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 Polina Dashkova's Madness Treads Lightly, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 1, and Leonid Yuzefovich’s Horsemen of the Sands. 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, including the 2014 Read Russia Prize for Contemporary Russian Literature, the 2016 Soeurette Diehl Frasier Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, and the 2018 Linda Gaboriau Award for Translation from the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
In advance of the forthcoming publication of Schwartz’s translation of Leonid Yuzefovich’s Horsemen of the Sands by Archipelago Books, Literary Hub published “The Mysterious Case of a Mongolian Murder That Might Have Been…,” one of many footnotes to the tale of the brutal anti-Bolshevik warlord Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg. Read the story here.
For a taste of what it was like to translate Horsemen of the Sands, read my post on the Center for the Art of Translation blog: “On the Outside Looking In.”
My translation of one of Nina Berberova’s finest novellas, “Resurrection of Mozart,” has been included in Found in Translation: 100 of the Finest Short Stories Ever Translated, selected by Frank Wynne. The novella first appeared in 1991 The Tattered Cloak and Other Stories.
At Book Riot, Leah Rachel von Essen has included my translation of Mikhail Shishkin’s novel Maidenhair among its “50 Must-Reads of Slavic Literature.”
