Biography Polina Barskova

Polina Barskova was born in Leningrad in 1976; began writing poetry at the age of eight, and has spent many years attending studio (“kruzhok”) for writing for children, led by poet Viacheslav Leikin. She began publishing poems in journals at age nine and released her first book of poetry, Christmas, in 1991. She won the Vavilon: All-Russian Competition for Young Writers in 1992 and the Young Poet Prize in 2005. She came to the United States at 20, in order to pursue graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, after having already completed a degree in classical literature at St. Petersburg State University. In 2006, she received her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley.

Polina Barskova’s poetry has won her wide recognition as one of the best poets of her generation: she has been shortlisted for Russian prizes including the Debut and Andrei Bely, and has published numerous collections. Three books of her poetry have appeared in English translation: This Lamentable City, The Zoo in Winter, and Relocations (Zephyr Press, 2013). In their translators’ note for The Zoo in Winter, Boris Dralyuk and David Stromberg describe Barskova’s work and offer context, including this line about their choices for the book, “In selecting the seventy-nine poems in The Zoo in Winter, we wished to present Barskova in all her moods – passionate and analytical, rapturous and cool, profoundly serious and daringly flippant” (Dralyuk and Stromberg, 2011:3).

Her scholarly publications include articles on Nabokov, the Bakhtin brothers, early Soviet film, and the aestheticization of historical trauma, primarily the culture of the Siege of Leningrad (1941–1944). She edited the anthology Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad. Her project presents a collection by five Soviet writers—Gennady Gor, Dmitry Maksimov, Sergey Rudakov, Vladimir Sterligov, and Pavel Zaltsman — that has been unknown to Russian readers for 70 years. As a scholar, Barskova, a professor of Russian literature at Hampshire College, explores the mythologies and slum texts of early Soviet-period writers from her native city, Leningrad-St. Petersburg. Barskova now lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Hampshire College.

Sources

Barskova, Polina. Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad. Edited by P. Barskova, trans. from the Russian by A. Dibble et al. Ugly Duckling, 2017

Barskova, Polina. The Zoo in Winter. Selected Poems. Translated by Boris Dralyuk and David Stromberg. Melville House Press, 2011.