Besieged Leningrad : aesthetic responses to urban disaster / Polina Barskova.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Barskova, Polina, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Collective memory.

Saint Petersburg (Russia)--History--Siege, 1941-1944.

Saint Petersburg (Russia).

World War, 1939-1945--Campaigns--Russia (Federation).

World War, 1939-1945.

Collective memory--Russia (Federation)--Saint Petersburg.

Saint Petersburg (Russia)--Civilization.

World War, 1939-1945--Influence.

Russia (Federation)--Saint Petersburg.

Physical Description:

ix, 232 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

DeKalb : Northern Illinois University Press, [2017]

Summary:

During the 872 days of the Siege of Leningrad (September 1941 to January 1944), the city's inhabitants were surrounded by the military forces of Nazi Germany. They suffered famine, cold, and darkness, and a million people lost their lives, making the siege one of the most destructive in history. Confinement in the besieged city was a traumatic experience. Unlike the victims of the Auschwitz concentration camp, for example, who were brought from afar and robbed of their cultural roots, the victims of the Siege of Leningrad were trapped in the city as it underwent a slow, horrific transformation. They lost everything except their physical location, which was layered with historical, cultural, and personal memory. In Besieged Leningrad, Polina Barskova examines how the city's inhabitants adjusted to their new urban reality, focusing an the emergence of new spatial perceptions that fostered the production of diverse textual and visual representations. The myriad texts that emerged during the siege were varied and exciting, engendered by sometimes sharply conflicting ideological urges and aesthetic sensibilities. In this first study of the cultural and literary representations of spatiality in besieged Leningrad, Barskova examines a wide range of authors with competing views of their difficult relationship with the city, filling a gap in Western knowledge of the culture of the siege Book jacket.

Contents:

Walking through the siege: routes, routines, and the paths of the imagination

Spatialized allegory: speaking dystrophy otherwise

Paradoxes of siege vision: darkness, blindness, and knowledge

Framing the siege sublime: urban spectacle and cultural memory

The spatial practice of siege reading

Reading into the siege: heterochronic directions of escapist reading.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Barskova, Polina, author. Besieged Leningrad

ISBN:

9780875807720

0875807720

OCLC:

982091709