Elena Shvarts poetry reading at UW-Madison

[Laura Little]

The following event is co-sponsored by University of Wisconsin-Madison's CREECA and Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

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Please join us for a poetry reading by renowned Russian poet Elena Shvarts.

Tuesday, November 6 at 5:00 pm
126 Memorial Library
728 State Street

About the poet: Elena Shvarts is recognized as one of the leading poets writing in Russian today. Born in 1948 in Leningrad, Shvarts started writing poetry at the age of thirteen and was received as something of a wunderkind by readers and writers of the Soviet Union’s officially banned literature, its so-called “second literature.” A prominent participant in the Leningrad intellectual underground, Shvarts moved in the dissident literary and artistic circles that flourished in the 1970s and ‘80s, publishing verse and criticism in the samizdat and tamizdat. The author of over a dozen volumes of verse and the subject of over a hundred scholarly articles and reviews, Shvarts’ reputation continues to grow both at home and abroad. In 2003 her poetry was collected by Petersburg publisher Pushkinskii dom in a two-volume edition for which she was awarded the prestigious Triumph Prize. A Gogol prize followed a year later for the prose collection _Vidimaia storona zhizni_. In January
of this year the Moscow literary journal Znamia, to which Shvarts is a frequent contributor, singled out her “Kitaiskaia igrushka” cycle of verse with one of its annual prizes. _Birdsong on the Seabed_, a Russian-English bilingual edition of her poems, is forthcoming from publisher Bloodaxe Books. Among the more striking characteristics of Elena Shvarts’ verse are the intensity of its existential exploration, its continually shifting rhythms and intonations, the multiplicity of its authorial personae and frames of reference, and its striking and often violent imagery.

Drago Momcilovic
CREECA Events Coordinator
Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia
210 Ingraham Hall
1155 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
Phone:(608) 262-3379
Fax: (608) 890-0267
www.creeca.wisc.edu

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