Book Review: Tatiana Voltskaia, Cicada: Selected Poetry & Prose

by anna battista

Tatiana Voltskaia began writing poetry at a young age and established herself as a leading Russian poet following the appearance of her first collection Two Bloods in 1989. Voltskaia - who, in recent years, was also the recipient of two literary awards, the Tepfer Pushkin Prize in 1998 and the award of the St Petersburg literary journal Zvezda in 2003 - was born in St Petersburg (then Leningrad) in 1960. When she started writing, Russia was passing through the glasnost era and the consequent perestroika. It is natural then that her poems deal at times with the crisis generated by the changes in Russian society and in the souls of young people.

The bilingual Russian-English volume Cicada mainly features poetry, but also a few essays. Emily Lygo - who translated Voltskaia’s poems - underlines in the introduction how the poems are vehicles for “personal expression”, while the essays are more general, taking the form of public discourse. Yet the essays are directly linked to the poems. The essay “The Soul of Paris”, in which the poet draws inspiration from a visit to Paris to make comparisons between Russia and Europe and analyse Gothic and modern architecture, is followed by the poem “Cathedrals”, which features the poet’s personal interpretation of Gothic architecture. In the essay “On The Ruins Of Our Rome 1 & 2” Voltskaia writes about love and death, while in the poem “From bitterness that’s flowing” she explores her very personal views of love.

In the fourth part of the series of essays entitled “On The Ruins Of Our Rome”, Voltskaia studies the concepts of time and space in one of the Russian poets that most inspired her, Brodsky (“Space is the clothing of time; time grows out of it, wears it into holes, throws it away, and exchanges it for new space.”), while in the poem “On the possibility of Joseph Brodsky’s return”, she compares Brodsky to Orpheus, warning him with the words, “Orpheus, don’t come here. We don’t exist/You cannot call us like Eurydice/We are only the shadows of your lines.”

While the poems feature a wide range of themes - among them winter (“Like a vampire”), St. Petersburg (“In this town”), romantic love (“Shadow”), flawed relationships (“Time”) and sex (“The Pendulum”) - there is an element that unifies and informs all the works: classical literature. Voltskaia often draws comparisons mentioning figures lifted from the world of the Latin and Greek classics such as Odysseus and Penelope, Orpheus and Eurydice, and the poet Ovid, while her Cynthia echoes Catullus’ beloved domina by the same name.

Cicada, the first book by Tatiana Voltskaia in English translation, is an elegant collection of poems best read in silence, pondering on each word wisely and carefully chosen by the author, letting her heartbreaking verses that often evoke nostalgic memories and strong emotions, seep into your heart and mind.

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