Event Highlights: Russian Voices – Poetry in the Age of Totalitarianism
On November 18, the Boston University Castle welcomed Russian poets Sergey Gandlevsky and Katia Kapovich for a reading and conversation titled “Poetry in an Age of Totalitarianism.” Moderated by Daria Khitrova, Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages at Harvard University, the evening also featured Philip Nikolayev, another prize-winning poet who, alongside his wife, Kapovich, is an editor of Fulcrum, “an annual of poetry and aesthetics.”
Sergey Gandlevsky was born in 1952 to a religious family, and began writing poetry at age 17. Influenced by the work of Pushkin, Gandlevsky’s poems are greatly biographical, and he says that memory plays a great role in his creativity. He is one of the underground Russian poets who, in the 70’s, began writing for themselves and their circles of friends during Russia’s Brezhnev era, forging new directions in Russian poetry, avoiding participation in what they saw as a morally bankrupt society. Gandlevsky has won the Little Booker Prize and the Anti-Booker Prize in 1996 for his poetry and prose. The first English translation of his poems, a book called A Kindred Orphanhood, was published in 2003.
Katia Kapovich was born in 1960 in the Soviet Union (now Chişinău, Moldova). She immigrated first to Jerusalem in 1990 and then to the United States in 1992. By 2002, she had received the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the United States Library of Congress. She has since been included in a number of periodicals including the London Review of Books, News from the Republic of Letters, and a Russian publication called Novy Mir. Her poems are composed in both English and Russian, incorporating elements of memory and mythology.
After being born in Moscow and raised in Russia and Moldova, Philip Nikolayev immigrated to the United States in 1990. He earned a BA and an MA at Harvard University and earned a PhD at Boston University. Nikolayev has published multiple poetry collections, and his poems often focus on philosophical questions and daily life, mixing formal and experimental poetry styles. Nikolayev now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Kapovich.
Watch the event here (BU login required), and click for more information about Gandlevsky, Kapovich, and Nikolayev.
-Toria Rainey, ’18