David Magarshack

David Magarshack (; 23 December 1899 – 26 October 1977) was a British translator and biographer of Russian authors, best remembered for his translations of Dostoevsky and Nikolai Gogol.

Biography Magarshack was born in Riga, in present-day Latvia, at the time part of the Russian Empire. In 1920, he moved to the United Kingdom in order to study.

After graduating from University College London with a degree in English Language and Literature in 1924, Magarshack attempted to make a career out of journalism, and then out of writing crime fiction, neither of which was successful. He gained British citizenship by naturalisation in 1931.

He married Elsie Pedley and they had two daughters and two sons.

Translations and other writings In early 1949, Magarshack was approached by E. V. Rieu, the editor of the Penguin Classics series, in order to translate Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Magarshack accepted the job for an advance of £200 and royalties of seven-and-a-half per cent. Over the next 13 years, Magarshack went on to become one of the most prolific contributors to the Classics series. His last translation for the series, Chekhov's Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories, was published in 1964, after which Magarshack ceased translation for the series due to the new series editor's preference for more scholarly translations.

Magarshack's translation work was assisted by his wife Elsie, a Yorkshire-born, Cambridge-graduate of English. Magarshack's daughter, Stella, has stated that Elsie helped Magarshack with all his translations and proofreading work.

Magarshack wrote a series of biographies of Russian writers. His biography of Dostoyevsky was savagely critiqued by Joseph Frank who wrote: "It is difficult to give any connected account of Mr. Magarshack’s interpretation of Dostoevsky because, to tell the truth, no such interpretation exists".

Magarshack continued to translate both contemporary and classic Russian literature. In addition, he wrote extensively on translation theory, though most of this work would remain unpublished.

Selected works A more complete list of Magarshack's work can be found in Appendix 2 of McAteer (2017).

Translations Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1951). The Seagull, Anton Chekhov (1952). The Devils, Dostoevsky (1953, see Demons). Oblomov, Ivan Goncharov (1954). The Idiot, Dostoevsky (1955). The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky (1958). Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol (1961). Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy (1961).

Biographies Stanislavskii, a Life (1950). Chekhov, a Life (1952). Turgenev, a Life (1954). Chekhov, The Dramatist (1955). Gogol, a Life (1957). Dostoyevsky (1962). Pushkin: a Biography (1967).

Fiction Big Ben Strikes Eleven, A Murder Story for Grown-Up People (1934). Death Cuts a Caper (1935). Three Dead (1936).