CANCELED Beyond the Russian Classics: Marian Schwartz
Green Apple Books on the Park | 1231 9th Avenue | San Francisco, CA
Due to poor air quality– the Air Quality Index (AQI) in the Bay Area is projected to be “very unhealthy”– our event with Marian Schwartz to discuss Horsemen of the Sands has been canceled.
Horsemen of the Sands (Archipelago Books) contains two novellas: The Storm, which takes place in a Soviet elementary school, and Horsemen of the Sands, a mystical tale about the real-life warlord R.F. Ungern-Shternberg, who fought both the Chinese and the Bolsheviks for control of Mongolia during the Russian Civil War, which lasted six years after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.
In The Storm, a bombastic teacher lectures his young students on traffic accidents and family separation, unwittingly stirring an emotional crisis. A lost wallet, an office fling, an upset stomach—the minutiae of life unveil the private tragedies at the heart of a school community.
Horsemen of the Sands takes place a world away. An old herdsman entrances a young tank commander with the legend of Baron Ungern, the real-life White Russian officer who conquered Mongolia. A foggy epic unfolds, a tale of faith and revenge centering on a mysterious amulet, said to make the wearer invincible. From the dim of the classroom to the vast Mongolian steppe, Leonid Yuzefovich’s masterful novellas The Storm and Horsemen of the Sands drill straight to the core of human emotion. These Russian parables illuminate the fears, passions, and ambitions beneath the grandest acts and the tiniest gestures.
Marian Schwartz is a prize-winning translator of Russian literature. She is the principal translator of the works of Nina Berberova and translated The Last Tsar, by Edvard Radzinsky, as well as classics by Mikhail Bulgakov, Ivan Goncharov, Yuri Olesha, and Mikhail Lermontov. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowships and is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association.
Sabrina Jaszi is a literary translator based in Alameda, CA, working from Uzbek, Ukrainian, and Russian. Her published translations include the works of Salomat Vafo, Suhbat Aflatuni, O‘tkir Hoshimov, Reed Grachev, Nadezhda Teffi, and Alisa Ganieva. Her co-translation with Roman Ivashkiv of Andriy Sodomora’s The Tears and Smiles of Things (Academic Studies Press) received the American Association for Ukrainian Studies’ Best Translation Prize for 2023–24. She is also a writer with stories and essays published in StoryQuarterly, J Journal, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of Turkoslavia, a collective and journal devoted to Turkic and Slavic literature in translation. To learn more, visit Turkoslavia.com.