A poignant collection of short pieces about the author's hometown, St. Petersburg, Russia, and the siege of Leningrad that combines memoir, history, and fiction.

Living Pictures refers to the parlor game of tableaux vivants, in which people dress up in costume to bring scenes from history back to life. It’s a game about survival, in a sense, and what it means to be a survivor is the question that Polina Barskova explores in the scintillating literary amalgam of Living Pictures. Barskova, one of the most admired and controversial figures in a new generation of Russian writers, first made her name as a poet; she is also known as a scholar of the catastrophic siege of Leningrad in World War II. In Living Pictures, Barskova writes with caustic humor and wild invention about traumas past and present, historical and autobiographical, exploring how we cope with experiences that defy comprehension. She writes about her relationships with her adoptive father and her birth father; about sex, wanted and unwanted; about the death of a lover; about Turner and Picasso; and, in the final piece, she mines the historical record in a chamber drama about two lovers sheltering in the Hermitage Museum during the siege of Leningrad who slowly, operatically, hopelessly, stage their own deaths.

Living Pictures introduces a startlingly daring and original new voice from world literature.

"The prolonged German siege of Leningrad during the Second World War was among the most destructive sieges in history, leading to mass starvation and well over a million deaths. The contemporary Russian poet and scholar Polina Barskova, born in Leningrad, has done extensive research on the siege in archives in St. Petersburg, research that has borne fruit in Living Pictures, an extraordinary dramatization of life under the most extreme of circumstances. In the remarkable title piece of the collection, set in the winter of 1941 and 1942, Mosej and Antonina, a young couple who work in the Hermitage, refuse to take shelter underground, remaining instead in the grand galleries of the palatial museum. Their experience begins almost as a lark, as they recite poetry, perform tableaux vivants based on Rembrandt paintings, and retell the story of the Snow Queen. Inevitably, however, cold and hunger take over, and as they do the two characters fall silent, or rather, their imagined voices are replaced by documented voices of the siege, as if the reader had tuned into a ghostly radio channel. Living Pictures is an uncanny and poignant masterpiece in which Barskova brilliantly explores the vertiginous divide between individual suffering and recorded history"--