Read my review in LitHub.

I review new releases by contemporary Russian writer Polina Barskova (both translated into English):

The State Hermitage Museum, gem of Saint Petersburg, pride of imperial and Soviet Russia. Founded by Catherine the Great, Russia’s longest ruling woman, and containing one of—if not the—largest art collections in the world. Egyptian antiquities, Italian renaissance, Dutch masters, impressionists, cubists, the canon of the art world housed in six buildings, including the Winter Palace, a 460-room mansion built for Catherine herself.

Now imagine the Hermitage in the context of forty degrees below zero, no electricity, no running water, frozen and bursting sewage pipes, air raids and bombings, anti-aircraft guns, shelling, destroyed buildings, rats, starvation in the hundreds of thousands.

Imagine the grandiose halls hung with empty frames: valuable art shipped away for protection while Hermitage staff hide in the basement next to the frozen corpses of their colleagues. Imagine curators and art historians giving tours to sailors, describing absent paintings from memory in exchange for scraps of charred bread. Imagine skin papery from thirst, gums rotting from scurvy and dystrophy.

A scene so surreal it can only be real. This was the Siege of Leningrad, September 1941 to January 1944, when Nazi Germany blockaded the city and kept it in a state of total deprivation, aided by Soviet negligence and resource-hoarding.

The siege contains within its 872-day duration all the cruelties and ironies of Soviet life. For contemporary Russian writer, scholar, and poet Polina Barskova, this particular history symbolizes Soviet mythology, deceit, and hollow grandeur—and the traumatic tension between public and private memory.

Published 9/16/22

Read my review in LitHub.