Living Pictures
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- 8,49 €
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- 8,49 €
Description de l’éditeur
<p>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.</p>
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Barskova (This Lamentable City) delivers a haunting and magnificent debut fiction collection rooted in Leningrad. Drawing on her own experiences as a Leningrad-born immigrant and secret diaries and journals kept by Leningraders, she juxtaposes their memories with suppositions about them, memorializing the WWII siege of the city and its aftermath in emotionally acute prose. "The Forgiver" focuses on Dmitry Maximov, a literature professor whose poems could only be published abroad, while "Hair Sticks" features Marina Malich, wife of the writer Daniil Kharms, who fled the U.S.S.R. for Germany and Venezuela after the Leningrad blockade. Interspersed with these partly historical, partly imagined accounts of the blockade's survivors are stories of Barskova's own Leningrad childhood, painful love affairs, and adulthood in the U.S. "A Gallery" narrates a naturalization ceremony in Lowell, Mass., and "Dona Flor and Her Grandmother" profiles a grandmother who tried to teach the narrator "the secrets of ruling the feckless male heart," not knowing that the boyfriend Barskova was mourning hadn't left her but was killed in a car accident. This beautiful attempt to reconstruct the lives of the lost, blended with an account of a new life built from the rubble, deserves a wide readership.
