Written in the Dark. Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad. Gennady Gor, Dmitry Maksimov, Sergey Rudakov, Vladimir Sterligov, Pavel Zaltsman

Сборник стихов Геннадия Гора, Дмитрия Максимова, Сергея Рудакова, Владимира Стерлигова и Павла Зальцмана, написанных в блокадном Ленинграде. Составитель Полина Барскова. Послесловие Ильи Кукулина. На русском и английском языке. 

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 them—subjects 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. 

The texts collected here represent a remarkable, stunning discovery. This is not only because the unofficial, deskdrawer poems in this book were hidden and unknown until quite recently. Their survival was extremely improbable, and their transmission here is something of a miracle. These poems push modernist verse in new directions. — EMILY VAN BUSKIRK, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY 

In a world gone mad—over one million perishing in the Nazi siege of Leningrad— the refusal of conventional sense was a conceptual necessity. Written in the Dark is full of wit, gallows humor, and mordant courage, with overlays of Surrealism, Futurism, Acmeism, Symbolism, and the absurd. Grappling with a fate that defies logic, poetry becomes a necessary measure against the dark, like the sparks from two sticks of wood, creating a fire that warms even in an apocalypse. — CHARLES BERNSTEIN, U. OF PENNSYLVANIA