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Speakers): Polina Barskova (Hampshire College)

This paper will be dedicated to the topic of urban disaster in the works about the Siege of Leningrad (1941-1943), written by Gennadii Gor and Pavel Zal’tsman, and about Babyn Yar, in Marianna Kiyanonska’s recently-published poetry collection, entitled “Бабин Яр. Голосами” (2017). In all these works, the authors aim to reproduce the disaster of war by evoking the voices of victims. This paper’s particular point of interest is how these poets write the cities of death – and how their thematics form their language.
 
Polina Barskova published her first book of poetry, “Christmas,” in 1991; at the moment her tenth book of poetry, “One sunny morning at the urban square,” is in print in Saint Petersburg. Barskova received her BA in Classics from the St. Petersburg State University (writing her thesis on Catullus), and her MA and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, where she arrived in 1998 and studied the cultural history of Petrograd-Leningrad. Now, Barskova lives in Amherst, MA with her daughter, Frosia, where she teaches Russian literature at Hampshire College. She is working on multiple projects dedicated to the culture of the Leningrad Siege, as well as new books of her poetry and prose both in Russian and in English translation. At the end of 2015, Barskova received the Andrey Bely Prize for her book of prose, “Living Pictures”; in 2017, she edited a bilingual anthology of unofficial poetry from the Siege, “Written in the Dark,” which received the AATSEEL Translation Award. In 2017, she also published a monograph entitled “Leningrad Besieged: Aesthetics of the Urban Disaster”.