We invite you to an evening of discussion with Polina Barskova, a judge of this year’s Pushkin House Book Prize, on the cultural life of besieged Leningrad, bringing together her perspectives as a scholar of the Siege, as a gifted poet with intimate knowledge of the literary response to the Siege, and as an individual who grew up in Leningrad.

In conversation with Dr Susan Larsen, and focussing primarily on her books Written in the Dark and Living Pictures, Barskova will explore the construction of Siege narratives both in situ and in retrospect, the discoveries and missing pieces in archives, literature as witness and resistance during times of trauma, and cultural memory as a monument.

Living Pictures (New York Review Books, 2022) is a polyphonic work of living history that weaves together memoir, archival material and fiction to explore the legacies of the Siege of Leningrad. Growing up in Leningrad, Polina Barskova saw no trace of the estimated million people who died in the city during the Nazi blockade. Their stories were suppressed or literally hidden away in the archives – and gradually uncovered by Barskova in the process of her scholarly research. Her discoveries are reflected in the chorus of voices in Living Pictures, exploring traumas historical and personal, Barskova’s childhood and formative relationships, the lives and afterlives of cultural figures of besieged Leningrad, and a life spent excavating vital fragments from under Leningrad’s official history. In returning to the archive of texts still being recovered from the Siege, Barskova commemorates these ghosts from her home city’s past and reflects on their legacy for the future generations – including the meaning of the Siege in today’s world.