We invite you to an evening of discussion with Polina Barskova, a judge of this year’s Pushkin House Book Prize, on the cultural life of besieged Leningrad, bringing together her perspectives as a scholar of the Siege, as a gifted poet with intimate knowledge of the literary response to the Siege, and as an individual who grew up in Leningrad.
In conversation with Dr Susan Larsen, and focussing primarily on her books Written in the Dark and Living Pictures, Barskova will explore the construction of Siege narratives both in situ and in retrospect, the discoveries and missing pieces in archives, literature as witness and resistance during times of trauma, and cultural memory as a monument.
Living Pictures (New York Review Books, 2022) is a polyphonic work of living history that weaves together memoir, archival material and fiction to explore the legacies of the Siege of Leningrad. Growing up in Leningrad, Polina Barskova saw no trace of the estimated million people who died in the city during the Nazi blockade. Their stories were suppressed or literally hidden away in the archives – and gradually uncovered by Barskova in the process of her scholarly research. Her discoveries are reflected in the chorus of voices in Living Pictures, exploring traumas historical and personal, Barskova’s childhood and formative relationships, the lives and afterlives of cultural figures of besieged Leningrad, and a life spent excavating vital fragments from under Leningrad’s official history. In returning to the archive of texts still being recovered from the Siege, Barskova commemorates these ghosts from her home city’s past and reflects on their legacy for the future generations – including the meaning of the Siege in today’s world.
Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016) presents the poetry of Gennady Gor, Pavel Zaltsman, Dmitry Maksimov, Sergey Rudakov and Vladimir Sterligov, written in 1942 during the most severe winter of the Siege of Leningrad. Through their different artistic styles, the avant-garde poets attempted to convey the depth of suffering and psychological destruction of those living through the Siege. In striking contrast to state-sanctioned “Blockade” poetry in which the heroic citizen triumphs over death, the poems gathered here show weakness, desperation, disease and madness – topics so taboo that the poets’ legacy was intentionally lost to history. Yet this phenomenon of Soviet literature was preserved by the poets’ families and is uncovered in this anthology, rendered by a team of translators and edited by Polina Barskova.
Polina Barskova is a scholar and a poet, author of thirteen collections of poems and three books of prose in Russian. Her collection of creative nonfiction, Living Pictures, received the Andrey Bely Prize in 2015, and was published in English by Pushkin Press (UK) and the New York Review Books (US). She edited the Leningrad Siege poetry anthology Written in the Dark (published by Ugly Duckling Presse) and has four collections of poetry published in English translation: This Lamentable City (Tupelo Press), The Zoo in Winter (Melville House), Relocations (Zephyr Press) and AirRaid (Ugly Duckling Presse). Barskova has also authored a monograph Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, 2016) and multiple edited volumes on the culture of the besieged Leningrad.
Dr Susan Larsen is a Teaching Associate in Slavonic Studies at the Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics, the University of Cambridge. Her research explores issues of gender and national identity in Russian culture from the late 18th century to the present. Her publications include articles on contemporary Russian cinema, pulp fiction for adolescents, Soviet women's magazines, as well as several translations of Russian play and film scripts. She is currently at work on a cultural history of girlhood in Russia, 1764-1917.
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