Poems by Jelena Schwartz – A Lyrical Dialogue with World Culture

Poet, essayist, and translator Yelena Schwartz (1948-2010) was a respected figure in Leningrad’s informal literary scene. She was also inspired by such famous poets as Polina Barskova and Maria Stepanova. In the Soviet Union, Schwartz’s poems circulated exclusively in Samizdat (self-publishing) and were copied and transmitted secretly – far from Leningrad. When the first volume of Jelena Schwartz’s poetry was officially published in 1989, it was said to be on sale the same day.

She was a graduate of theater studies and the daughter of a well-known playwright who made her living mainly translating plays for the Leningrad Stages.

Manipulation of style and camouflage had a lasting effect on her fictional and well-read narrative poetry and gave the work a luster that was missing in everyday life. Poet and contemporary Oleg Yuriev described the influence in the preface, which is worth reading: “He gave me (and not only me) faith in the full value of my time, the opportunity to live in my time without comfortable despair.”

Jelena Schwartz takes her readers into the most diverse contexts and times. The multi-page poems draw material and themes from the Bible as well as from the Tsarist era in the eighteenth century, from ancient Rome, or from the tragedy of the Siege of Leningrad.

“Foreign feathers” are presented as a lyrical theme and sometimes even as an author: for example, poems about the relationship of the fox fairy from Chinese mythology to a fictional Estonian poet named Arno Zart, who is named as the official creator of these works.

Humor and fun of masking always come into play with Jelena Schwarz.

Her multi-page collection of poems “Cynthia” introduces the first-person perspective of the Roman heroine of the same name in epitaphs by Probers with the words: “Her poems have not survived, but I tried to translate them into Russian anyway.”

Free fiction always feels like a playful dialogue with global culture – also formally. Translator Daniel Yuryev has adopted only the exact meaning of the form (and constant rhyme schemes) of many poems to a limited extent – in favor of free verse.

However, Yuriev kept the Alexandrian in one of Jelena Schwartz’s programmed poems called “Imitation of Boelo.” The author of the French classic poetic base also wrote his work The Hexagonal Yampus.

In this poem, Schwartz formulates her poetry – with the goal of finding out the relationship between the poet and God. Indeed, she creates – almost divine – in her individual poems, small worlds between joy and sadness.

“I like poems that are like tram,
They ring, they ding, their keys donate the ride,
But their tablets give, albeit twisted,
Palaces, stadiums, silent moonlight reflection.
(…]The poet’s eye reveals itself to you,
For one breath may roar the Lord,
The eye is hanging and the thread is bloody,
burdened with the pain and glory of the world by the covenant of God.”