ZABOLOTSKY POETRY NIGHT: READING AND DISCUSSION

Join us for an engaging evening of poetry reading and discussion featuring the works from Zabolotsky's Columns.

Dmitri Manin will present his outstanding translations from the newly released Columns by Zabolotsky (Arc Publications, 2023). Additionally, Berkeley professors Polina Barskova and Luba Golburt will provide insights into the Oberiuts and avant-garde poetry.

This is a bilingual event in Russian and English.

This event is free with RSVP.

Dmitri Manin is a physicist, programmer and award-winning poetry translator. His translations into Russian span the range from Robert Burns to Allen Ginsberg to contemporary American poets. His translations into English have been published in journals and anthologies, including The Best Literary Translations, forthcoming in 2024 from Deep Vellum. Nikolai Zabolotsky’s Columns is Dmitri's first solo book in English. Columns, first published in 1929, is a landmark of Russian Modernism.

Luba Golburt is Associate Professor in the department of Slavic languages and literatures at UC Berkeley. Her areas of expertise include Russian poetry and the literature and art of European Enlightenment and Romanticism. She is the author of The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination as well as many articles on the history of Russian poetry, from Gabriela Derzhavin in the 18th century to Anna Glazova in the 21st.

Polina Barskova, poet and writer, published her debut when she was only eight years old. She has lived in the United States since 1998. She studied classical philology in St. Petersburg and Slavic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she currently teaches. 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.

About COLUMNS

When Columns, a slim volume of poems written by an unknown young Russian poet named Nikolai Zabolotsky, appeared in 1929, it took the literary world of Leningrad [St. Petersburg] by storm. Zabolotsky was not part of the city’s artistic elite, having arrived in Leningrad from the provinces only eight years earlier, but the privations and confusion he found in the city following the 1917 Revolution and ensuing civil war stimulated his poetic imagination.

"The early poems of Nikolai Zabolotsky present to us images of such stark and surprising vividness that they continue to stun nearly a century after their publication. Dmitri Manin’s translations retain the freshness of Zabolotsky’s vision – that of an imaginative outsider thrust into a world torn apart and remade, haphazardly, by a bloody revolution and civil war – as well as the solemn music that effectively counterpoints the poet’s cavalcade of novel images. This book will change the way you see the world around you." – Boris Dralyuk

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