The appearance of Olga Berggolts's work of prose Daytime Stars should be saluted as an important step in development of the English-language version of the Soviet century's Modernism. This text should and hopefully will be added to many syllabi in the field of Slavic Studies and beyond it.

This text could enrich syllabi on Women Studies, Soviet Experience and Experimental Prose with interesting new depth. Olga Berggolts was perhaps one of the most striking women writing in Russian in her time, an author who attempted to find adequate narrative form for the irreconcilable paradoxes of the Soviet experience. Unlike her literary friends and confidants (Anna Akhmatova or Evgenii Shvarts, to name only two) Berggolts attempted to stay ideologically faithful and politically correct, first and foremost a writer of the Soviet experience—with the illusions, difficult ardor, and also poignant ambivalence this position implies.

Recent publication of her diaries revealed that Berggolts could serve as an exemplary representative of the duplicity of the Soviet subject, who was at once in awe and in horror of the totalitarian state. As Katharine Hodgson writes in her panoramic monograph, Voicing the Soviet Experience, Berggolts, centrally known as the Muse of the Siege of Leningrad, wrote about various historical epochs, usually seeking a way to frame her narratives by herself—what Lidiia Ginzburg, another attentive acquaintance of hers, soberly assessed as “hysterical egocentrism.” This combination of confessional and historical narratives is at the center of the creative inquiry that became Daytime Stars.

Berggolts attempts here to narrate her life as a collage of memories: her childhood during Revolution; her mature years during the Siege; her dreams and fantasies about various sharp moments of Russian history, including the fateful death of Prince Dmitrii in Uglich. In her introduction, Hodgson explains the lacunae by Berggolts's need for omissions because she wanted her book to be publishable. I think that necessity of (self) censorship here is intertwined with the formal quest: the author is looking for her own unique kind of narrative authenticity and invents it first and foremost as a paradoxical combination of the layers of memory. Writing at the same time and from the same post-trauma situation as Varlam Shalamov, Lidiia Ginzburg, Evgenii Shvarts (who failed to publish their documentary prose), and Leonid Panteleev (whose Siege notes also were published in a compromised way), Berggolts wrote Daytime Stars as her Main Book (glavnaia kniga/главная книга) which makes us take it seriously—both its inventions and achievements, failures and omissions. I would argue that its main claim to originality is its treatment of time within the touchy container of quasi-non-fiction, non-fiction with various lacunae, and silences: the author jumps from one temporal, historical reality to another when it becomes too unbearable or dangerous to narrate.

I regret that the authors decided not to include the unpublished prison chapters. They explain this decision by the desire to leave the text “as is,” in the form of the original publication. I would argue that having these chapters in the present edition would allow the reader to appreciate the deeper complexity of Berggolts's ideological and aesthetic choices.

Regardless, I appreciate the choice of linguistic register by the translator. This translation allows the English language to sense Berggolts's original language with its combination of clarity, sentimentality and slightly exalted rhythms.