Vasily Semyonovich Grossman was born in Berdichev, Ukraine, on December 12, 1905, in a town with one of Europe's largest Jewish communities. In 1934, he released In the Town of Berdichev, a short tale that drew praise from writers as different as Maksim Gorky, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Isaak Babel, as well as Glyukauf, a novel about the Donbass miners' lives. Grossman worked as a correspondent for the army newspaper Red Star throughout World War II, covering practically all of the major engagements from the defense of Moscow until the fall of Berlin. One of the earliest pieces in any language concerning a Nazi execution camp, The Horror of Treblinka (late 1944), was translated and used as testimony in the Nuremberg trials. After the publication of his work For a Right Cause (formerly named Stalingrad) in 1952, he was savagely criticized.

A fresh wave of anti-Semitic purges was about to commence, and Grossman would very likely have been arrested if Stalin hadn't died in March Read More chevron_right

Vasily Semyonovich Grossman was born in Berdichev, Ukraine, on December 12, 1905, in a town with one of Europe's largest Jewish communities. In 1934, he released In the Town of Berdichev, a short tale that drew praise from writers as different as Maksim Gorky, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Isaak Babel, as well as Glyukauf, a novel about the Donbass miners' lives. Grossman worked as a correspondent for the army newspaper Red Star throughout World War II, covering practically all of the major engagements from the defense of Moscow until the fall of Berlin. One of the earliest pieces in any language concerning a Nazi execution camp, The Horror of Treblinka (late 1944), was translated and used as testimony in the Nuremberg trials. After the publication of his work For a Right Cause (formerly named Stalingrad) in 1952, he was savagely criticized.

A fresh wave of anti-Semitic purges was about to commence, and Grossman would very likely have been arrested if Stalin hadn't died in March 1953. While experiencing popular success, Grossman worked on his two masterpieces, Life and Destiny and Everything Flows, neither of which would be published in Russia until the late 1980s. In February 1961, the KGB seized the manuscript for Life and Fate. Grossman, on the other hand, was able to work on Everything Flows until his final days in the hospital, a work far more critical of Soviet society than Life and Destiny.

On the eve of the twenty-third anniversary of the Berdichev massacre, in which his mother had died, he died on September 14, 1964. The series Everyman's Poetry features Robert Chandler's translations of Sappho and Guillaume Apollinaire. Vasily Grossman's Life and Destiny, Leskov's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and Aleksander Pushkin's Dubrovsky and The Captain's Daughter are among his Russian adaptations. He has co-translated many works of Andrey Platonov with his wife, Elizabeth, and other partners.

Soul, for example, was named best translation of the year from a Slavonic language by the AATSEEL (American Association of Teachers of Slavonic and East European Languages) in 2004; it was also a finalist for the 2005 Rossica Translation Award and the Weidenfeld European Translation Prize. Robert Chandler's translation of Hamid Ismailov's The Railway earned the AATSEEL prize in 2007, and the jury of the 2007 Rossica Translation Prize gave it a special mention. Robert Chandler is the author of a biography of Alexander Pushkin and the editor of Russian Short Tales from Pushkin to Buida. Platonov's Soul and Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter were both co-translated by Elizabeth Chandler.

Mavis Gallant, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Lethem, Rod Liddle, and Ali Smith are among the authors whose works Anna Aslanyan has translated into Russian. She is a BBC Russian Service contributor.