#Blissful spirits license
Why, after all, should their journey across the Lethe have to be one-way only? In facing her “guilty anguish” at the archive, Barskova is no longer writing as a scholar: the license of fiction gives her a greater freedom to feel and to use reverie (or free association, if you like) to steer her way around complex subjects, going way beyond the limits of academic prose. “Does that then make me Charon?” she asks herself, as if startled by this idea of transporting the souls of the dead back from the shores of non-being, like the mythic ferryman.
“No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten” - no one can be helped, and everyone is forgotten. The melancholy - the languor - the charm of the archive: the sensation of working a brainteaser, a mosaic, as though all these voices could make a single voice and yield a single meaning, and you could surface from this fog in which there is no past, no future, only guilty anguish. In “The Forgiver,” a story contemplating survivors and survivorship, she reflects on what it’s like to rewrite the history of an event most people would believe well-understood and already too much written about: The blockade is “nowhere and everywhere, like a riddle in a folktale,” Barskova writes. Growing up in Leningrad decades after the event, Barskova sensed the blockade’s continued presence, even though it was “nowhere to be found.” Leningrad’s (and later Petersburg’s) public memorials have reflected almost no cognizance of the horror that visited the city in the 900 days of the siege. As a scholar of the Leningrad blockade, she used archival documents and eyewitness testimonies to assemble a mosaic of the calamity that took place in her home city when it came under German siege in 1941–1944.
#Blissful spirits professional
She is also a free spirit who has found a professional use for her wanderings in research and teaching. Polina Barskova is a poet and literary historian. Take away the memory of what has been and vanished, and life itself - the “real” life - is reduced to a mere subplot.Įven the title of this book works as a clue, alerting us to watch for double plots and to read between the lines, Living Pictures being another phrase for the old-fashioned game of “charades.” Players in the game try to hint at something by arranging themselves into scenes, challenging others to guess the meaning of their poses and gestures. It is the place where Barskova grew up and absorbed a conviction that pervades her writing: that life everywhere is haunted by absences. “It’s not the urge to change places but the urge to change times that overpowers us,” writes Polina Barskova about the motives that set a traveler on the road, in spite of everything that should make modern travel intolerable: “the airport searches and disrobings,” the nightmare of “joining the herd.” Most of the stories gathered in this volume (and masterfully translated into English by Catherine Ciepiela) involve travel, the destinations ranging from Siberia to San Francisco still, the center of the author’s world is firmly St. Anna Razumnaya discusses Polina Barskova’s new book and what makes it such a superbly satisfying read. Set in places as diverse as San Francisco, small-town Massachusetts, Siberia, and (of course) Leningrad–Petersburg, these stories come forward as searchingly intimate and by turns tender, sensuous, macabre, absurd, ambivalent, yet always immensely and movingly vulnerable. Petersburg.” As a poet, she is sensitive to the clash between the intimate lives of real people and their monolithic representations in the so-called “historical memory.” In a recent interview, she described those narratives as an “endless shimmer of untruths, half-truths, and pseudo-truths.” Barskova’s Living Pictures is a collection of stories about learning to see through this shimmering web, which proves to stretch far beyond Russia and its peculiar problems. As a historian, she is conscious of the propaganda aims implicit in each of those names: the Soviet ambitions written into “Leningrad” and the older imperial claims etched into “St. The city’s composite identity, built up over time in layers, cannot, she intimates, be either embraced or disowned piecemeal. When talking about her birth city, the American scholar and Russian writer Polina Barskova prefers to speak of it as “Leningrad–Petersburg.” This is deliberate.
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