She studied Russian and Spanish at Harvard as an undergraduate before completing a Master's degree in the Slavic Department at the University of Texas at Austin in 1975.
[4] During this time, she co-translated her first published translation, An Otherworldly Evening by Marina Tsvetaeva, with Russian professor Richard D. Sylvester.
Another editor at Praeger put Schwartz in touch with a newly started publishing company looking for translators.
[5] She continued publishing translations of major Russian authors such as Solomon Volkov's Conversations with Joseph Brodsky, Yury Olesha's Envy, Mikhail Bulgakov's The White Guard, and Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov.
However Schwartz's point, as reviewer Masha Gessen described, was that "Tolstoy's writing is indeed remarkable for its purposeful roughness, the use of repetition, and the obsessive breaking of clichés to force the reader to consider the meaning of each word and phrase".