Vera Pavlova

Vera Pavlova was born in 1963, in Moscow. She graduated from the Schnittke College of Music and the Gnessin Academy, where she specialized in history of music. Up to the age of eighteen she studied to become a composer. She also worked as a guide at the Shaliapin Museum in Moscow, and published several essays on music. For nearly ten years she sang in a church choir.

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She began writing poetry at the age of twenty, after the birth of her first daughter, while she was still at the maternity ward. She first published her poems at the age of twenty-four, in the literary monthly “Yunost”. Pavlova became a celebrity after no fewer than seventy-two poems of hers were published in an issue of the “Segodnia” daily, giving rise to the rumor that she was a literary hoax. Since then her works have appeared in many newspapers and in most of the major magazines in Russia.

Her first collection, “Nebesnoye Zhivotnoye” (“The Heavenly Animal”), was published in 1997. The second and third collections, “Vtoroi Yazyk” (“The Second Tongue”), 1998, and “Linia Otryva”, (“Tear on This Line”), 2000, were issued by the Pushkin Foundation Publishing House, in its prestigious “Autograph” poetry series. Her fourth collection, “Chetvertyi Son” (“The Fourth Dream”), was acclaimed by the Russian Academy of Letters as the best book of the year and awarded the Apollon Grigoriev prize, the most prestigious of its kind in Russia.

To date Pavlova has published fourteen collections of poetry in Russian, of which “Vezdes’” (“Here and Everywhere”), 2003, “Ruchnaya Klad’” (“Hand-carried Luggage”), 2006, and “Pis’ma v sosedneyu komnatu” (“Letters to the Room Next Door”), 2006, were acclaimed as The Best Books of the Year. The latter of these collections is a unique project in book printing: it consists of 1001 poems written out in the author’s hand and illustrated with drawings by the poet’s four-year old daughter.

Pavlova’s poems have been translated into nineteen languages. She has participatedin international poetry festivals in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Brussels, Geneva, Rotterdam, and elsewhere. She had poetry readings at a number of American schools, including Columbia University, University of Illinois at Urbana, Dartmouth College, Ohio State University, Virginia Tech, William and Mary College, Harvard University, North-Western University, Wesleyan University, Dickinson College, Princeton University, University ofAlaska (Anchorage), and at a number of other schools in the United States and other countries. Pavlova frequently participates in art projects, jointly with painters (Vladimir Suliagin and Sergei Maksiutin) and musicians (Iraida Yusupova, Michael Nyman, and Vladimir Genin). She has also experimented with non-traditional ways of disseminating poems, such as SMS-messaging, postcards, video clips, and audio books. One of her four poems featured in The New Yorker magazine was selected by the Poetry in Motion program and was displayed as a poster in subway cars in New York City and in Los Angeles buses.

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Pavlova’s literary output never leaves her readers and critics indifferent. Here are some excerpts from comments and reviews:

Published: November 8, 2009 POETRY What Fell Apart, What Came Together

“The feeling of flesh, the taste of flesh, the weight of flesh, the flesh of flesh, the music of secretions and belly rumblings as the music of life; the unification of flesh, the inception of flesh, its life, its death, and its metamorphosis as justification of poetry – that is what Pavlova’s poems are about.”

Pavel Belitskiy, "Nezavisimaya Gazeta"

“The system of direct hit impact, used by Pavlova, is unthinkable for the contemporary ‘magazines of good taste’, and it makes the literary critics wary, because critical analysis calls for quotations, but finding at least four lines within the limits of decency is practically impossible.”

Vladimir Novikov, "Novyi Mir"

“In the most literal of senses the world is being examined with the use of the tongue… The world is being licked over with a poem, it is drawn into the text, experienced physiologically, causing shudders… As Vera Pavlova speaks, she uproots the traditional meanings and turns of speech, pronouncing each word with delight, but also with an effort, as if for the first time, carefully listening to the sound and feeling anew her native speech with her tongue…”

As Vera Pavlova speaks, she uproots the traditional meanings and turns of speech, pronouncing each word with delight…

Aleksandr Arkhangelskiy, "Vremia MN"

“Many critics and readers had doubts as to whether Vera Pavlova really existed… A hoax would be more in tenor with the kind of boundless freedom of melody and lyrics that abolishes, as it were, the accidental corporeality of any specific individual.”

Igor Shevelev, “Obshchaya Gazeta”

“I will be as bold as to claim that Russian poetry of the twenty-first century will begin with Vera Pavlova.”

Yevgenia Pishchikova, “Izvestia”

Bibliography:

Nebesnoye zhivotnoye, 1997
Vtoroy yazyk,1998
Liniya otryva, 2000
Chetvertyy son, 2000
Sovershennoletiye, 2001
Intimnyy dnevnik otlichnicy, 2001
Vezdes’, 2002
Po obe storony poceluya, 2004
Ruchnaya klad’, 2006
His’ma v sosednuyu komnatu, 2006
Tri knigi, 2007
Mudraya dura, 2008
Na Tom Beregu Rechi, 2009
Iz Vos’mi Knig, 2009