12. Duck-Hunting
  13. White Guard
  14. A Month in the Country
  15. In One Stay, a one-act play
  16. The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Ivan Chonkin, by Vladimir Voinovich
  17. On the Bottom of Life, by Maxim Gorky
  18. The Conjurer, by Sacha Guitry
  19. Let's Dream, by Sacha Guitry
  20. It Makes a Break, a one-act play
  21. Sara, an adaptation of Chekhov's Ivanov
  22. Far Out, a one-act play

    Major Translations

  23. Chekhov: The Early Stories 1883–88, translated by Patrick Miles and Harvey Pitcher
  24. A Theatre Romance, translation of Teatral'nyi roman by Bulgakov, commissioned by the Royal National Theatre
  25. Two Plays by Aleksandr Vampilov
  26. The Russian Theatre after Stalin
  27. A Moth on the Fence

    Articles, Papers, Book Chapters

  28. Chekhov and the Company Problem in the British Theatre, in Chekhov on the British Stage, pp. 185–93
  29. Aleksandr Vampilov: A Playwright whose Time is Now, in British East-West Journal, pp. 7–8
  30. Chekhov, Shakespeare, the Ensemble and the Company; Peter Hall interviewed by Patrick Miles New Theatre Quarterly, 11, no.43, pp. 203–10
  31. Chekhov on the English Stage, in Chekhov and World Literature, pp. 493–534
  32. Leavis and Bakhtin, Cambridge Review, November 1998, pp. 42–46
  33. A Conversation with Bakhtin, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 36, no.4, October 2000, pp. 438–49
  34. Cheshire Cats in the Theatre: A Translation and Fringe Experience, New Theatre Quarterly, November 2000, pp. 359–63
  35. Early Chekhov: The Making of a Totalitarian Consensus, Slavonica, 14, no.1, pp. 18–43
  36. Chekhov at 150: The "Hampstead Connection", The London Magazine, June/July 2010, pp. 98–102
  37. Joseph Brodsky in Leningrad, Poetry Nation Review, May–June 2019, pp. 17–20