Marian Schwartz translates Russian classic and contemporary 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, Mikhail Lermontov, and Leo Tolstoy. Her most recent publications are Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 3, Eugene Vodolazkin’s Brisbane, and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s Kidnapped: A Story in Crimes!. She is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association and the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowships and numerous prizes. In Fall 2024, University of Notre Dame Press published the final volume in Schwartz’s translation of March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 4. Aphorism lovers will enjoy her recent translation of Victor Shenderovich’s A Collection of Aphorisms, available here. Forthcoming in Fall 2025 is the UK publication of her translation of Mikhail Shishkin’s masterpiece Maidenhair (Quercus).
in the News
Dmitry Glukhovsky, “Sulphur,” first published in Asymptote (Winter 2022), has now been included in The Best of World SF, vol. 3 (Bloomsbury, 2023).
In Fall 2023, Schwartz’s translation of Dmitry Glukhovsky’s play The White Factory was staged at London’s Marylebone Theatre, for which it was awarded five Offies!
In Fall 2023, The Montreal Review published her translation of “Oppenheimer,” a chapter from Irina Vinokurova’s recent biography of Nina Berberova, Nina Berberova: Izvestnaya i neizvestnaya.
“Marian Schwartz has not let one drop of Petrushevskaya’s bawdy humor get lost in translation.” Jennifer Wilson, reviewing Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s Kidnapped: A Story in Crimes in “Mother Russia,” New York Review of Books, October 5, 2023
An original essay, “The Russian Canon in Retranslation,” in This Is a Classic: Translators on Making Writers Global, edited by Regina Galasso (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Mikhail Epshtein, “Schizophrenic Fascism: On Russia’s War in Ukraine,” Studies in East European Thought, June 22, 2022
Gary Saul Morson, “What Solzhenitsyn Understood,” New York Review of Books, May 12, 2022