Robert Chandler is the author of Alexander Pushkin and the editor of two anthologies for Penguin Classics: Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov. His translations of Sappho and Guillaume Apollinaire are published in the Everyman’s Poetry series. His translations from Russian include Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, Everything Flows, and The Road (all published by NYRB Classics); Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk; and Aleksander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter. Together with Olga Meerson and his wife, Elizabeth, he has translated a number of works by Andrey Platonov. One of these, Soul, won the 2004 AATSEEL (American Association of Teachers of Slavonic and East European Languages) Prize. His translation of Hamid Ismailov’s The Railway won the AATSEEL Prize for 2007 and received a special commendation from the judges of the 2007 Rossica Translation Prize.
Books
An Armenian Sketchbook
Vasily Grossman wrote not only one of the great Russian novels of the 20th-century (Life and Fate), but also vivid reportage, moving essays, and brilliant travel journals. This account of two months he spent in Armenia in the mid-60s is the most intimate of his works. Suppressed during his life, it is here available in English for the first time.
The Road
Grossman’s Life and Fate has been called the War and Peace of WWII, and his war reporting considered among the most important from the field. The Road brings together Grossman’s best untranslated fiction and nonfiction, including “The Hell of Treblinka,” one of the very first journalistic dispatches from inside a concentration camp.
The Road
Grossman’s Life and Fate has been called the War and Peace of WWII, and his war reporting considered among the most important from the field. The Road brings together Grossman’s best untranslated fiction and nonfiction, including “The Hell of Treblinka,” one of the very first journalistic dispatches from inside a concentration camp.
Everything Flows
The final novel from the author of Life and Fate centers on a former political prisoner adjusting to freedom after decades spent in Soviet camps. It is a story of love, survival, honor, and an indictment of the totalitarian state.
Soul
Andrey Platonov is one of Russia’s finest post-revolution novelists, and this definitive and newly translated collection of his works positions him amongst the greatest of twentieth-century writers. On Robert Chandler’s translation, The Observer wrote, “Rarely does literature come this close to being music.”
Life and Fate
An epic tale of World War II that interweaves a transfixing account of the battle of Stalingrad with the story of a single middle-class family, the Shaposhnikovs, scattered by fortune from Germany to Siberia.