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Air Raid by Polina Barskova

2022; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 96; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2022.0071

1945-8134

Sibelan Forrester,

Sociopolitical Dynamics in Russia

Reviewed by: Air Raid by Polina Barskova Sibelan Forrester Polina Barskova Air Raid Trans. Valzhyna Mort. Brooklyn. Ugly Duckling Presse. 2021. 153 pages. POLINA BARSKOVA, poet and professor, is the author of twelve books of poetry in Russian and two books of prose, with three books (or parts of books) published in English translation before this one—a selection of her work from different years. Like all books from Ugly Duckling Presse, where it is number 47 in the Eastern European Poets Series, Air Raid is handsomely produced on good paper and feels nice in the hand. Best of all, it is a bilingual edition with facing-page translations into English by another important poet, Valzhyna Mort, who now lives and works in the US (as does Barskova). The book has many things to offer fans of poetry (in Russian and/or English), historians of Russia (especially the Stalinist repressions, the Holocaust, and World War II—which for the USSR began in 1941 and is called the Great Patriotic War), and anyone who practices, studies, or just appreciates translation. The term “air raid” is so familiar that we probably don’t notice that it’s close to being a palindrome. The Russian expression is Воздушная тревога—literally, “air alarm”—and the schematic searchlights on the cover might evoke their aural companions, the siren. History is a vital element of this collection, with the strands of repression/Gulag, Holocaust, and the Siege of Leningrad twining through several of the poems or cycles of poems. (The table of contents lists twenty items, but some include multiple sections or poems.) The siege is less well known in the West than other elements of Soviet history—but cut to me for a moment, an undergraduate student in the library decades ago, weeping over Harrison Salisbury’s The 900 Days. For Barskova the study of life and writing during the siege has been a significant scholarly project (see her edited collection Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad, also from Ugly Duckling), reading letters and manuscripts in archives, and as we see here reacting with her own poems. Barskova was herself born in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, and the city’s history is her heritage. She expertly writes both metrical, rhyming verse (which feels particularly suitable to the topic of World War II and to children’s verse, with a real snap in a lot of the lines); in more recent years, she has moved more into free verse. No one would call it dissident verse, but it is all deeply subversive, refusing to adhere to the officially cultivated tradition of treating the Soviet war effort with solemn pomposity. The characters who appear in the poems, many of them Leningrad writers and cultural figures who suffered terribly during the siege, are also presented without numbing reverence: they are complex, fully rounded human beings with flaws, idiosyncrasies, and misdeeds, and even the most pitiable of them (the ungifted translator Zinaida C.) receives sympathy in a poem where the contents of her apartment are cataloged after her death, presumably somewhere in a snowbank. The whole book’s tragic cast and refusal to idealize anyone (including the poetic speaker herself) can lead to weird details. The titular cycle “Air Raid” re-creates letters between a daughter who has been evacuated to (relative) safety, her father arrested and now in a gulag, and her grandmother, who has stayed behind in Leningrad and will soon die there. In one the father asks his rather young daughter to send him a package with dog fat, which he realizes will force her to catch, kill, and butcher the dog, plus salt and lightly smoke the extracted fat: a monstrous request! In another, the grandmother’s letter-as-poem ends with the line, “What happiness that right now you are not with me”—another monstrous thought, though understandable as she can at least rejoice in her granddaughter’s safety. The book’s second section moves (mostly) closer to the present, though the past still greatly informs it. These poems draw on the poet’s own life or describe a series of “romantic” walks through American graveyards (some with graves of Russian...