Julian Henry Lowenfeld is the great-grandson of Raphael Löwenfeld, the first translator of Leo Tolstoy’s works into German.  (Vladimir Nabokov first began writing poems and short stories under the pseudonym V. Sirin during the year he lived in Löwenfeld’s home in Berlin).

Lowenfeld majored in Russian literature at Harvard University and continued his studies first as an exchange student in Leningrad State University, and later independently with the renowned Pushkin scholar Nadyezhda Braginskaya. He has lectured to popular acclaim at the famous Pushkinsky Dom (Institute of Russian Literature), and  the Museum of Pushkin’s Last Residence on Moika 12, in St. Petersburg, at Pushkin State Museum in Moscow, at the United Nations, the Pushkin House in London, England, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., Columbia University, Lehigh University, various branches of the New York Public Library and Boston Public Library, the Donnell Arts Center, the Voice of America, BBC Russian World Service, Kanal Kultura, most of the major Russian television channels, and numerous other venues.

In November 2009, BARYSHNIKOV ARTS CENTER, New York city, featured a world premiere in English of Pushkin’s “Little Tragedies” in verse translation by Julian Henry Lowenfeld which has been praised as “brilliant” by leading authorities in both Russia and the United States, including such major scholars as V.E. Bagno, director of the Pushkin House in the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg; E.A. Bogatyrev, Director of the of the State Museum of Alexander Pushkin in Moscow; Pushkin Prize winner Professor V.S. Nepomnyashchiy; Academician S.A Fomichev; as well as professors of Columbia, Princeton, Harvard, Pennsylvania State, and Lehigh Universities.

Lowenfeld was awarded Russia’s prestigious “Petropol” and “Peacemaker” prizes for his book My Talisman, featuring translations of beloved lyrics and a lively biography of Russia’s beloved national bard.