MHRA Publication

‘The book is a treasure trove, and not just for those interested in antiquity. It was written after Shvarts’s death and after access to archival materials opened out a fuller picture of her notebooks, drafts, and discards. Barker takes excellent advantage of this bounty, amply illustrating her study with photographs of the poet and with copies of many manuscripts (which nearly always show how little Shvarts amended as she worked)... [Her] insightful reading of the brilliant poem Homo Musagetes is a fitting culmination of the entire book and a model for the kind of interpretive work that is still to come for many other Shvarts poems. We will all be building on Barker’s superb book in undertaking that work.’ — Stephanie Sandler, Russian Review 82, 2023, 535-36 (full text online)
‘Georgina Barker’s new book on Elena Shvarts’s classical reception is a welcome addition to the growing number of monographs on Russia’s literary reception of Greece and Rome... Overall, this book will be useful to scholars interested in classical reception in Russia. It will also serve in graduate-level seminars addressing reception studies and comparative literary approaches.’ — Zara Torlone, Modern Language Review 2024, 119.1, 176-78 (full text online)