ABSTRACT
Dr Robert Baldick features for only a short period in the Russian section of the Penguin Classics archive as he died unexpectedly of a cerebral tumour on 24 April 1972 at the age of forty-five. Radice, by contrast, enjoyed a long career as the Penguin Classics editor, a role which she found herself performing on her own after Baldick's death and that of his successor, C. A. Jones, in 1974. With the departure of the earliest cohort of translators – either voluntarily, as appears to have been the case with Gardiner, or through forced ejection (Elisaveta Fen, Rosemary Edmonds, and David Magarshack) – Penguin commissioned a new set of freelancers. Forty years on from the first Penguin Russian Classics translations, some were now deemed ready for re-translation. In addition to commissioning re-translations, Penguin embarked on introducing contemporary Russian literature in its new Penguin Twentieth Century Classics series.
