Elena Andreevna Shvarts (1948-2010) was intellectual, theatrical, apolitical, Orthodox, a Petersburger, hard-drinking, cat-loving, chain-smoking, rowdy… But, first and foremost, she was a poet. In her writing — which constitutes one of the most important oeuvres in 20th- and 21st-century Russian poetry — Shvarts broke conventions, donned personae, and transcended byt (“everyday existence”). One way she did this was through engaging with classical antiquity.
Shvarts grew up in the liberal atmosphere of the Khrushchev Thaw, but came to maturity in the Brezhnev Stagnation, when her riotous poetic style made her unpublishable within the USSR.[1] Yet her apparent lack of concern for an official career left her free to write whatever interested her, to be read in samizdat (“self-publishing”) which circulated around the Leningrad underground (a 1970s sub-culture of unofficial artists, believers, and dissidents).
Shvarts was a self-taught classicist. In her diary at the age of 14 she mentions learning Latin, and she has a flawed but charming translation of Emperor Hadrian’s last poem that has clearly been translated from the original Latin.
Rome was the focus of Shvarts’ antiquity, and the setting for many of Shvarts’ poems. Kinfiia, 27 poems spanning 32 years (1974-2006), are ‘translations’ of the ‘lost poems’ of Propertius’ (probably fictional) girlfriend Cynthia. Shvarts explained her motivation for writing from this classical persona:
“It’s fun to transport your life from seventies Russia to Ancient Rome, as it were – everything becomes funnier and prettier. I used Ancient Rome as something like a powder room or a kitchen – for gossip and settling scores; poems ‘from yourself’ don’t give you that possibility.”
Throughout Kinfiia, Rome blurs with contemporary Leningrad/Petersburg, most obviously through how wet the city is; and Kinfiia blurs with Shvarts herself, particularly through her violent outbursts.
Shvarts did not use Rome to comment overtly on communism – although in the age of Socialist Realism, the very learnedness and apoliticism of her poems, and their urge to escape the dreariness of the Stagnation, were political statements in themselves. But when the USSR fell, she repeatedly used the sack of Rome to stand for its fall,[2] and lamented above all the destruction of culture ushered in by the communists in 1917 and completed by the capitalists in the 1990s.
Perestroika and the ensuing collapse of communism in Russia allowed Shvarts to travel outside the USSR for the first time in 1989, and to visit her beloved Rome at last. Her ‘Roman notebook’ chronicles her stay there in the winter of 2001-02; Soviet Russia still intrudes – Shvarts sees the likeness of a kolkhoznitsa (“female collective farmer”) in a statue of a goddess of Rome (‘Medici villa garden’).
In one of her last poems, written as she was dying, Shvarts thanked God for, amongst other things, allowing her to see Rome (‘Thanksgiving’, 2009).
This profile was written by Georgina Barker
For English translations of Shvarts’ poetry, see Molnar & Kelly (1993), Dugdale (2008), and Epstein (2018). For more on Shvarts’ classical reception, see Barker, USSR Meets SPQR: Classical Antiquity in the Poetry of Elena Shvarts (forthcoming).
[1] Apart from two poems published in a Tartu University journal in 1973, nothing of Shvarts’ was published in the USSR until 1983, although from 1978 she was published quite widely abroad. Barbara Heldt, ‘The Poetry of Elena Shvarts’, World Literature Today, 63.3 (1989), 381–83.
[2] ‘Two gravestones’ (1990), ‘Istanbul has not fallen, nor has Constantinople’ (1996), ‘Discontinuous story about a communal flat’ (1996), ‘Kinfiia’s complaint’ (2006).
