Elena Schwarz: Between Song and Prayer

Miro Procházka: What is so remarkable about your birthplace?

Elena Schwarz: St. Petersburg is a city where you cannot live without noticing where you are living. In Moscow, yes, it is possible—in St. Petersburg it is unthinkable. My parents lived in St. Petersburg and that’s where I was born. St. Petersburg is unique—exceptional, even without its magic. In my eyes, St. Petersburg was always a catastrophic city. I was born after the war when everything and everybody was recovering from the siege. My mother lived through the entire siege. I recall endless stories—remember the cripples in the streets. This was my childhood, and one of my first emotions was trauma. I became acutely aware of where I lived—those beautiful palaces stand on human bones—the foundation of St. Petersburg drowns in blood.

MP: In Moscow, poet-conceptualists are being heard—literary post-modernism is propagated. In comparison, St. Petersburg appears as an oasis of tradition, clinging to classicism.

ES: Moscow is full of conceptualists, but I don’t agree with the common opinion that St. Petersburg’s muse has a classical face. It is said that St. Petersburg is the city of Anna Akhmatova—but it equally belongs to Mayakovsky. My poetry doesn’t belong to the classical tradition, because in St. Petersburg poetry evolves thanks to the creative continuity of local avant-garde experiences. My poetry offers the Russian ear something new—a new melody, a new rhyme. St. Petersburg’s poetry veers to clean music. In Moscow the avant-garde poets are imitators of contemporary west-European poetry—invented elsewhere, without the creative participation of Russian poets. The conceptualism propagated in Moscow is  unoriginal.

MP: In your verses we can feel the ashes of Auschwitz. To quote Adorno, is poetry still possible?

ES: Poetry is always possible. When I’m writing about Auschwitz, I retrace Hitler’s and Stalin’s concentration camps—submit to the siege of Leningrad.  I’m praying for a world that is ending—heading   for self-destruction at a terrifying pace. We should rephrase Adorno’s question: “Is poetry possible before the end of the world—or even during its end?” As long as humanity exists—there will be poetry.

MP: Why did religion enter your work when you grew up in a godless country?

ES: Our generation adopted religious beliefs rather spontaneously. Returning to Christianity demonstrated our political insurrection. In the sixties, it was fashionable to reject totalitarianism by attending church. Poetry brought me to Christianity—God derived from my verses. Nowadays, I often recall Dostoyevsky’s pronouncement: “If I had to choose from between Jesus Christ and Truth, I would choose Jesus.”

Translated from Czech by Jan Kocián