Poet Vera Pavlova visited campus during the fall semester to work with students on creative writing in Russian. The visits were sponsored jointly by the Arts Initiative Grant and the Academic Enhancement Fund under the sponsorship of CAS. Translated into twenty-three languages and the author of eighteen poetry collections, Pavlova led workshops with students in second- and third-year Russian.
Following Pavlova’s prompts, students hand-wrote miniature books in two languages. Small forms are an art form that the poet favors: most of her poems are quite short, varying from a few lines to a stanza in length. The subject of the books is bold, idiosyncratic and playfully mystical, much like Pavlova’s work: students wrote from the perspective of an embryo who thinks, philosophizes, and writes. In the BU students’ renditions, the narrator wonders what life outside the womb may be like (“mysterious, muffled, dark”) and contemplates why he or she wants to be born (“to fly… to rest… to die,” as one group decided).
On another visit to the Russian classrooms, Pavlova guided students into a later stage of life: collectively, they compiled a mini-dictionary of what she called “the language of Adam,” or the first words the students uttered as children, in English, Russian, and other languages, if appropriate. They then collectively improvised poetry in Russian with the use of these words.
For more information about Pavlova’s visit, please contact Olga Livshin, head of the Russian language program, at olivshin@bu.edu.
