Relocations: Three Contemporary Russian Women Poets

by Polina Barskova, Anna Glazova, Maria Stepanova

Polina Barskova, Anna Glazova, and Maria Stepanova all were born in the early to mid-1970s and came of age during perestroika. 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 life choices introduced in the post-Soviet era. In distinct ways all three are engaged in the project of renovating Russia's great modernist tradition for a radically different historical situation. They write poems of imaginative daring, pushing recognizable scenarios into the fantastic, the surreal or the speculative, bending form and language to the task. They also display a cerebral firepower boosted by their education in institutions Soviet, European and American, and which they exercise in their chosen professions—Barskova and Glazova are academics, teaching at Hampshire College and Cornell University respectively, and Stepanova is chief editor of the influential online journal Open Space. Barskova, Glazova, and Stepanova read one another attentively and have published reviews of each other's work, a mark of how they perceive themselves as engaged in the same project of "modernizing" Russian poetry. The broad trend in Russian poetry after the collapse of Soviet-era literary paradigms has been dispersal—of hierarchies, of institutions, of poetic models and of poets themselves, many of whom live and work outside the cultural capitals, whether abroad or in the provinces. These poets are moving beyond the Russian modernists' engagement with totalitarianism to address subjects such as the Holocaust and the war in Chechnya, and they are doing so in a fundamentally new mode. "Relocations is a highly enjoyable collection of poetry introducing the English-language world to three incredibly diverse and talented women poets writing in Russian that could be as meaningful to a casual fan of poetry as to a comparative literature scholar. A much-needed, timely, fun, and all-too-relevant read in 2014." —Will Evans, Three Percent

Genres: Poetry

200 pages, Paperback

First published August 13, 2013

About the author

Polina Barskova is an associate professor of Russian Literature at Hampshire College. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of twelve collections of poetry in Russian, including her latest volume of selected poems Solnechnoe utro na ploshchadi (A Sunny Morning on the Square, 2018), and author of a collection of short stories entitled Zhiviye kartiny (Living Pictures, 2014), for which she was awarded the Andrei Belyi Prize (2015). Three collections of her poetry have appeared in English translation: This Lamentable City (2010), Zoo in Winter (2011) and Relocations (2013). She edited the anthology Written In The Dark, named Best Literary Translation into English for 2017 by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages, and of two scholarly works in Russian: a reader on the Siege of Leningrad Blokada: svidetel’stva o leningradskoi blokade (2017) and a collection of conference papers Blokadnye narrativy (2017). Her first English monograph, Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster, was published in 2017.

Reviews

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read to review for Three Percent, interesting combination of writers who are all completely different from each other, two of whom now live in America, one of whom I already knew of because she was an editor for OpenSpace.ru and now is an editor at Colta.ru, two websites I follow(ed). Some really good stuff in here.

Full review coming soon.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good writers and selection of poems.