Eastern European poets series

"The spirit of the poems in 'Gestures' seems to dwell somewhere in the period of 'La Belle ?poque', drawing its energy from the capitals of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian Empire ... and just next to that, there is the first half of the 20th century, with its modernist and avant-garde art practices and social reforms. What unites both of these eras in Ostups' poems is their suppressed emotionality and fragmentary nature."--Page 9.

Poetry. This anthology presents a group of writers and a literary phenomenon that has been unknown even to Russian readers for 70 years, obfuscated by historical amnesia. Gennady Gor, Pavel Zaltsman, Dmitry Maksimov, Sergey Rudakov, and Vladimir Sterligov wrote these works in 1942, during the most severe winter of the Nazi Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944). In striking contrast to state-sanctioned, heroic "Blockade" poetry in which the stoic body of the exemplary citizen triumphs over death, the poems gathered here show the Siege individual (blokadnik) as a weak and desperate incarnation of Job. These poets wrote in situ about the famine, disease, madness, cannibalism, and prostitution around themsubjects so tabooed in those most-Soviet times that they would never think of publishing. Moreover, the formal ambition and macabre avant-gardism of this uncanny body of work match its horrific content, giving birth to a "poor" language which alone could reflect the depth of suffering and psychological destruction experienced by victims of that historical disaster.