Elena Schwarz: To Dance

Elena Schwartz writes poems that mix the fervour of Dostoevsky with the formal clarity and freedom of Mikhail Kuzmin. She shares the religious quest of the former and the mystical stylizations of the latter. She brings the city of Petersburg to life much as they did, but also sets her poems in a timeless, boundless arena where values are transcendent, aspirations infinite. Her poems can exude the polyphonic characterizations of Dostoevsky, and her long sequence of Lavinia poems from the 1980s has the feel of a novel.

The intensity of her short lyrics and her longer narrative poems is Dostoevskian, as well. In the poetic tradition, Tsvetaeva or Mayakovsky are closer models for her sense of drama and romance. Other poets have attributes she sometimes displays—Khlebnikov's surreal juxtapositions, Zabolotsky's urban clangour—but Schwarz inevitably sounds like none of these predecessors, despite all the ways that she lovingly and compellingly speaks from within the traditions they established.

She is among the best-known poets of contemporary Russia, a poet who performed her work in the Leningrad underground in the 1960s and 1970s and emerged to a wider audience in the glasnost and post-Soviet eras. Twelve volumes of her poetry have appeared in Russian, and a two-volume set is in preparation as of this writing. She has been honoured with the Andrei Belyi (1987) and Petersburg Northern Palmyra (1999) prizes, among others. Schwarz continues to flourish, writing poetry and prose at an impressive rate, and, more than thirty years into her career, she is still growing as a writer in interesting and unpredictable ways.

The spiritual qualities of her work continue to deepen. She has never been content with traditional notions of the soul, still less with poetry's ideas about the self. In the lyric and narrative poems, she has asked repeatedly what makes a soul, whether it can be known. She has been unwilling to oppose the spirituality of the soul to the physicality of the body. She wants to make the soul visible, to give it the kind of substance and materiality that confirms its existence.

Written for the Prague Writers’ Festival by Stephanie Sandier