Ian Satunovsky's war lyric is an extensive corpus drawn from the entirety of his poetic career (early 1940s- early 1980s). This talk will introduce this body of work through a series of close readings focused on the compounding of identities and temporalities in Satunovsky's very short texts. How does Satunovsky's poetry resist the hardening and polarization of identities occasioned by war? And how can we make sense of Satunovsky's identification of war as a structuring event of his biography and the source of his poetics?

Luba Golburt is Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination (2014) and is currently at work on her second book on the Russian nature lyric from the 18th century to the present as well as co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Russian Poetry.

Sponsored by the Russiand Department and Jewish Studies Program