Polina Barskova

Broschiertes Buch

Living Pictures

Beschreibung

"The prolonged German siege of Leningrad during the Second World War was among the most destructive sieges in history, leading to mass starvation and well over a million deaths. The contemporary Russian poet and scholar Polina Barskova, born in Leningrad, has done extensive research on the siege in archives in St. Petersburg, research that has borne fruit in Living Pictures, an extraordinary dramatization of life under the most extreme of circumstances. In the remarkable title piece of the collection, set in the winter of 1941 and 1942, Mosej and Antonina, a young couple who work in the Hermitage, refuse to take shelter underground, remaining instead in the grand galleries of the palatial museum. Their experience begins almost as a lark, as they recite poetry, perform tableaux vivants based on Rembrandt paintings, and retell the story of the Snow Queen. Inevitably, however, cold and hunger take over, and as they do the two characters fall silent, or rather, their imagined voices are replaced by documented voices of the siege, as if the reader had tuned into a ghostly radio channel. Living Pictures is an uncanny and poignant masterpiece in which Barskova brilliantly explores the vertiginous divide between individual suffering and recorded history"--

Autor

Polina Barskova published her debut when she was only eight years old. She has lived in the United States since 1998. She studied classical philology in St. Petersburg and Slavic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she currently teaches. Apart from her extensive poetic work—eight volumes of poetry published since 1991—she dedicates her work as a literary scholar and editor to the poets of the siege of Leningrad. Catherine Ciepiela is a professor of Russian at Amherst College and translator of Russian literature. She is the author of The Same Solitude, a nonfiction work about the epistolary romance between Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak, which received the AATSEEL Prize for Best Book of Literary/Cultural Criticism in 2007 and was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice. Eugene Ostashevsky is the author of the poetry collections The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza and Iterature, both published by Ugly Duckling Presse. He is the editor of OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism, the first collection of writings by Vvedensky and friends in English translation. Ostashevsky teaches in the liberal studies program at New York University.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: New York Review of Books
• Seitenzahl: 192
• Erscheinungstermin: 6. September 2022
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 201mm x 124mm x 15mm
• Gewicht: 204g
• ISBN-13: 9781681376592
• ISBN-10: 1681376598
• Artikelnr.: 62072317