Michael Scammell

Michael Scammell (born 1935) is an English author, biographer and translator of Slavic literature.

Education

Michael Scammell was born in Lyndhurst, Hampshire, England, attended Brockenhurst Grammar School, and after two years working as a copy boy for the Southern Daily Echo in Southampton, was drafted into the British army, spending most of his time at the Joint Services School for Linguists in Cambridge and Bodmin, where he was trained as a Russian interpreter. In 1958 he earned a B.A. degree with first class honors in Slavic Studies from the University of Nottingham, and edited the prize-winning student newspaper, The Gongster. Having spent a year teaching English at the University of Ljubljana in the former Yugoslavia, he attended graduate school at Columbia University and later obtained his doctorate in Slavic Studies.

Career

Translations

While in graduate school, Scammell taught Russian Literature at Hunter College and began translating books from Russian. His first translation was a novel, Cities and Years, by the Soviet author, Konstantin Fedin. Having been introduced to Vladimir Nabokov, he translated two of Nabokov's Russian novels into English, The Gift and The Defense,, followed by a translation of Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.