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SUMMARY:Sense of Place lecture series: "Representations of the Besieged Le
 ningrad (1941—44)" - Polina Barskova (Hampshire College)
DTSTART:20160114T173000Z
DTEND:20160114T190000Z
UID:TALK60817@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:21355
DESCRIPTION:Abstract: This talk introduces the audience to the voluminous 
 corpus of the urban images created during the Nazi Siege of Leningrad—bo
 th textual and visual.  During the Siege\, the city and its people\, surro
 unded by the military forces of Nazi Germany\, suffered 872 days of famine
 \, cold\, and darkness\, and lost around 1\,000\,000 to hunger.  The Siege
  experience and its representations are unique. Unlike victims of other tw
 entieth-century political and social disasters such as the Soviet Gulag an
 d the Nazi Holocaust\, the inhabitants of Leningrad were for the most part
  neither displaced nor instantly robbed of their familiar urban environmen
 t. Their ties with the city were broken but not demolished\; they were doo
 med to continued contact with Leningrad while it underwent gradual but gra
 ve changes. My study asks how people subjected to catastrophic events rela
 te to their cultural and physical environment: the inhabitants of Leningra
 d lost virtually everything in the disaster except their place\, and this 
 place served them as an inexhaustible source of contemplation and writing.
  Readers of Siege urban representations confront a challenge: they have to
  untangle the many layers and agendas of these works\, as they attempt to 
 perceive representations of the shattered city as a site of unique complex
 ity.\n\nBio: Polina Barskova was born in Leningrad in 1976\, began writing
  poetry at the age of eight and since then during many years had been atte
 nding studio (“kruzhok”) for writing children led by poet Viacheslav L
 eikin. She published her first book of poetry “Christmas” in 1991.  Cu
 rrently\, her eighth book of poetry “Master of the Garden” is in print
  in St. Petersburg. Barskova received her BA from St. Petersburg State Uni
 versity in Classics for a diploma on Catullus\, and her MA and PhD from th
 e University of California at Berkeley where she arrived in 1998 and studi
 ed cultural history of Petrograd-Leningrad. Her scholarly publications inc
 lude articles on Nabokov\, Bakhtin brothers\, early Soviet film\, and\, la
 tely\, on culture of the besieged Leningrad. Now Barskova lives in Amherst
  (MA) with her daughter Frosia where she is teaching Russian literature at
  Hampshire College\, working on a project entitled "The Ruin Screams: Cult
 ure in the Besieged Leningrad (1941-44)\," and on new books of her poetry 
 and prose both in Russian and in English translation. At the end of 2015 B
 arskova received Andrey Bely Prize for her book of prose “Living Picture
 s”
LOCATION:Umney Theatre\, Robinson College\, Cambridge
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