Encounter

Born in Warsaw, Elizaveta Polonskaya was a Russian Jewish poet, translator, and journalist, and the only female member of the literary group known as the Serapion Brothers. After fleeing the 1905 pogroms in Poland, she spent much of her youth in St. Petersburg and was active in underground socialist politics, before leaving to study medicine at the Sorbonne. Polonskaya returned to Russia after the revolution, where her literary career began in earnest. Close to luminaries such as Lev Lunts and Ilya Ehrenburg, she produced verse rich in biblical and Jewish themes and female sexuality. In the 1930s, Polonskaya worked as a writer and journalist full-time, as well as being a translator of English and a children’s writer, crafting prose sketches and poems in line with the Soviet Union’s ideological literary guidelines. Aware of the sometimes violent repressions of her friends and colleagues, she produced almost no original verse in the postwar era.