Haunted by exile, longing for linkages between past and present, Olga Livshin’s A Life Replaced is a collection of poetry that wants to spread a “blanket of wild buckwheat over a meadow,” and does just that. What is the meadow of this book? It is memory, both personal and collective, bringing voices of many poets, spoken through the same mouth to us in English: “it is summer everywhere, except war.” Livshin is in conversation with two poetic masters, our contemporary Vladimir Gandelsman, and a great 20th century poet Anna Akhmatova. Registration is required for this event. To learn more about this event, click here.
About the Author: Olga Livshin grew up in Odessa and Moscow, and came to the United States with her family as a teenager. She holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literature and taught Russian language and literature at the university level full time before switching to teaching teenagers world literature and creative writing. Her poems, translations, and essays are published in The Kenyon Review, Poetry International, Mad Hatters’ Review, and other journals.
About the Interlocutor: Eleonor Gilburd is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago. Her first book, To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture, was awarded the 2020 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies.