Event date:
Wednesday 26 September to Thursday 27 September
Time:
13:00
Location:
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, 2 Hope Park Square
Dr Georgina Barker: The Unheroines of Elena Shvarts
The poetry of Elena Shvarts is full of riotous, rapturous, repellent female figures. Not conventional ideal heroines, but unconventional unideal ‘unheroines’. My work-in-progress talk will bring together four of these unheroines: Princess Dashkova, Aphrodite, Svalka (Dump), and Kinfiia. I will explore how Shvarts used these unheroines – in all their ugly beauty – to reflect aspects of herself: her personality, her daily life in Russia, her gender and sexuality, her status as a poet. Counterposing her writing of unheroines with her wish to escape byt (‘everyday life’) through her poetry, I will ask: why was Shvarts so drawn to the unheroic?