Marian Schwartz is a prize-winning translator of Russian fiction, history, biography, criticism, and fine art. She is the principal English translator of the works of Nina Berberova and translated the New York Times bestseller The Last Tsar, by Edvard Radzinsky, as well as classics by Mikhail Bulgakov, Ivan Goncharov, Yuri Olesha, and Mikhail Lermontov. Her two most recent book translations are Mikhail Bulgakov's White Guard (Yale University Press) and Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov (Seven Stories Press), soon to be out in paperback from Yale University Press. Overlook Press will publish her translation of Olga Slavnikova's 2017 in March 2010. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowships and is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association.
On the occasion of Yale University Press’s paperback edition of Oblomov, Katherine A. Powers has a glowing review in the Boston Globe:
The expression “great comic novel” attached to a title usually causes me to drop everything and rush off to the library to secure what I consider to be one of the prime reasons for living. The greatest of these works are, to my mind, ones that are not simply funny, but also possess a melancholy, even hopeless dimension. Examples are Charles Portis’s “Masters of Atlantis,” V.S. Naipaul’s “A House for Mr. Biswas,” Flann O’Brien’s “The Third Policeman,” Dawn Powell’s “The Wicked Pavilion,” Barbara Pym’s “Excellent Women,” Molly Keane’s “Good Behavior,” Evelyn Waugh’s “A Handful of Dust,” Anthony Burgess’s “The Long Day Wanes,” and Shchedrin’s “The Golovlyov Family” - which has also been called the gloomiest novel in all Russian literature.
Ivan Goncharov’s “Oblomov,” published in Russian in 1859, is invariably described as a “great comic novel.” Still, though I’ve taken it out of the library several times in explosions of enthusiasm, I had never actually read it until now - two versions, in fact: C. J. Hogarth’s translation of 1915, the first in English, which turns out to be an abridgement; and the most recent translation, Marian Schwartz’s of 2008, just published in paperback (Yale University Press, $16.95).
To read the complete review, click here.
The graphics used on this site were inspired by the work of Liubov Popova (1889-1924), a Russian artist and designer influenced by Constructivism and Futurism, as seen in her biography, by D.V. Sarabianov and N.L. Adaskina, Liubov Popova, translated by Marian Schwartz and published by Harry N. Abrams in 1990.