Wednesday 29 March, 17:30–18:30 followed by a drinks reception in the IASH Seminar Room, Hope Park Square
SPQR in the USSR: Elena Shvarts’s Classical Antiquity (Legenda 2022) by Dr Georgina Barker
Since her rise to notoriety among the dissident artists of the 1970s Leningrad underground, Elena Shvarts (1948-2010) has earned a place in the canon of great Russian poets for the originality, riotousness, beauty, and deceptive erudition of her poetry. Many of Shvarts’s greatest poems were inspired by classical antiquity – the literature, myth, and history of ancient Rome and Greece. Her antiquity is never static: it evolves in response to the seismic changes that Russia underwent during her lifetime. In this in-depth study, Georgina Barker follows Shvarts’ transcendental and escapist encounters with classical antiquity from wild youth to defiant old age, and discovers Shvarts shaping antiquity to fit herself. An appendix of Barker’s translations of Shvarts’ classical poems and archival transcriptions of previously unpublished poems gives anglophone and russophone readers alike unprecedented access to Elena Shvarts’ classical antiquity.
Dr Georgina Barker is Leverhulme Early-Career Fellow in the Department of Greek and Latin at University College London, with her project Classical ‘Lesbians’ in the Russian Imagination. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh in 2018. Her research explores Russian responses to ancient Greek and Roman history, literature, and culture. She is especially interested in how classical antiquity shapes contemporary Russian society – and vice versa. At IASH she researched Elena Shvarts’ reception of Princess Dashkova, the first woman Director of the Russian Academy of Science, whom Edinburgh hosted between 1776 and 1782. Shvarts’ poem ‘Princess Dashkova’s Old Age’ gives an unconventional view of the second most prominent woman of the Russian Enlightenment; it was staged as part of the verbatim play Princess Dashkova, the Woman Who Shook the World at St Cecilia’s Hall in 2018.
Free registration at https://spqrintheussr.eventbrite.co.uk