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.

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 Turbin clan and their mixed fortunes, Bulgakov drew semi-autobiographically on his Kiev relatives (you can still visit their home). Comedy, terror and a matchless sense of intimacy with a warm family ripped apart by history drive White Guard.

The Turbins and their beloved city suffer revolving-door coups until, at last, fate shows its hand and an armoured train pulls in with the "vibrant red star" of Mars (and Lenin) in a winter sky.

The public is very much invited.

She died of complications from a fall last March, said Dr. Murl G. Barker, a friend, who is chairman of the Russian department at Rutgers University.

Miss Berberova is best known for her 1969 autobiography, "The Italics Are Mine," written during the years 1960 to 1965. Many of the figures in the worlds of émigré arts and politics — including Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Blok, Vladimir Nabokov, Maxim Gorky and Fyodor Sologub — come vividly alive in her reminiscences.

"She has brilliantly evoked the atmosphere of literary Petrograd," wrote a critic in The New York Times Book Review in 1969, adding that the memoirs "have yielded some remarkable portraits and vignettes." The book was re-issued last year by Alfred A. Knopf in a revised translation.

A Film From Her Novella

Recognition for her fiction came late, but French, German and English critics have compared Miss Berberova’s sharp, incisive writing to that of Turgenev’s and Chekhov’s. Her 1934 novella "The Accompanist," about a young woman pianist who accompanies and competes with a soprano, was made into a film this year by the French director Claude Miller.

A selection of Miss Berberova’s novellas, "The Tattered Cloak and Other Novels," was published by Knopf in 1991. Michiko Kakutani, writing in The Times, said: "Long overdue in America, this collection of stories deserves a wide and appreciative audience, while Miss Berberova herself deserves recognition as one of the most captivating Russian writers alive today."

Her fiction has been on best-seller lists in France, and she was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Government in 1989.

Miss Berberova (pronounced bur-BEAR-uh-vuh) was born in 1901 in St. Petersburg; her father was an Armenian civil servant; her mother was Russian. She attended Rostov University and was involved in the literary and artistic ferment in that city until she left in 1922, accompanying the poet Vladislav Khodasevich. Together they traveled about Europe as members of the household of Maxim Gorky, before settling in Paris in 1925. Reported the News

Miss Berberova then began a 15-year affiliation with the Russian-language daily Poslednye Novosti, reporting news events and writing book reviews, critical articles, short fiction and theater and movie reviews. She was also one of the founders of the émigré weekly Russkaya Mysl’ in 1947.

She wrote four novels and "Tchaikovsky," a biography of the composer. Appearing in 1937, the book created a sensation because it dealt openly with the composer’s homosexuality.

In 1950 Miss Berberova immigrated to the United States, working at a variety of jobs until she became the editor of the journal Mosty. In 1958 she joined the Slavic department at Yale University, and in 1963 she moved on to Princeton, where she taught until 1971.

Miss Berberova was the partner of Khodasevich until the 1930′s, but they were never married. She married Nikolai Makeyev, a journalist, in 1937; and in the 1950′s, George Kochevitsky, a musician who died last month. Both marriages ended in divorce.

Miss Berberova, who became a United States citizen, returned to Russia in 1989.

She received an honorary doctorate from Middlebury College in 1983, and another from Yale University last year. She moved from Princeton to Philadelphia in 1990. — Glenn Collins, New York Times, September 29, 1993

Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment
By Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, Wojciech Materski, and Maia A. Kipp
Translated by Marian Schwartz
Yale University Press, 2008

The 14,500 Polish army officers, police, gendarmes, and civilians taken prisoner by the Red Army when it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939 were held in three special NKVD camps and executed at three different sites in spring 1940, of which the one in Katyn Forest is the most famous. Another 7,300 prisoners held in NKVD jails in Ukraine and Belarus were also shot at this time, although many others disappeared without trace. The murder of these Poles is among the most monstrous mass murders undertaken by any modern government.

Three leading historians of the NKVD massacres of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn, Kharkov, and Tver—now subsumed under “Katyn”—present 122 documents selected from the published Russian and Polish volumes coedited by Natalia S. Lebedeva and Wojciech Materski. The documents, with introductions and notes by Anna M. Cienciala, detail the Soviet killings, the elaborate cover-up, the admission of the truth, and the Katyn question in Soviet/Russian–Polish relations up to the present.

A volume in the Annals of Communism series published by Yale University Press.

Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917-1953
By Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko with Andrei Artizov and Oleg Naumov
Translated by Marian Schwartz
Yale University Press, 2007

Leaders of the Soviet Union, Stalin chief among them, well understood the power of art, and their response was to attempt to control and direct it in every way possible. This book examines Soviet cultural politics from the Revolution to Stalin’s death in 1953. Drawing on a wealth of newly released documents from the archives of the former Soviet Union, the book provides remarkable insight on relations between Gorky, Pasternak, Babel, Meyerhold, Shostakovich, Eisenstein, and many other intellectuals, and the Soviet leadership. Stalin’s role in directing these relations, and his literary judgments and personal biases, will astonish many.

The documents presented in this volume reflect the progression of Party control in the arts. They include decisions of the Politburo, Stalin’s correspondence with individual intellectuals, his responses to particular plays, novels, and movie scripts, petitions to leaders from intellectuals, and secret police reports on intellectuals under surveillance. Introductions, explanatory materials, and a biographical index accompany the documents.

A volume in the Annals of Communism series published by Yale University Press.

This book gives voice to the experiences, thoughts, and feelings of ordinary Russian people-workers, peasants, soldiers-as expressed in their own words during the vast upheavals of 1917. The documents in the volume are selected from the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow and other Russian collections and most have never been published before. They include letters from individuals to newspapers, institutions, or leaders; collective resolutions and appeals; and even poetry written by self-taught, lower-class authors.

Using a mixture of narrative and hitherto unpublished letters from workers, peasants and soldiers, Steinberg brings 1917 to life again. . . . The result is utterly fascinating. — Alison Rowat, Glasgow Herald

"his volume will be particularly useful as collateral reading for graduate and upper-division undergraduate students in history and Soviet studies. — History: Reviews of New Books

A wonderful achievement, a rare amalgam of excellent scholarship and original source materials. — Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Chicago

A volume in the Annals of Communism series published by Yale University Press.