Robert Chandler’s translations of Sappho and Guillaume Apollinaire are published in the series “Everyman’s Poetry.” His translations from Russian include Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Aleksander Pushkin’s Dubrovsky and The Captain’s Daughter. Together with his wife, Elizabeth, and other colleagues he has co-translated numerous works by Andrey Platonov. One of these, Soul, was chosen in 2004 as “best translation of the year from a Slavonic language” by the AATSEEL (the American Association of Teachers of Slavonic and East European Languages); it was also shortlisted for the 2005 Rossica Translation Prize and the Weidenfeld European Translation Prize. Robert Chandler’s 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. Robert Chandler is the editor of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and the author of a biography of Alexander Pushkin.
Books
Happy Moscow
Happy Moscow isn’t a place, but a person, a gifted orphan whose flair for parachuting catapults her into the Soviet elite. Until, that is, she comes in for a great fall and reveals that Stalin’s utopia isn’t quite as happy as it’s made out to be. “A reminder of the unique, paradoxical power of literature to expose the mismatch between rhetoric and reality.”—The Spectator
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 a former political prisoner adjusting to freedom after decades spent in a 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.