Poetikvorlesung – Polina Barskova: „Calliope and Clio as Co-Authors“

The DFG Center for Advanced Studies „Russian-Language Poetry in Transition“ (FOR 2603) cordially invites you to a lecture with Polina Barskova streamed live via Zoom. Please register by e-mail with our coordinator Katja Baharova (baharova@uni-trier.de) no later than April 27th, 2021, to receive the stream’s access data.

Polina Barskova: Calliope and Clio as Co-Authors: History as Method, Material, and Challenge in Contemporary Russian Poetry (Elena Mikhailik, Igor‘ Bulatovsky, Ilya Kukulin)

This paper will explore various approaches to history writing practiced by Russophone poets today; the main foci will be representations of historical trauma and various exercises in alternative history. Additionally, I will ask: How does interest in historical narrative influence the formation of lyrical subjectivity: who is speaking for History and its agents? What kinds of forms and lyrical genres correspond today with the task of historical representation? The lecture will be in English, with texts in Russian and English.

Polina Barskova is a poet and scholar, author of twelve collections of poems and two books of prose in Russian. She also authored a monograph Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster (2017) and edited three scholarly volumes. Her collection of creative nonfiction, “Living Pictures,” received the Andrey Bely Prize in 2015 and was published in German with Suhrkamp Verlag and is forthcoming in English with NYRB. She edited the Leningrad Siege poetry anthology Written in the Dark (UDP) and has four collections of poetry published in English translation: This Lamentable City (Tupelo Press), The Zoo in Winter (Melville House), Relocations (Zephyr Press), and Air Raid (forthcoming with Ugly Duckling Press). She has taught at Hampshire College, Amherst College, and Smith College. In 2021, she will be teaching Russian Literature at the University of California at Berkeley.