Please note: this event will be held exclusively in Russian. All discussion, Q&A, and materials will be in Russian only, and no translation will be provided.

We invite you to a talk with Polina Barskova – poet, writer, and researcher, and a judge of the Pushkin House Book Prize 2025. Polina will present her new prose book, Сибиллы, или Книга о чудесных превращениях (The Sibyls, or The Book of Wondrous Transformations) – a powerful exploration of memory, loss, and transformation.

Blending historical fact with literary content, the novel reimagines the life of Dorothea Merian, an artist who traveled to Russia during the reign of Peter the Great to become the keeper of the Kunstkamera, at the Tsar’s personal invitation. Through the story of Dorothea and her mother, the renowned Sibylla Merian, Barskova evokes the birth of European drawing in Russia and the complex ties between St. Petersburg and Amsterdam, art and myth, mother and daughter. This is a bold and bizarrely beautiful experiment with the novel form – where the narrator’s personal search for language and self is entwined with the forgotten lives of women artists and the transformation of a city into legend.

Polina will also read from her poetry, offering a rare chance to experience her lyrical voice alongside her prose.

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.

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