On Thursday, December 5 at 8:00 pm two leading Russian poets, Polina Barskova and Anna Glazova, will read from their work in Russian and in English translation. Their poetry appears together in the recent three-poet anthology RELOCATIONS, published by Zephyr Press and edited by Catherine Ciepiela. The reading will take place in Pruyne Auditorium, on the first floor of Fayerweather on the Amherst College campus. The event is sponsored by Amherst College's Creative Writing Program.
ABOUT THE POETS:
Polina Barskova began publishing her poetry at age nine and is the author of eight books of poems that have garnered national awards in Russia. Two collections of her poetry in English translations appeared recently: This Lamentable City (Tupelo Press, 2010) and The Zoo in Winter (Melville House Press, 2011). She is also a published scholar with degrees in classical literature (from St. Petersburg University) and Slavic languages and literatures (UC Berkeley). Her research concerns Soviet Russian literature of the 30s, and she has forthcoming books on cultural life during the siege of Leningrad. She currently teaches Russian literature at Hampshire College and lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Anna Glazova is a poet, translator and scholar in German Studies and Comparative Literature with a PhD from Northwestern University. She is the author of three books of poems, and just won this year's Andrey Bely prize for her latest, Dlia zemleroiki. She has translated into Russian books by Robert Walser,Unica Zürn and Ladislav Klima; her translations of Paul Celan’s poetry recently appeared (Govori i ty, Ayluros, 2012). A volume of her poems in translations by Anna Khasin, Twice under the Sun, has appeared with Shearsman Books (London, 2008). Her scholarship has focused on the work of Paul Celan and Osip Mandelstam. She works and resides in Hamburg, Germany and the United States.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The fall of the Soviet Union released creative energies that have shaped a new Russian poetry. Polina Barskova, Anna Glazova and Maria Stepanova belong to the generation that has led this epochal transformation. Born in the 1970s, they are old enough to have visceral memories of Soviet life but young enough to move adeptly with the new influences, new media and new choices introduced in the post-Soviet era. Together they represent a contemporary Russian culture that reaches beyond national borders: Barskova has emigrated to the US, Glazova is based in Germany and Stepanova is a lifelong Muscovite.
Their generation is also the last one raised on Russian modernism, which these poets are renovating from within. While they possess the modernists’ erudition, they decline to worship high culture. They have no patience for modernist mythologies of the poet. They have moved beyond the modernists’ death-match with totalitarianism to think critically about politics and culture -- Barskova as an historian of Petersburg, Glazova as a theorist and translator of Central European writing, and Stepanova as the editor of an independent online journal. They mistrust lyric emotion, confidently leaving behind Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova as poets of female desire while remaining conscious of themselves as writing women. As this gathering of these poets’ work signals, women are more influential in Russian poetry than ever before.