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The present situation urgently calls for the multifaceted studies of Russophone literature against war. The authors of the following essays develop their inquiry through the following questions: How does the relationship with the notion of the enemy shape the war poetry of Boris Slutskii and Ian Satunovskii? To what extent can the war poetry of the latter be seen as a matrix of his biographic narrative construction, especially considering that Satunovskii's lyrical subject is shattered, stuttering, de-language/d? How does today's popular poetry of protest differ from today's avant-garde poetics? What are the differences between their means of expression, address, and foci? All of these studies seek to explore the anti-war position in modernist poetry that has been developed through drastically different means, yet the general purpose is aptly formulated by one of our authors as "to bear witness and respond to the ongoing atrocities and destruction."

The siege blacked out Leningrad. Public lighting was turned off; chipboard in windows prevented inside lighting from getting out. The darkness imposed its daily rhythm on Leningraders; at the same time, it hid the city from the view of German combat pilots. It lamed everyday life, which nonetheless continued to function. Darkness is a central topos of many literary testimonies from the besieged city. Adapted from the source document.

Focusing on less studied areas of the twentieth-century war experience, this article investigates the notions of "urban beauty" and "urban spec-Slavic Review 69, no. 2 (Summer 2010) tacle" as experienced by the residents of besieged Leningrad. Polina Barskova suggests that, via an estrangement effect, the siege gaze replaces the unrepresentable traumatic experience of presentnesswith an aestheticized cultural past containing such useable notions of cultural memory as ruin, stage set, monument, and frame. This replacement can be described as a siege urbanscape sublime, a sublime lying not in the distinction between the horrific and the beautiful but rather in the observer's tendency to substitute the horrific with the beautiful. This particular species of sublime aims at psychological anesthesia and is thoroughly oxymoronic: the intense clashing of opposites—to the point that oxymoronic sensibility leads to rhetorical confluence—alerts us to the connection between the aesthetic discourse of besieged Leningrad and the perennial Petersburg text, thus opening new opportunities for the study of the functioning of cultural memory in Soviet society.

SUMMARY:
Статья изучает проблему репрезентации блокадного тела, используя как дискурсивные, так и визуальные тексты, возникшие в Ленинграде в период 1941–1944 гг. Чем объясняются радикальное разнообразие и противоречия в изображении блокадного тела? Каковы стилистические и риторические приёмы, используемые для его описания и воссоздания? Автор предлагает рассматривать тропологию аллегории как терапевтическую рамку, позволяющую очевидцам, оказавшимся в контакте с блокадным телом (как своим, так и чужим), рассматривать его вне посттравматической реакции отвращения, которое является одной из центральных эмоций, пронизывающих дискурс блокадной телесности.

It has long been common to interpret the mythology of St. Petersburg through the prism of eschatological prophecy. But what happens to the cultural tradition when the prophecy of doom comes to be experienced as reality, and predictions give way to reaction? How did the discourse of the end of Petersburg change when the legendary curse of Peter's estranged wife—"This city will be empty"—turned into the devastation of postrevolutionary Petrograd: violent, starved, frozen, and diseased? In this article Polina Barskova explores various cultural expressions of the urban crisis in the years just after 1917. These artistic reactions come from Viktor Shklovskii, Pavel Shillingovskii, Semen Pavlov, and Grigorii Kozintsev, among others. Here, the focus is on the tension between two impulses: to distance and aestheticize the ruins or to bring them closer to author and recipient, rendering these signs of urban disaster maximally incoherent and ugly. The article argues that the Petersburg authors use both strategies, as well as their hybrids.