Ol’ga Sedakova

Moscow, 1949

O. Sedakova. Ph.: S. Melichov, www.olgasedakova.com

Ol’ga Sedakova was born in Moscow in 1949, daughter of a military engineer who moved as a consultant to Beijing, where Sedakova spent her first years of school (1956-1957). It was her paternal grandmother, Daria Semënovna, who taught her the cultural and social values of the Russian people and the traditions of the Orthodox faith, showing her the way to an identity rooted in spirituality that was firmly opposed to the dictates of Soviet atheism.
Sedakova’s first contact with the arts came at a young age, thanks to the presence of acquaintances who frequented her home, especially the pianist M.G. Erokhin who introduced her to the then unpublished verses of R.M. Rilke.
She began writing verse when she was very young and, while still a girl, published her first writings in “Komsomolskaia Pravda” and “Pionerskaia Pravda”, which already demonstrated her reluctance to adhere to the dictates of the canon of socialist realism. In 1967, she enrolled in the Faculty of Philology at Moscow State University, where she graduated six years later and was then admitted to the PhD course at the Institute of Slavic Studies where she presented a thesis on funeral rites among Eastern and Southern Slavs (revised and published in 2004). The university environment allowed Sedakova to meet individuals who would profoundly influence her writing, such as V. Erofeev who she met in 1968 and whose work, especially Moskva-Petushki, was the subject of several studies by Sedakova (cf. Sedakova 2010d: 741-756). Sedakova’s work initially circulated via the samizdat and, later, through the tamizdat.
From the second half of the 1970s, Sedakova, firm in her “aesthetic and spiritual resistance” (Sandler 2017: 259), approached the circles of the “second culture” in Leningrad, in particular, the philosophical-religious seminars held by V. Krivulin and T. Goricheva, who also edited the magazine “37”. In the 10th issue of the magazine in 1977, the first collection of her verses appeared, entitled Strogie motivi (Rigorous reasons), as well as her translations of several of Rilke’s poems and of the last sonnet of Dante’s Vita Nova: in the editor’s note Sedakova was presented as “the most Leningradian of Moscow’s poets” for the “rigour and clarity of her poetic form”. From then on, Sedakova collaborated continuously with Leningrad’s intellectuals, in particular Krivulin, Goricheva, E. Shvarts, and S. Stratanovskii, and with the magazine “Chasy”, for which she wrote a large number of articles, beginning in 1980. The magazine published her verses, Triptikh iz ballady; kantsony i ballady (Tripticht of ballads; songs and ballads) (no. 23 1980), which included poems previously published in “37” (no. 34 1981), essays dedicated to Rilke’s poetry (no. 36 1982), translations of Rilke’s lyrics (no. 39 1982) and an “autobiographical-analytical-philological” narration. Pokhvala poezii (In Praise of Poetry) (no. 46 1983). In 1983, Sedakova received the Andrei Belyi Literary Prize for her poetry and her acceptance speech was published in “Chasy”, no. 47 of 1984. The year 1985 saw the publication of a sylloge of verses, Iz sbornika “Vorota, okna, arki” (From the Collection “Doors, Windows and Arches”), which was published by the YMCA Press in 1986, the year in which a stanza of her poetry also appeared in issue no. 141 of “Grani”.
Sedakova is recognised as an intellectual, poet and translator of great worth (cf. Ėpshtein 2005).  After the fall of the Soviet Union, her works were finally published in her homeland. Since 1991, the year in which the first collection of her work appeared in the former USSR, Kitaiskoe puteshestvie. Stely I nadpisi. Starye pesni, (A Journey jn China, Stelae and Inscriptions, Old songs), many of her works have been published including an anthology of her writing in 2001 (cf. Sedakova 2001) and her complete works in four volumes, Stikhi, Perevody, Poetica and Moralia (Verses, Translations, Poetics, Moralia) in 2010. Translations (perevody) are an important part of the Sedakovian corpus. Alongside her translations of works in modern European languages by, for example, P. Celan, T.S. Eliot, P. Claudel, J. Donn, and Rilke (cf. Sedakova 2020a), are translations of medieval Italian literature, especially Dante’s Divine Comedy (cf. Sedakova 2020b), but also Petrarch and St. Francis. Sedakova also had a profound knowledge of medieval ecclesiastical Slavic literature.
As well as being a writer and translator, Sedakova was a dedicated scholar.  During her university years, she met and established links with important academics in Moscow. Her mentors included the philologist and linguist M. Panov and N. Tolstoi, whose courses on ethnolinguistics and Slavic folklore strongly influenced Sedakova. Thanks to Tolstoi, from 1974, she attended J. Lotman’s lectures on semiotics and literary analysis in Tartu. Sedakova also established links with S.S. Averintsev and V.V. Bibikhin two eminent scholars who also frequented “non-aligned” Moscow circles, specialists in different but contiguous fields.   Averintsev was a philologist and Byzantinist and an expert in patristic and biblical hermeneutics. Bibikhin was a philosopher and secretary to A. Losev who specialised in the Italian Renaissance and was also a translator of M. Heidegger and L. Wittgenstein. Both established close intellectual associations with Sedakova that lasted for many years, and both offered important analyses and interpretations of her poetry. From 1992, Bibikhin held cycles of lectures dedicated to Sedakova’s poetry, whose verses were read “to discover what the word says to us in Russia, and what new words Russia will say” (Bibikhin 2009: 282). Averintsev wrote the afterword to the 1994 collection of Sedakova’s lyrics and an introduction to the subsequent anthology of verse and prose (cf. Sedakova 2001). According to Averintsev, Sedakova’s words while echoing “what the lexicon of the ascetic tradition calls the ‘remembrance of death’, the ability to look from the side of the end” (Sedakova 2008a: 155) are to be “kept, like a talisman we clasp in our hands” (Ibid.: 151). Averintsev believed that the Christian Orthodox theological and liturgical tradition must be understood by those who pray: this conviction led him to write the dictionary Sofia-Logos (Kiev 2006, published posthumously) and is echoed in many of Sedakova’s writings, especially in the vocabulary of complex liturgical terms (Sedakova 2008b). Thanks to Averintsev, Sedakova established lasting contacts with Italian intellectuals, especially with V. Strada, who invited her to Italy in 1989, and with the Vatican, where, from 1995, she went with Averintsev to participate in the “Solov’ëvskian meetings” with John Paul II. The contribution of these figures to Sedakova’s thinking is evident in the fourth volume of her 2010 opera omnia, Moralia, as well as in the recent volumes dedicated to Averintsev’s intellectual legacy (Sedakova 2019) and her correspondence with Bibikhin (Sedakova 2020c).
In recent years, Sedakova has consolidated her position as a leading intellectual on the contemporary international scene. Many of her works have been translated and she has received many awards (such as the “Lerici Pea” for her career, 2020).  In 2017 an anthology of studies in Russian and English of her poetry was published (Sandler 2017 and 2019).

Iris Karafillidis
[30th June 2021]

Translation by Iris Karafillidis

Bibliography

Selected primary sources

• Sedakova O.A., Vorota, okna, arki, YMCA Press, Parigi 1986.
• Sedakova O.A., Kitaiskoe puteshestvie. Stely i nadpisi. Starye pesni, Gnozis, Moskva 1991.
• Sedakova O.A., Stichi, afterword by S.S. Averintsev, Gnozis, Moskva 1994.
• Sedakova O.A., Sochineniia v 2-kh tt., NQF, Moskva 2001.
• Sedakova O.A., Poėtika obriada. Pogrebal’naia obriadnost’ vostochnych i iuzhnych slavian, Indrik, Moskva 2004.
• Sedakova O.A., Solo nel fuoco si semina il fuoco. Poesie, Mainardi A. (ed.), Edizioni Qjqajon, Magnano (BI) 2008a.
• Sedakova O.A., Slovar’ trudnykh slov iz bogosluzheniia: Tserkovnoslaviano-russkie paronimy, Greko-latinsky kabinet Iu.A. Shichalina, Moskva 2008b (3a eds. 2021).
• Sedakova O.A., Elogio della poesia, Chessa F. (ed.), Aracne, Roma 2012.
• Sedakova O.A., Stikhi. Perevody. Poetica. Moralia. Sobranie sochinenii v 4 t., Universitet Dmitriia Pozharskogo, Moskva 2010 (a, b, c, d).
• Sedakova O.A., I slova slovu otvechaet. Vladimir Bibikhin – Ol’ga Sedakova. Pis’ma 1992-2004 godov, Izd. Ivana Limbakha, Sankt-Peterburg 2019.
• Sedakova O.A, Chetyre poeta Ril’ke, Klodel’, Ėliot, Celan, Jaromir Hladik Press, Moskva 2020a.
• Sedakova O.A, Perevesti Dante, Izd. Ivana Limbakha, Moskva 2020b.
• Sedakova O.A., Sergei Sergeevich Averintsev: Vospominania. Razmyshleniia. Posviascheniia. Svyato-Filaretovskii pravoslavno-khristianskii institut, Moskva 2020c.

Secondary sources

• Bibikhin V.V., Grammatika poėzii. Novoe russkoe slovo, Izd. Ivana Limbakha, Sankt-Peterburg 2009.
• Ėpshtein M.N., Postmodern v russkoi literature, Vysshaia shkola, Moskva 2005.
• Sandler S. (ed.), Ol’ga Sedakova: Stikhi, smysly, prochteniia: Sbornik nauchnikh statei, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, Moskva 2017 (ed. ing. Madison 2019).
• von Zitzewitz, J., Olga Sedakova’s Journey poems: The spirituality of form, “Literature and Theology”, 2014: 1-16.