Living Pictures

Growing up in Leningrad, Polina Barskova saw no trace of the estimated million people who died in the city during the Nazi blockade of 1941-44. As one of Russia's most admired and controversial contemporary writers, she has repeatedly returned to the archive of texts still being recovered from the siege, finding creative ways to commemorate these ghosts from her home city's past.A chorus of their voices and stories appears in Living Pictures, a breathtakingly inventive literary collage of memoir, archival material and fiction. With blazing immediacy and wit, Barskova delves into traumas historical and personal, writing of memories from a Soviet childhood, her foundational relationships and losses, and a life spent excavating vital fragments from under Leningrad's official history. Ending with a stunning chamber drama about two real people who died while sheltering in the Hermitage Museum during the siege, this is a rich, polyphonic work of living history.



Polina Barskova, born in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) in 1976, is one of the most celebrated contemporary Russian writers. She currently teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to her extensive poetic oeuvre, she is a literary scholar and editor dedicated to the poets of the Leningrad blockade. Living Pictures is her first volume of prose. Catherine Ciepiela is professor of Russian at Amherst College, and a 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. Eugene Ostashevsky is a professor, poet and translator. he is the author of The Feeling Sonnets and The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi and the translator of Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets, also available from Pushkin Press.