Author(s): Polina Barskova

Novel | Russia | Translated fiction | Short Stories

Two lovers remain in a gallery of the Hermitage, refusing to shelter underground while Leningrad is under siege. Freezing and gnawed by hunger, they recite poems and stories to pass the time, re-enacting the paintings that are being evacuated from the museum. As their voices and bodies begin to fail and fragment, their conversation is interspersed with sections from a diary - a real document from a person who died during the blockade. This is the centrepiece of Living Pictures, Polina Barskova's genre-defying collection of fiction that reckons with the history and aftermath of the siege of Leningrad. Drawing on archival material and refracting it through fiction, Barskova draws arresting, fearless portraits of the lives caught up in the blockade. A work of stunning inventiveness and richly poetic language, Living Pictures is a dazzling collage of a city and a culture in crisis.

 'A precise, tremendous and beautiful book' - Maria Stepanova, author of In Memory of Memory

'Highly poetic... Polina Barskova's prose elegantly combines all genres into a new narrative form' - WDR 3

'Enchanting experimentation with prose' - Die Welt

Author Biography: Polina Barskova, born in Leningrad in 1976, was a literary prodigy and made her debut at the age of eight. She studied Classical Philology in Saint Petersburg, Slavic Studies in Berkeley and teaches at Hampshire College in Amherst. In addition to her extensive poetic oeuvre - eight volumes since 1991 - she is a literary scholar and editor dedicated to the poets of the Leningrad blockade. Living Pictures is her first volume of prose and was awarded the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize.