Is it worth singing where no one can hear?

2026 Slow Reads. Poetry Season. Week III. Elena Shvarts, Birdsong on the Seabed

The third in my series of readings from 100 poems by 100 poets to read in times of war is Elena Shvarts’ Birdsong on the Seabed.

Introduction to Elena Shvarts

Elena Andreyevna Shvarts (1948–2010) lived her life and imagination in Leningrad–St Petersburg, a city raised by Peter the Great from beneath the swamps waters of the Neva to sing of higher things.

Born in 1948 to a dramatist mother, she came of age in the Khrushchev Thaw, moving through youth literary circles before becoming a leading figure in the literary underground in the 1970s. Shvarts and other Leningrad poets were cold-shouldered by the official culture during the Brezhnev years.

From the early 1970s to 1989 she did not publish in the state-approved magazines. One story claims it was a form of self-censorship: her insistence on the use of the word ‘soul’ in her poetry denied her publication. Her mystic temperament did not fit Socialist culture. Shvarts was religious but in an unorthodox way. She put her faith in the Russian, specifically St. Petersburg poetic and literary tradition. And why not? Pushkin, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Blok, Gogol, Dostoevsky.

The Leningrad poets of the 1970s shared their poetry in private performances and samizdat, amid the Cold War and the tightening of censorship after the Eastern European Spring and Czechoslovak Invasion of 1968. Shvarts and her circle gathered in an informal seminar known as Club 81. Their fellow, Joseph Brodsky was exiled and punished for daring to be a poet.

Over time some of Shvarts’ poetry appeared in émigré journals in Europe and the USA. It was not until the glasnost of Gorbachev that her poetry became widely read in the Soviet Union. In the late 1980s Gorbachev released the prisoners of Russian literature from the Soviet jails. There was an explosion in reading of previously banned books and writers, and many authors, like Shvarts, finally saw their books in print and met a wider audience. The publication of her books in the reforming USSR in 1989 marked Shvarts’ transition from underground poet to acclaimed writer. She would later receive the Triumph Prize for lifetime achievement in the arts.

But by temperament, Shvarts was resistant to orthodoxy and the new prison of literary celebrity, underground or commercial. As one recent study of Shvarts puts it,

In a society characterized by conformity, state atheism, and shortages economic and aesthetic, Shvarts was an eccentric ascetic devoted to the poetic craft, a blasphemous bohemian student of theology, an unpublished and unpaid writer who was nonetheless taken as an exemplar of the “Leningrad school” of Russian poetry, which revived and remixed the practices of Russian modernism. Shvarts became a central figure in the andegraund (underground) even as she avoided and even mocked many of its institutions, successfully leveraging its platforms for theatrical self-expression and benefiting from discerning publics for her work.

Laura Little, Becoming an Andegraund Poet: Elena Shvarts and the Literary Environment of the Late Soviet Era (2021)

Shvarts is a religious or spiritual poet but of a highly unorthodox kind. She spoke of poetry as “a way of reaching the non-material (spiritual) by semi-material means.” Her poems feature references to God, the cross, holy fools, faith, and the fragility of belief in both the Soviet and post-Soviet world. Much of her translated poetry comes from the post-Soviet era. Birdsong on the Seabed was written in 1994.

There are two translated bilingual collections of Shvarts poetry I read regularly, both to enjoy her poetry and to deepen my Russian language learning.

• Paradise: Selected Poems (translated by Michael Molnar) (1993)

• Birdsong on the Seabed (translated by Sasha Dugdale) (2008)

I looked for more online resources but they are hard to find, especially in our current Western moment of restrictions of Russian cultural exchanges. However, Shvarts is a poet worth reading, especially if you are interested in history and in these times of war. There is so much to appreciate and discover in them. She writes of St. Petersburg, its imaginary and real urban experiences, courtyards, back streets, marginal spaces, wanderers, legends, history and other poets. The city becomes a private stage for visionary transformations.

She is a poet of women’s experience. Michael Molnar wrote that her imagined transcendent world is rooted in female experience.

“Being is more housewife than Lord. This Creator who bakes the night like bread or stitches our blood circulation is familiar with kitchen and household work. Woman is the measure of all things in this cosmos.”

Michael Molnar, Introduction to Paradise: Selected Poems

Shvarts is a poet of masks and multiple personae—saints, madwomen, animals, mythological or historical figures. She explores fractured identity and the instability of the soul. And Shvarts is a self-taught classicist. Someone has even written a book on the role of SPQR, the Roman republic, in her writing.​ It becomes a symbol of the destruction of civilization. After the USSR fell, she used the sack of Rome to stand for the fall of the Soviet Union. She lamented the destruction of culture ushered in by the communists in 1917, revived in Gorbachev’s glasnost. She also lamented the devastation wrought by the liberal capitalist revolution of the 1990s.

“Birdsong on a Seabed” is a poem of the 1990s, the devyanostye. You hear that distinctive Shvarts voice: rooted in Petersburg’s margins, reaching toward something beyond the material, singing from depths where no song should be possible, transforming social catastrophe into poetic vision. Birdsong escaping from a cage is a recurring motif in her poetry. The poet and the souls attempt to break free from whatever confines it, whether social restrictions, artistic conventions, sanity, reason, historical tragedies or the physical limits of reality. As Sasha Dugdale wrote:

“In ‘Birdsong on the Seabed’ the poet-bird sings of the land above to the cold-blooded and indifferent sea beasts, but none believe it. This marvellous, almost miraculous, poem fixes the fate of the prophet and the poet in Shvarts’ world - to sing with unbearable beauty of another reality to those who are deaf or indifferent to your song.

Sasha Dugdale, Introduction to Birdsong on the Seabed

Or as I have written elsewhere, from the cages of our lives, we sing our greatest cantos.

Please enjoy my reading of this miraculous poem, which I have read in both English translation and the original Russian.

My Audio Reading of Shvarts, Birdsong on the Seabed

You can support the Burning Archive by becoming a paid subscriber and get more from my slow reads, deep dives and guides to a life of the mind in this troubled time.

P.S. You can also buy my collections of poems, Gathering Flowers of the Mind and Cantos From A Cage: Poems of Lockdown.

Jeff