Living Pictures

Polina Barksova, born in Leningrad in 1976, was a literary wunderkind and published her debut when she was only eight years old. She has lived in the US since 1998, where she studied Classical Philology in Saint Petersburg, Slavistics at Berkeley. She currently teaches at Hampshire College in Amherst. Apart from her extensive poetic work -- eight volumes of poetry published since 1991 -- she dedicates her work as a literary scholar and editor to the poets of the siege of Leningrad.

Catherine Ciepela is a professor of Russian at Amherst College and translator of Russian literature. She is the author of The Same Solitude, a nonfiction work about the epistolary romance between Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak, which received the AATSEEL award for Best Book of Literary/Cultural Criticism in 2007, and a Choice award for Outstanding Academic Title