{"id":50305,"date":"2025-06-13T14:01:16","date_gmt":"2025-06-13T13:01:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/?p=50305"},"modified":"2025-06-13T16:53:42","modified_gmt":"2025-06-13T15:53:42","slug":"polina-barskova-ive-been-working-with-ceramics-for-twenty-five-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/polina-barskova-ive-been-working-with-ceramics-for-twenty-five-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Polina Barskova: \u201cI\u2019ve been working with ceramics for twenty-five years\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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\u2013 Your new novel, Sybils, or The Book of Wondrous Transformations<\/em>, is, on one hand, the story of a watercolor teacher and Kunstkamera curator, the artist Dorothea Merian, who came to Russia at Peter the Great\u2019s invitation. On the other hand, it\u2019s about a young woman who found herself in the U.S. in the late 1990s. The writer in you who creates that text\u2014are the historical and personal voices one person, or two?<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 I think all of this comes from the corners of the same person\u2014like in those puzzles about communicating vessels, though not always obviously so, even to the author herself. I say this as a philologist, someone who believes that the author\u2019s judgment of what they’re doing should only be trusted up to a point.
When I began writing Living Pictures<\/em> in 2014 (my first prose book), I was around thirty-five and had been writing poetry for many years (since I was eight\u2014yes, I\u2019m that suspicious sort of phenomenon). But I had the sense that some things couldn\u2019t be conveyed in verse.
For me, poetry is urgent\u2014an emergency format. My poems, like in a fairy tale I love, jump out of me the way frogs or roses once leapt from a princess\u2019s mouth. But to contemplate certain things, I need to slow down. That\u2019s why prose became, if you like, my art of slowness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 And the poet and prose writer in you\u2014are they the same person too?<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 I\u2019m tempted to use an unusual metaphor\u2014for me, at least\u2014something athletic, like biathlon or triathlon. It\u2019s one drive, one desire, but very different skills.
In poetry, I have to contain an intense flame\u2014discipline it. Among all the simple recipes for writing a good poem, I like this one: when you\u2019re dying of love, it\u2019s very useful to write a poem about, say, a cat\u2019s morning.
I borrow from Viktor Shklovsky\u2019s idea of the knight\u2019s move: when you reroute your emotion into a different channel, something interesting might happen. But in prose, I try to say what I mean to say\u2014more directly.
Sybils<\/em> is about finding yourself outside yourself, beyond your familiar life\u2014and how that can become your fate, your creativity, your new self. I thought it would be engaging and distracting to write about some marvelous creature who wasn\u2019t me. And so the Gzely artist family was born.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Do you feel related to them, in some way?<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 After all these years? Certainly. I wrote this book almost daily for the past three years. Recently, at a friend\u2019s place, I saw a ballet barre and imagined her life\u2014what we do with words is very much like regular physical training, yet so different. I never know when a poem will strike: theme, state, and sound must align.
But with Sybils<\/em>… For three years I told everyone I was writing a book about caterpillars. I loved seeing their surprise, disgust, horror\u2014wondering if I\u2019d lost my mind. Writing a hybrid text that touches scientific, historical, and popular genres\u2014perhaps that\u2019s where some madness lies.
It began when I slowly started learning about the great Sibyl Merian, then about her remarkable daughter. I found out how little is known about them\u2014even among specialists. Almost no one had heard of Dorothea, despite her being quite significant in Russian science. It\u2019s the sense that history washes away individuals\u2014especially in the story of emigration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Does emigration change a person? For you, does it feel like something that happened long ago or just recently?<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Both, absolutely. And this book emerged in response to February 2022, to the feeling that I personally could not go to Russia. There\u2019s a bitter irony here: I probably could buy a ticket, land at Pulkovo, and go to the Strelka. I don\u2019t think flashing-lights cars would chase me.
There\u2019s a historical anecdote: Brodsky and Baryshnikov stand on the Stockholm waterfront and say, \u201cLet\u2019s just get on something and be there<\/em>.\u201d And then freeze at the thought of how hard that really is. I think their feelings were an intense Molotov cocktail of longing.
My situation is less dramatic now, but the city is very dear to me. All the people I\u2019ve recently lost are there\u2014shadows, new forms of them.
I left at twenty-one, not understanding the seriousness of it. Most of my life has passed in this new place and state. Until recently, I thought that was a miracle\u2014for a writer, change is good.
But must a writer always travel from Kupchino to Oakland? I don\u2019t know. A dear friend just sent me a photo of Proust\u2019s bed from his museum-flat\u2014he wrote one of the 20th century\u2019s greatest works there. He didn\u2019t need to change cities or languages.
Each of our stories is monstrously individual. I thought emigration helped me understand myself and my writing. But in the past three years, it\u2019s just become very hard and painful\u2014that, too, will likely feed my writing in time. In short: emigration is incredibly complex.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Do you feel a difference between how you wrote poems at age eight and how you write now?<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Honestly, not really. It\u2019s strange\u2014because the accumulation of texts and the sense of responsibility are so different now.
The ballet barre metaphor fits: I\u2019ve been at this barre for forty years. But the thing about poetry is that it only works when you both know and don\u2019t know what the poem will be. It\u2019s always a risk.
I recently read about one of my favorite painters, Perugino, and his trial of mastery\u2014and I pondered the nature of skill and craft. You train your hand so well that you\u2019re sure it\u2019ll be \u201cgood,\u201d as it always has been.
It\u2019s very hard\u2014unless you\u2019re someone like Velimir Khlebnikov\u2014to ignore the reader\/listener, but you must try. You have to look away from that charming face, from the tension, from the desire to seduce the reader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 You mean the reader\u2019s face?<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Yes, the reader, the listener\u2014whoever they are. You must let go of them and say, \u201cI\u2019ll try something entirely new\u201d\u2014as much as a person can<\/em> do something entirely new.
In a recent lecture on Akhmatova, I talked about how one of her miracles was that she constantly changed. Her very early poems\u2014those \u201coysters in ice\u201d\u2014were daring and popular.
But she left that path, that success, and became a different writing being. There\u2019s not much in common between Poem Without a Hero<\/em> and those sharp little vignettes. They\u2019re different methods.
So I believe in the idea of evolution. But every time, I don\u2019t know if I\u2019ll manage it. And that\u2019s both frightening\u2014and deeply fascinating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Does translation turn a poem into a new work?<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Absolutely. Translating poetry is an incredibly strange area. The task of creating a new poem in a new language and culture is monstrously hard.
I talk about this a lot with my friends\u2014Eugene Ostashevsky, Matvei Yankelevich, Ainsley Morse\u2014great translators in my circle. I admire their craft endlessly, though I don\u2019t understand it fully\u2014only that it\u2019s very slow art.
Matvei is finishing The Voronezh Notebooks<\/em> by Mandelstam now; Zhenya is struggling with Vaginov\u2019s poems. It seems to take forever.
I\u2019m fascinated by the intersection of art and time\u2014that\u2019s one of the metaphors in Sybils<\/em>. It\u2019s a life passion of mine: thinking about how we experience time passing.
I\u2019ve been working with ceramics for twenty-five years. It\u2019s my so-called hobby\u2014something I allow myself to do with passion and mediocrity.
Ceramics teachers talk a lot about time: once a mug is shaped, it must sit for two days before a handle is attached\u2014that takes half a day. It amuses me deeply: I, too, am the result of craft\u2014of learning in a youth poetry circle. The interplay of craft, impulse, and madness\u2014that\u2019s what interests me now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 You\u2019re a juror for the 2025 Pushkin House Book Prize. What does that mean to you now?<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Today, no matter which aspect of Russian history we look at, we see the reflection of today\u2019s disaster. I\u2019ve repeated one thing for three years: for those connected to Russian civilization and language, nothing is \u201cnormal\u201d today.
I\u2019m now opposed to normalization in our discourse. The fate of the Russian book is as catastrophic and complex as every other segment of this situation.
Our prize may be the only platform in the West still trying to discuss how Russia is viewed today. That\u2019s a painful question.
Reading the submitted books was a vital exercise. I\u2019m fully prepared for some to say such books shouldn’t exist.
But even if we ban books about Russia, Russia clearly isn\u2019t going away. If the world stops trying to understand it, Russia will keep doing what it\u2019s doing.
It\u2019s an ambitious, powerful, terrifying player\u2014some think mad, some think coldly rational\u2014but no one disputes that Russia, to our shame, fear, whatever, is trying to make history.
And this prize is one of the attempts to reckon with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 As someone writing in Russian, do you think the language will change?<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Absolutely. I\u2019m beginning to research the literature of the so-called Second Wave of emigration\u2014those who left the USSR in 1944\u201345. It\u2019s been studied far less than the First or Third Waves.
I\u2019m especially interested in their language: they took the Soviet language with them, then tried to describe non-Soviet experiences using it.
It\u2019s fascinating to see how First Wave \u00e9migr\u00e9s reacted to them\u2014what conflicts arose.
Language changes especially in times of crisis\u2014and one of our main tasks now is to observe how it changes, suffers, and helps us either remain ourselves or become someone new.
Right now, everything is in painful flux\u2014including language.
We\u2019re living through a historical moment of constant, irritating, multifaceted torment\u2014but from that, for better or worse, great literature may emerge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tickets for the upcoming events: <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n