Female images and trauma visualization in the blockade text of Olga Bergholz

This work investigates the role of female images in the representation of trauma in the blockade narrative by O. F. Bergholz. Her poetic texts for propaganda posters “Okna TASS” and the poem “Conversation with a neighbor” portray realistic images of women. The poem “The February Diary” conveys the blockade trauma through the aesthetics of silence, filled with existential semantics. In “Leningrad Poem,” the poet emphasizes the loss of sacred traditions: the disconsolate mother cannot bury her child. In “Leningrad Autumn,” Bergholz reproduces real everyday life and religious-mystical being: the figure of a woman holding a board with nails visualizes a graphic symbol - a cross, manifesting the burden of people’s ordeal. In the novel “Day Stars,” the chapter “Smoke Break,” the author depicts the emotional and moral threshold crossed by two Leningrad women, sitting on a sled with a coffin and having a smoke break. In the passage “Banya” from the unfinished second part of “Day stars,” Bergholz breaks through to the “existentially uncomfortable writing” and visualizes the blockade trauma in the category of physicality traditionally tabooed in the literature of the Soviet period. The naked female body becomes exceptionally expressive and serves as a sign to reveal new meanings in the literary text. Skinny bodies being the norm, the appearance of a buxom beauty in the bathhouse caused anger: the blockade women identified her as an enemy. The author of the paper defines Leningrad women, considered in the framework of trauma studies, as a “community of loss” of female identity.

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