Marian Schwartz began her career in literary translation in 1978 with her translation of Landmarks, a 1909 collection of essays on the Russian intelligentsia written by some of Russia’s most eminent philosophers of the day. In the more than four decades since then, she has published dozens of volumes of fiction and nonfiction—biography, criticism, fine arts, philosophy, and history.
Schwartz studied Russian at Harvard University, Middlebury Russian School, and Leningrad State University and received a Master of Arts in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Texas at Austin in 1975, after which she headed to New York to try her hand at publishing.
Two years as an assistant editor for Praeger Publishers led to the freelancer’s life, which she has embraced ever since, including a five-year engagement translating the quarterly Russian Studies in Literature.
Schwartz is perhaps best known for her prize-winning translations of works by Russian émigré writer Nina Berberova, including eight volumes of fiction (The Accompanist, The Tattered Cloak, Billancourt Tales, The Revolt, Cape of Storms, The Book of Happiness, The Ladies from St. Petersburg, and The Last and the First) and one biography (Moura: The Dangerous Life of the Baroness Budberg, translated with Richard D. Sylvester). In 2021, Pushkin Press published her translation of Berberova’s first novel, The Last and the First, which Nabokov praised as a “unique, harmonious, and brilliant book.”
She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts translation awards as well as the 2018 Linda Gaboriau Award for Translation from the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, 2014 Read Russia Prize for Best Translation of Contemporary Russian Literature, the 2002 and 2011 Held Translation Prize from the Association of Women in Slavic Studies, the 2009 AATSEEL Award for Best Translation into English, 1999, 2007, and 2016 Soeurette Diehl Frasier Translation Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, and, for Nina Berberova’s Sentence Commuted, the 1985 Novella-in-Translation Award from The Literary Review, the first recognition for her translation work and so remembered with special fondness.
Schwartz has had one brush with bestsellerdom, Edvard Radzinsky’s The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II. Her translation was on the New York Times bestseller list for sixteen weeks, was read by David McCallum for an audiobook, and was translated (from the English) into Spanish as El último zar. Some of Schwartz’s favorite translations have been quirky, like Vasily Peskov’s Lost in the Taiga, a journalist’s account of a family of Old Believers who lived in the taiga completely isolated from human society for sixty years, and White on Black, by Ruben Gonzales Gallego, stories about his life growing up severely disabled in the Soviet Union. She worked with Professor Darra Goldstein on High Society Dinners: Aristocratic Dining in Tsarist Russia, a family album of menus and related papers from 1857-58 with an introductory essay by the eminent Yuri Lotman on the history of dining in Russia.
Schwartz has retranslated several Russian classics—Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, Yuri Olesha’s Envy, Mikhail Bulgakov’s White Guard, Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina—but is drawn to contemporary Russian literature. Current authors include Leonid Yuzefovich, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Olga Slavnikova, Eugene Vodolazkin, Dmitry Glukhovsky, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Schwartz remains committed to encouraging the publication of high-quality foreign literature in the United States and was, until February 24, 2022, mentoring the younger generation of Russian translators through the Emerging Translator Mentorship Program of the American Literary Translators Association, for which she has served on the board and as president. In the wake of Russia’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine, she has refocused her efforts on translating human rights journalism for rightsinrussia.org as well as the work of Russian writers working in opposition to the war and the Putin regime.
A complete list of publications is available upon request.