Ирина Полянская
Biography
Irina Polyanskaya (1952-2004) was the most autobiographical of recent Russian writers, as well as one of the most accomplished. Repelled by the impersonality of history as studied in schools or described in books, she focussed instead on the human past of her family and on family life in general, her view of which was anything but sentimenal.
Polyanskaya was born in 1953, and spent her early years in the ‘Zone' in the Urals, where her convict father was put to work as a scientist. She trained as an actress, studied music, and later attended the Literary Institue in Moscow. For many years, her literary output was largely confined to the genre of the short story, but her last years (before illness cut short her life) brought the publication of several longer works, including The Passing of the Shade (Prokhozhdenie teni, 1997) and The Reading Water (Chitayushchaya voda, 2001). The thread of music runs through the first; cinematic motifs dominate the second.
In his obituary, Andrei Nemzer wrote of Polyanskaya's writing: ‘Rhythmic and musical phrasing, a composition that is regulated by and arranged according to a play of motifs now converging, now branching out away from each other, a wealth of unexpected associations, the ability to see the present day and at the same time remember yesterday in its fullness and multicoloured liveliness - all this was subordinated to the author's main thought, which strove to open up and establish a human (which is to say free and creative) beginning in an illusory and cruel world without freedom.'
Bibliography
http://lib.ru/NEWPROZA/POLYANSKAYA_I/
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