Ignat Avsey, who has died of cancer aged 75, was a distinguished translator from Russian. He breathed new life into not only two of Dostoevsky's best-known novels (The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot) but also two of his least-known (The Village of Stepanchikovo and Humiliated and Insulted). Ignat's knack of lighting on forgotten gems to translate did not stop at Russian literature: his translation of an early thriller by the Viennese writer Alexander Lernet-Holenia, I Was Jack Mortimer (1933), has just been published and well received.
Ignat was born in Latvia, of Russian parentage. His family settled in Britain after the second world war. For most of his working life, Ignat, bilingual and with a thorough knowledge also of German, was a teacher of Russian, first of technical Russian and translation at the Holborn College of Law, Languages and Commerce and, later, when this school became the Polytechnic of Central London and then the University of Westminster, literature as well. He was a gifted and entertaining teacher.
I first met Ignat in 1982 when offered, as a publisher, his first translation, of Dostoevsky's black-comic novel The Village of Stepanchikovo. With his obsessions, limitless ambition, unpredictable mood swings and unquenchable flow of language – which I learned to stem on occasion with a deft movement of the hand – he seemed to walk straight out of that novel.
He believed profoundly in the translator's role as a creative figure and leader of taste, and paid the price for this ideal in his unsuccessful lawsuit against the University of Westminster (settled out of court) for not crediting his translations as "original research". For him, however, translation – including decisions on what to translate – was original research. And his translations of Dostoevsky made truly original contributions in revealing the full extent of his humour and showing the most disregarded of his works actually to be far more significant than hitherto realised.
Ignat is survived by his wife, Anastasia, his sister, Ina, and his brother, Leon.