SPQR in the USSR

<p>Since her rise to notoriety among the dissident artists of the 1970s Leningrad underground Elena Shvarts (1948-2010) has earned a place in the canon of great Russian poets for the originality riotousness beauty and deceptive erudition of her poetry. Many of Shvarts's greatest poems were inspired by classical antiquity - the literature myth and history of ancient Rome and Greece. Her antiquity is never static: it evolves in response to the seismic changes that Russia underwent during her lifetime. In this in-depth study Georgina Barker follows Shvarts's transcendental and escapist encounters with classical antiquity from wild youth to defiant old age and discovers Shvarts shaping antiquity to fit herself.</p><p>An appendix of Barker's translations of Shvarts's classical poems and archival transcriptions of previously unpublished poems gives anglophone and russophone readers alike unprecedented access to Elena Shvarts's classical antiquity.</p><p>Georgina Barker is Leverhulme Early-Career Fellow in the Department of Greek and Latin at UCL.</p>