David Magarshack was a Latvian-born author, translator and biographer of Russian authors. Born in Riga (then part of Russia), he moved to Britain in 1920 and became naturalized in 1931. After graduating from University College, London, in English Language and Literature, he worked in Fleet Street and wrote a number of novels during the late 1930s. He was the biographer of Stanislavsky (1951, reprinted 1986), Chekhov (1952, reprinted 1980), Turgenev (1954), Gogol (1957), Dostoevsky (1962), Pushkin (1967), and is best remembered for his translations of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekov and Gogol. His extensive translations of Dostoevsky include The Devils (1954), The Idiot (1955) and The Brothers Karamazov (1958) for Penguin Classics, all of which are still in print today. He died in 1977.