Living Pictures

They refuse to seek shelter in the cellar and wait it out in the dark, draughty art gallery, defying the cold and the hunger. Mojsej, 25, and Antonina, 37, work at Leningrad’s Hermitage, one of the most beautiful museums of fine arts in the world. In the winter of 1941/42, it becomes their last refuge.

In the beginning, they recite poetry, tell each other the fairy tale of the Snow Queen, re-enact paintings by Rembrandt that are supposed to be evacuated from the museum. When they try to remember a song, their voices fail. Listening into the silence, the repeated calling, ensuring that the other is still there, the conversations between two lovers, reduced to rudimentary fragments, ultimately turn out to be a »documentation of voices« of real people who died during the siege of Leningrad. This focal text of the volume, preceded by ten longer and shorter pieces of prose, is entitled »Living Pictures«. All of them revolve around Saint Petersburg as an imaginary place, even when they are set in Lowell/ Massachusetts, in San Francisco or by a stream in Siberia and deal with childhood, first love or painful losses.

Polina Barskova’s poetic language calls us, through space and time, as witnesses to the scenes and inserts every experience into the larger context of history. By attempting to interweave private recollections and cultural memory, she defies traditional narrative forms – not programmatically but based on an existential experience.

»As narrator and guide ... Barskova makes the unprocessed grief come alive. She spins it into non-narrative and non-linear poems and prose, a pastiche which mimics the very nature of traumatic memory: disassociated and halting.« Tanya Paperny, Literary Hub

»A haunting and magnificent debut fiction collection. ... 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.« Publishers Weekly, starred review

»These fractured poem-stories are composed of disjunctively arranged images, slices of memory both personal and historical, and a shadowy array of citations of varying levels of obscurity and recognizability, creating unique prose tissues that carve out a space for themselves in an ambiguous zone between critical essay, autobiography, poetry, and short fiction. What is unambiguous is their success: They are extraordinarily powerful works, at turns densely evocative and dizzyingly erudite, doing many of the best things that writing can do. Barskova, following the method of her poetry, manages by painstaking technique and sheer force of image to ponder herself considering the Siege and its survivors, drawing from life and art to represent an experience of personal trauma mediated by communication with history.« Jack Rockwell, Full-Stop

»A genre-bending story featuring memoir, art criticism, and the story of two lovers stuck in the Hermitage during the blockade« Matt Janney, Calvert Journal

»The gems within the collection Living Pictures are found in the chapter ›Reaper of Leaves‹, lovingly wicked observations on Leningrad’s literature and its ›third-rate writers hopelessly trying to light a fire under the word.‹« Franz Haas, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»If you engage with Polina Barskova’s venture of [creating] an enchanting experiment with prose, you will experience the continually branching-out contextuality of the arts in living pictures.« Herbert Wiesner, DIE WELT

»When [Barskova] lets Yakov Druskin and his younger brother Michail enter the stage, she manages to create a fascinating portrait of two people on just twelve pages ...« Andreas Platthaus, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»In these often enigmatic, subtly associative texts, numerous figures from Russian/Soviet literary history appear like shadows from the past [...] Other texts dive deep into very personal experience and suffering, throwing spinning lights of thought on memories of love, lust and pain.« Katharina Granzin, taz. die tageszeitung

»If one truly wishes to examine this barbaric time, to enter into its darkness, one needs another, a damaged language for this, must inflict wounds on one's own words in order to then hear the pain from their broken sound.« Michael Wolf, neues deutschland

»Living Pictures is […] a richly woven book on art, artists, the conditions of their mutual pervasion in times of endurance.« Jonis Hartmann, Fixpoetry

»Living Pictures is a highly poetic book about memories of a Soviet childhood and a reinvention in the USA, with interludes of a choir of voices from St. Petersburg. Polina Barskova’s prose elegantly joins all the genres to create a new narrative form.« Christine Hamel, WDR

»The endeavour […] is not exclusively sombre but of meticulous […] precision and concreteness, full of exuberant narrative and stylistic ideas, sometimes full of humour.« Erich Klein, ORF