Life Without

Tatiana Shcherbina has been described as ‘one of the most significant figures in contemporary Russian poetry’ (Kommersant’). In her recent work the elegant and ironic narrator meditates on love, disappointment and loss against the backdrop of Russia’s social collapse. Sometimes her poems take the form of overtly political statements (‘Dictatorship, democracy’), sometimes new capitalist Russia is reflected merely in the emotional plane – in a poem on lost love she claims she has paid the highest rate: cash. Whilst her themes are timeless, Shcherbina’s settings are distinctly contemporary. She writes about sitting at a computer gazing into the Microsoft Windows; her poems are full of supermarkets, printing cartridges, TV, the environment; she considers applying make-up, drinking alone, falling asleep to the sounds of films in the next room. Tatiana Shcherbina is one of a generation of Russians who have been to travel frequently in Europe. She has lived in France – and sometimes writes in French – and her Russian poetry is filled with an awareness of other ‘European’ culture. She has even been criticised for a supposedly anti-Russian stance, yet she understands absolutely what is happening in Russia and is in no way an outsider. Hers is also the stance of a woman challenging Russia’s patriarchal and chauvinist society. However, Tatiana Shcherbina’s poetry is not primarily political, but literary, and she shows great versatility in different forms and genres. Her playfully meditative essays form the perfect counterpoint to her sophisticated and self-aware poetry. Russian-English dual language edition.

Tatiania Shcherbina was born in Moscow in 1954. Before 1999, she worked on Radio Liberty and four of her collections were published in samizdat. Since 1999, she has published six volumes of poetry and prose in Russia and two poetry collections in French, her adopted mother tongue. She has been a journalist and a reviewer for several Russian newspapers. In 2002, she took part in the Poetry International at London's Royal Festival Hall and in a UK tour by Russian women poets. Her poems appeared in a special Russian women's poetry issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, followed by a selection of her earlier poetry from Zephyr Press in the US. Life Without: Selected Poetry & Prose 1992-2003, translated by Sasha Dugdale, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2004.