A talk by Robert Chandler: Vasily Grossman, Lev Ozerov and the World of Soviet Jewry

Robert Chandler will discuss his two most recent translations: of Vasily Grossman’s novel ‘Stalingrad’ and Lev Ozerov’s poetry collection ‘Portraits Without Frames’.

Grossman’s ‘Life and Fate’ has been hailed as a 20th-century War and Peace. However, Grossman did not originally conceive of ‘Life and Fate’ as a self-contained novel. It is, rather, the second of two closely related novels about the Battle of Stalingrad. The characters in both novels are largely the same and so is the storyline; ‘Life and Fate’ picks up where ‘Stalingrad’ ends, in late September 1942.

In 1946 Ozerov published a long poem about the massacre of Kiev Jews at Babi Yar, one of the first works to address the subject in Russian. He was also one of the contributors to ‘The Black Book’, a documentary account, co-edited by Grossman, of the Shoah on Soviet and Polish soil. Ozerov’s posthumously published ‘Portraits without Frames’ includes moving portraits of the four Soviet Yiddish poets executed on Stalin’s orders in August 1952.

Robert Chandler’s translations from Russian include many works by Vasily Grossman and Andrey Platonov. He has also compiled three anthologies for Penguin Classics: of Russian short stories, of Russian magic tales and (together with Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski) of Russian poetry. He is a co-translator of three volumes of memoirs and stories by Teffi and the author of a short biography of Alexander Pushkin. His translations have won prizes in both the UK and the USA. Robert is also a Vice President of the SCRSS.

The talk is open to both SCRSS members and non-members.