A Leningrad Underworld: Polina Barskova’s Living Pictures, by Sibelan Forrester

A Leningrad Underworld: Polina Barskova’s Living Pictures, by Sibelan Forrester Book Reviews [email protected] Mon, 03/27/2023 - 16:33 Photo by Wilhelm Gunkel / Unsplash What is the role of the past in our psychic universe? What happens to us if we learn only later about terrible things that took place in our streets, our parks, our own families, revealing dark tunnels beneath everything we thought we understood? Questions like these may strike anyone who grew up in the former Soviet Union, with its repressions and labor camps, but they are especially urgent for a poet and scholar born in in Leningrad like Polina Barskova, author of a new collection published by New York Review Books. Living Pictures (2022), translated by Catherine Ciepiela, refers to a game where participants dress up and assume the poses of famous paintings, quite different from charades—a game more familiar to anglophone readers. Born in 1976, Barskova debuted as a poetic prodigy, her first book published when she was nine. She left the Russian Federation at twenty for graduate school, then became a college professor in the United States with a research program focused on writing from the Siege of Leningrad (1941–44). Leningrad has sunk into history, with the city once again called by its original name, St. Petersburg (Sankt Peterburg). With so many personal ties to the place, Barskova is particularly qualified to study the topic and particularly... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'

[ World Literature Today | 2023-03-27 21:33:19 UTC ]

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