Category Archives: reviews

Humor in the Human Condition

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. [...]

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Slavic Professor Reviews White Guard

I was thrilled to read a very positive review of my translation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s White Guard by Sidney Eric Dement of the University of Kansas in the Slavic and East European Journal.  He begins:
In the course of their life in translation, the best novels shed their skin more than once. The time for Mikhail Bulgakov’s [...]

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Mining the Human Landscape in Slavnikova’s 2017

Lizok’s Bookshelf has run the first review I’ve seen of my translation of Olga Slavnikova’s forthcoming novel, 2017, which Overlook Press is publishing in March:
Olga Slavnikova’s Booker-winning 2017 is so tough to describe that I think I’ll do something very lazy and begin with words that compactly list some of its themes: rock hound, translucence, [...]

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Slate Picks Oblomov

The translator is always the last to know.  Slate chose my Oblomov translation as one of its Best Books of 2008!  Read about it here.  And be looking for the paperback edition, coming in February from Yale University Press.

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Michael Wood Reviews Oblomov in London Review of Books

“This intimately funny and desperately sad novel opens with a parade of visitors to Ilya Ilich Oblomov’s Petersburg flat. Most of them are introduced, in this new translation, by the phrase “in walked”, which creates a wonderful sense of flatness, repetition and invasion. All but one of the visitors are busy in some way or [...]

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The Independent Praises White Guard

Boyd Tonkin at The Independent has given my translation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s White Guard a short but very sweet review:
Marian Schwartz's pacey and compelling new translation of this most unstuffy classic captures a wonderful chronicle of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath as a colourful, absurd and even merry cocktail of nightmare and farce.
For the [...]

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