Elizaveta Polonskaya
Encyclopedia
Elizaveta Grigorevna Polonskaya , born Movshenson
, was a Russian Jewish poet, translator, and journalist, the only female member of the Serapion Brothers
.
(in Congress Poland
, part of the Russian Empire
); her father, Grigory Lvovich Movshenson, was an engineer who had graduated with high honors from the Riga Polytechnical Institute
and her mother, Charlotta Ilinichna (née Meylakh), came from a large Jewish merchant family in Białystok. The main language in the household was Russian, but Liza was also taught French, German, Italian, and English. Because of her father's professional status, he was granted the right to live outside the Pale of Settlement
, and the family moved often; shortly after Liza's birth, they moved to Łódź, where she spent most of her childhood. She attended the women's gymnasium
there and became interested in politics, taking part (with the help of her mother) in secret groups studying Belinsky
and political economy
. However, she also studied Judaism
with a rabbi, and "not only the stories themselves but also the biblical language (albeit in Russian translation) made a deep impression on her; her solemn, rhetorical verse is often marked by Slavonicisms."
Worried by the 1905 pogroms
, her father sent Liza, her mother, and her brother Alexander to Berlin
, where Charlotta's sister Fanny lived; there Liza joined another young people's study group, where she first read Marx
. The following year the family moved to St. Petersburg, where she began to work for the Bolshevik cell in the Semyannikov section of the Nevskaya Zastava district, occasionally being sent to Finland
to pick up leaflets from Lenin to distribute in St. Petersburg. In 1908, in order to avoid arrest and to further her education, she went to Paris
, where she enrolled in the medical school of the Sorbonne
. She attended meetings of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, where she met young people who shared her love of poetry and introduced her to the Russian symbolist
poets, who made a deep impression on her. In 1909 these friends introduced her to Ilya Ehrenburg
, a meeting that was significant for both of them. For a time they were inseparable, and it was she who introduced Ehrenburg to modern poetry and inspired his first verses, as he describes in his memoirs. Leslie Dorfman Davis writes: "Aside from poetry, Erenburg and Movšenson shared a satirical impulse which provoked disapproval from some of their older comrades. [...] Movšenson and Erenburg [jointly] published two journals, Byvšie ljudi (Former People) and Tixoe semejstvo (A Quiet Family), in which they 'rather caustically, without any sort of reverence, mocked the manners of the Bolshevik circle, insulting even the 'chiefs' (Plexanov, Lenin, Trotskij), and therefore had a sensational response.' [...] Although they quarreled and Erenburg fell in love with another woman, Ekaterina Schmidt, he and Movšenson remained friends and corresponded until his death." While in Paris, Liza became acquainted with both Russian and French writers and drifted away from her affiliation with the Bolsheviks; unlike other members of the emigré community (but like Ehrenburg), she was fluent in French and immersed in the intellectual and artistic life of the city. It was also in Paris that she published her first poems.
In 1914 she graduated from medical school, and after the outbreak of the First World War, she worked for a few months at a hospital in Nancy and then helped run a newly organized military hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine
. In March 1915 she learned that Russian doctors who had trained abroad were being urged to return and receive Russian diplomas so they could serve on the Eastern Front, and she made her way back to Russia via a steamship to Greece and a train through the Balkans. On her arrival in Petrograd, she found her family mourning her father's death; she received her diploma from the University of Tartu
and the title of lekar (physician) in July and went to the Galician front, where she remained until April 1917 supervising an epidemiological division. It was during this period that she met an engineer named Lev Davidovich Polonsky in Kiev; they became lovers and had a son, Mikhail. Although they did not marry (the relationship ended because of another woman to whom he was apparently already engaged), Liza took his family name (she was known as Polonskaya for the rest of her life), and the two kept up a correspondence (he apparently asked her to marry him years later, after his wife died, and she refused, preferring her independence). She left her infant son with her family and briefly returned to the front.
occurred. From then until the 1930s, she worked in different Soviet medical settings, combining medicine with her writing. By the winter of 1918-19, she was writing in her spare moments, and when she learned (from a streetcar advertisement) of the courses being offered by the Translators' Studio at the publishing house World Literature , newly established by Maxim Gorky
, she immediately went to the Dom Muruzi (Muruzi
House) and signed up for Nikolay Gumilev's poetry class and Viktor Shklovsky
's class on literary theory. It was there that she met and befriended the writers who were soon to form the Serapion Brothers; she was particularly close to Lev Lunts
, whom she called "the most serapionic" of the group, and shared his insistence on artistic independence and the importance of Western literature (as opposed to the "Scythianism," or Russian exclusivity, that was popular at the time). Even after the slow dissolution of the group (around the time of Lunts's emigration in 1923 and premature death in 1924), she kept in touch with a number of the Serapions and their friends, particularly Veniamin Kaverin
and Korney Chukovsky
. She published her second verse collection, Pod kammenym dozhdyom (Under a stone rain), in 1923; by the time of her third, Upryamy kalendar (A stubborn calendar), in 1929, she had begun to move "from strictly lyric poetry to ballads, narrative poems, and literary portraits." From the 1920s she worked as a translator (beginning with Rudyard Kipling
's "Ballad of East and West"), bringing into Russian works by Shakespeare, Victor Hugo
, Julian Tuwim
, and others, as well as the Armenian epic David of Sasun
. Chukovsky also helped her establish herself as a poet for children.
she and her family had to leave Leningrad for the Urals, first in Polazna
and then (from November 1942) in Molotov
. During this period she worked for a time as a school doctor, but on her return to Leningrad in 1944 she became once again a full-time writer.
of the late 1940s was not only painful for her because of the vicious attacks on friends like Mikhail Zoshchenko
, it was dangerous for her because of her association with the Serapion Brothers, whose principles were now considered heretical by the Party, and the persecution of Jews and doctors involved in the Doctors' plot
of early 1953 added to her peril. Although she continued to work as a translator and journalist (her sketches were published almost exclusively in Gudok [Train Whistle]), her only book published between 1945 and 1960 was Na svoikh plechakh [On their own shoulders] (1948), a collection of short prose pieces about the heroism of young Red Cross nurses in Leningrad during the war which was favorably reviewed. In the late 1950s she was abruptly dismissed from her post as head of the Translators' Section of the Writers Union. However, by 1960 she was able to publish a collection of her poetry, and another followed in 1966 (both consisted mostly of earlier work, with a few new poems). She also began publishing selections from her memoirs, though she was never able to publish them in book form (a collection was finally published in 2008). Illness forced her to stop writing in 1967, and she died in January 1969.
called her "the most gifted of the young poetesses"—she fell into obscurity, both because of the difficulty of keeping a career going as a single mother and for political reasons. Her name began to be mentioned again with the revival of interest in the Serapion Brothers from the 1960s on, but only as a member of that group; the most attention she received until the publication of Leslie Dorfman Davis's critical study Serapion Sister in 2001 was from Wolfgang Kasack, who wrote that her poetry was "clear and beautiful," avoiding obvious emotion and sometimes sounding prosaic, "acting on the reader through its humanness and depth of thought alone."
Viktor Shklovsky
wrote of her:
, was a Russian Jewish poet, translator, and journalist, the only female member of the Serapion Brothers
Serapion Brothers
The Serapion Brothers was a group of writers formed in Petrograd, Russia in 1921. The group was named after a literary group, Die Serapionsbrüder , to which German romantic author E.T.A. Hoffmann belonged and after which he named a collection of his tales...
.
Early life
Elizaveta (Liza) Movshenson was born in WarsawWarsaw
Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River, roughly from the Baltic Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population in 2010 was estimated at 1,716,855 residents with a greater metropolitan area of 2,631,902 residents, making Warsaw the 10th most...
(in Congress Poland
Congress Poland
The Kingdom of Poland , informally known as Congress Poland , created in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna, was a personal union of the Russian parcel of Poland with the Russian Empire...
, part of the Russian Empire
Russian Empire
The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...
); her father, Grigory Lvovich Movshenson, was an engineer who had graduated with high honors from the Riga Polytechnical Institute
Riga Technical University
Riga Technical University is located in Riga, Latvia.- Riga Polytechnical Institute, 1862-1918 :...
and her mother, Charlotta Ilinichna (née Meylakh), came from a large Jewish merchant family in Białystok. The main language in the household was Russian, but Liza was also taught French, German, Italian, and English. Because of her father's professional status, he was granted the right to live outside the Pale of Settlement
Pale of Settlement
The Pale of Settlement was the term given to a region of Imperial Russia, in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed, and beyond which Jewish permanent residency was generally prohibited...
, and the family moved often; shortly after Liza's birth, they moved to Łódź, where she spent most of her childhood. She attended the women's gymnasium
Gymnasium (school)
A gymnasium is a type of school providing secondary education in some parts of Europe, comparable to English grammar schools or sixth form colleges and U.S. college preparatory high schools. The word γυμνάσιον was used in Ancient Greece, meaning a locality for both physical and intellectual...
there and became interested in politics, taking part (with the help of her mother) in secret groups studying Belinsky
Vissarion Belinsky
Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky was a Russian literary critic of Westernizing tendency. He was an associate of Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin , and other critical intellectuals...
and political economy
Political economy
Political economy originally was the term for studying production, buying, and selling, and their relations with law, custom, and government, as well as with the distribution of national income and wealth, including through the budget process. Political economy originated in moral philosophy...
. However, she also studied Judaism
Judaism
Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...
with a rabbi, and "not only the stories themselves but also the biblical language (albeit in Russian translation) made a deep impression on her; her solemn, rhetorical verse is often marked by Slavonicisms."
Worried by the 1905 pogroms
Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire
The term pogrom as a reference to large-scale, targeted, and repeated antisemitic rioting saw its first use in the 19th century.The first pogrom is often considered to be the 1821 Odessa pogroms after the death of the Greek Orthodox patriarch Gregory V in Constantinople, in which 14 Jews were killed...
, her father sent Liza, her mother, and her brother Alexander to Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
, where Charlotta's sister Fanny lived; there Liza joined another young people's study group, where she first read Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
. The following year the family moved to St. Petersburg, where she began to work for the Bolshevik cell in the Semyannikov section of the Nevskaya Zastava district, occasionally being sent to Finland
Finland
Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...
to pick up leaflets from Lenin to distribute in St. Petersburg. In 1908, in order to avoid arrest and to further her education, she went to Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, where she enrolled in the medical school of the Sorbonne
Sorbonne
The Sorbonne is an edifice of the Latin Quarter, in Paris, France, which has been the historical house of the former University of Paris...
. She attended meetings of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, where she met young people who shared her love of poetry and introduced her to the Russian symbolist
Russian Symbolism
Russian symbolism was an intellectual and artistic movement predominant at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It represented the Russian branch of the symbolist movement in European art, and was mostly known for its contributions to Russian poetry.-Russian symbolism in...
poets, who made a deep impression on her. In 1909 these friends introduced her to Ilya Ehrenburg
Ilya Ehrenburg
Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg was a Soviet writer, journalist, translator, and cultural figure.Ehrenburg is among the most prolific and notable authors of the Soviet Union; he published around one hundred titles. He became known first and foremost as a novelist and a journalist - in particular, as a...
, a meeting that was significant for both of them. For a time they were inseparable, and it was she who introduced Ehrenburg to modern poetry and inspired his first verses, as he describes in his memoirs. Leslie Dorfman Davis writes: "Aside from poetry, Erenburg and Movšenson shared a satirical impulse which provoked disapproval from some of their older comrades. [...] Movšenson and Erenburg [jointly] published two journals, Byvšie ljudi (Former People) and Tixoe semejstvo (A Quiet Family), in which they 'rather caustically, without any sort of reverence, mocked the manners of the Bolshevik circle, insulting even the 'chiefs' (Plexanov, Lenin, Trotskij), and therefore had a sensational response.' [...] Although they quarreled and Erenburg fell in love with another woman, Ekaterina Schmidt, he and Movšenson remained friends and corresponded until his death." While in Paris, Liza became acquainted with both Russian and French writers and drifted away from her affiliation with the Bolsheviks; unlike other members of the emigré community (but like Ehrenburg), she was fluent in French and immersed in the intellectual and artistic life of the city. It was also in Paris that she published her first poems.
In 1914 she graduated from medical school, and after the outbreak of the First World War, she worked for a few months at a hospital in Nancy and then helped run a newly organized military hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine
Neuilly-sur-Seine
Neuilly-sur-Seine is a commune in the western suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the center of Paris.Although Neuilly is technically a suburb of Paris, it is immediately adjacent to the city and directly extends it. The area is composed of mostly wealthy, select residential...
. In March 1915 she learned that Russian doctors who had trained abroad were being urged to return and receive Russian diplomas so they could serve on the Eastern Front, and she made her way back to Russia via a steamship to Greece and a train through the Balkans. On her arrival in Petrograd, she found her family mourning her father's death; she received her diploma from the University of Tartu
University of Tartu
The University of Tartu is a classical university in the city of Tartu, Estonia. University of Tartu is the national university of Estonia; it is the biggest and highest-ranked university in Estonia...
and the title of lekar (physician) in July and went to the Galician front, where she remained until April 1917 supervising an epidemiological division. It was during this period that she met an engineer named Lev Davidovich Polonsky in Kiev; they became lovers and had a son, Mikhail. Although they did not marry (the relationship ended because of another woman to whom he was apparently already engaged), Liza took his family name (she was known as Polonskaya for the rest of her life), and the two kept up a correspondence (he apparently asked her to marry him years later, after his wife died, and she refused, preferring her independence). She left her infant son with her family and briefly returned to the front.
Career
On her final return to Petrograd in the spring of 1917, she had little time for either politics or literature; to support her family, which was in dire straits after her father's death, she took a job as assistant to a municipal charity doctor on Vasilyevsky Island, and was merely a spectator when the October RevolutionOctober Revolution
The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...
occurred. From then until the 1930s, she worked in different Soviet medical settings, combining medicine with her writing. By the winter of 1918-19, she was writing in her spare moments, and when she learned (from a streetcar advertisement) of the courses being offered by the Translators' Studio at the publishing house World Literature , newly established by Maxim Gorky
Maxim Gorky
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov , primarily known as Maxim Gorky , was a Russian and Soviet author, a founder of the Socialist Realism literary method and a political activist.-Early years:...
, she immediately went to the Dom Muruzi (Muruzi
Mourousis family
The Mourousis or Moruzi are a family which was first mentioned in the Empire of Trebizond. Its origins have been lost, but the two prevalent theories are that they were either a local family originating in a village which has a related name or else one that arrived with the Venetians during the...
House) and signed up for Nikolay Gumilev's poetry class and Viktor Shklovsky
Viktor Shklovsky
Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky was a Russian and Soviet critic, writer, and pamphleteer.-Life:...
's class on literary theory. It was there that she met and befriended the writers who were soon to form the Serapion Brothers; she was particularly close to Lev Lunts
Lev Lunts
Lev Natanovich Lunts was a Russian/Jewish writer, playwright, critic, translator, and essayist. He was a member of the Serapion Brothers literary group.-Biography:...
, whom she called "the most serapionic" of the group, and shared his insistence on artistic independence and the importance of Western literature (as opposed to the "Scythianism," or Russian exclusivity, that was popular at the time). Even after the slow dissolution of the group (around the time of Lunts's emigration in 1923 and premature death in 1924), she kept in touch with a number of the Serapions and their friends, particularly Veniamin Kaverin
Veniamin Kaverin
Veniamin Alexandrovich Kaverin was a Soviet writer associated with the early 1920s movement of the Serapion Brothers. The immunologist Lev Zilber was his older brother, and the critic Yury Tynyanov was his brother-in-law....
and Korney Chukovsky
Korney Chukovsky
Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky was one of the most popular children's poets in the Russian language. His poems, Doctor Aybolit , The Giant Roach , The Crocodile , and Wash'em'clean have been favourites with many generations of Russophone children...
. She published her second verse collection, Pod kammenym dozhdyom (Under a stone rain), in 1923; by the time of her third, Upryamy kalendar (A stubborn calendar), in 1929, she had begun to move "from strictly lyric poetry to ballads, narrative poems, and literary portraits." From the 1920s she worked as a translator (beginning with Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...
's "Ballad of East and West"), bringing into Russian works by Shakespeare, Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....
, Julian Tuwim
Julian Tuwim
Julian Tuwim , sometimes used pseudonym "Oldlen" when writing song lyrics. He was a Polish poet, born in Łódź, Congress Poland, Russian Empire, of Jewish parents, and educated in Łódź and Warsaw where he studied law and philosophy at Warsaw University...
, and others, as well as the Armenian epic David of Sasun
David of Sasun
David of Sasun or David of Sassoun is an Armenian epic hero from the Daredevils of Sassoun who drove Arab invaders out of Armenia.The Sasuntsi Davit is an Armenian national epic poem recounting David's exploits...
. Chukovsky also helped her establish herself as a poet for children.
1930s and 1940s
In 1931 Polonskaya gave up the practice of medicine to become a full-time writer, focusing on prose sketches; the turn from creative writing to journalism was common among women poets at the time, for example her friend Maria Shkapskaya. Towards the end of the decade "she was suffering from a worrisome heart condition, which interfered with her work and contributed to recurring bouts of despair," but shortly after the German invasion of USSROperation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that began on 22 June 1941. Over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a front., the largest invasion in the history of warfare...
she and her family had to leave Leningrad for the Urals, first in Polazna
Polazna
Polazna is an urban locality under the administrative jurisdiction of the town of Dobryanka in Perm Krai, Russia, located on the east bank of Kama Reservoir, north of Perm and south of Dobryanka...
and then (from November 1942) in Molotov
Perm
Perm is a city and the administrative center of Perm Krai, Russia, located on the banks of the Kama River, in the European part of Russia near the Ural Mountains. From 1940 to 1957 it was named Molotov ....
. During this period she worked for a time as a school doctor, but on her return to Leningrad in 1944 she became once again a full-time writer.
Postwar
After the war, she suffered both personal and professional setbacks. In December 1945 her beloved mother had a stroke, dying in January 1946, and her projected novel about the rebuilding of Leningrad, Gorod [The city], was rejected by the publisher, forcing her to return an advance she had already spent (she managed to get Litfond, the writers' literary fund, to pay the advance in exchange for literary work). Furthermore, the zhdanovshchinaZhdanov Doctrine
The Zhdanov Doctrine was a Soviet cultural doctrine developed by the Central Committee secretary Andrei Zhdanov in 1946. It proposed that the world was divided into two camps: the imperialistic, headed by the United States; and democratic, headed by the Soviet Union...
of the late 1940s was not only painful for her because of the vicious attacks on friends like Mikhail Zoshchenko
Mikhail Zoshchenko
-Biography:Zoshchenko was born in 1895, in Poltava, but spent most of his life in St. Petersburg / Leningrad. His Ukrainian father was a mosaicist responsible for the exterior decoration of the Suvorov Museum in Saint Petersburg. The future writer attended the Faculty of Law at the Saint Petersburg...
, it was dangerous for her because of her association with the Serapion Brothers, whose principles were now considered heretical by the Party, and the persecution of Jews and doctors involved in the Doctors' plot
Doctors' plot
The Doctors' plot was the most dramatic anti-Jewish episode in the Soviet Union during Joseph Stalin's regime, involving the "unmasking" of a group of prominent Moscow doctors, predominantly Jews, as conspiratorial assassins of Soviet leaders...
of early 1953 added to her peril. Although she continued to work as a translator and journalist (her sketches were published almost exclusively in Gudok [Train Whistle]), her only book published between 1945 and 1960 was Na svoikh plechakh [On their own shoulders] (1948), a collection of short prose pieces about the heroism of young Red Cross nurses in Leningrad during the war which was favorably reviewed. In the late 1950s she was abruptly dismissed from her post as head of the Translators' Section of the Writers Union. However, by 1960 she was able to publish a collection of her poetry, and another followed in 1966 (both consisted mostly of earlier work, with a few new poems). She also began publishing selections from her memoirs, though she was never able to publish them in book form (a collection was finally published in 2008). Illness forced her to stop writing in 1967, and she died in January 1969.
Reception
Although Polonskaya was highly respected in the 1920s—in 1926 the critic D. S. MirskyD. S. Mirsky
D.S. Mirsky is the English pen-name of Dmitry Petrovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky , often known as Prince Mirsky , a Russian political and literary historian who promoted the knowledge and translations of Russian literature in Britain and of English literature in the Soviet Union.-Life:A scion of the...
called her "the most gifted of the young poetesses"—she fell into obscurity, both because of the difficulty of keeping a career going as a single mother and for political reasons. Her name began to be mentioned again with the revival of interest in the Serapion Brothers from the 1960s on, but only as a member of that group; the most attention she received until the publication of Leslie Dorfman Davis's critical study Serapion Sister in 2001 was from Wolfgang Kasack, who wrote that her poetry was "clear and beautiful," avoiding obvious emotion and sometimes sounding prosaic, "acting on the reader through its humanness and depth of thought alone."
Viktor Shklovsky
Viktor Shklovsky
Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky was a Russian and Soviet critic, writer, and pamphleteer.-Life:...
wrote of her:
Like A. Veksler, Elizaveta Polonskaya wore black gloves on her hands. It was the sign of their order.
Polonskaya writes poems. Out in the world, she's a doctor, a calm and strong person. Jewish, but not an imitator. Her blood is good and thick. She writes little. She has some good poems about present-day Russia. The typesetters liked them.
Sources
- Leslie Dorfman Davis, Serapion Sister: The Poetry of Elizaveta Polonskaja, Northwestern University Press, 2001, ISBN 0810115794.
Poetry
- Znamenya [Signs], Petrograd: Erato, 1921.
- Pod kammenym dozhdyom [Under a stone rain], Petrograd: Polyarnaya zvezda, 1923.
- Upryamy kalendar [A stubborn calendar], Leningrad: Izdatelstvo pisatelei, 1929.
- Goda: Izbrannye stikhi [Years: Selected verse], Leningrad: Izdatelstvo pisatelei, 1935.
- Novye stikhi, 1932-1936 [New verses, 1932-1936], Leningrad: Goslitizdat, 1937.
- Vremena muzhestva [Times of courage], Leningrad: Goslitizdat, 1940.
- Kamskaya tetrad [A KamaKama RiverKama is a major river in Russia, the longest left tributary of the Volga and the largest one in discharge; in fact, it is larger than the Volga before junction....
notebook], MolotovPermPerm is a city and the administrative center of Perm Krai, Russia, located on the banks of the Kama River, in the European part of Russia near the Ural Mountains. From 1940 to 1957 it was named Molotov ....
: Molotovskoe oblastnoe izdatelstvo, 1945. - Stikhotvoreniya i poema [Verses and a long poem], Leningrad: Sovetsky pisatel, 1960.
- Izbrannoe [Selected], Moscow and Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1966.
- Stikhotvoreniya i poemy [Verses and long poems], St. Petersburg: Pushkin House, 2010.
Prose
- Poezdka na Ural [Voyage to the Urals], Leningrad: Priboi, 1927.
- Lyudi sovetskikh budnei [People of Soviet workdays], Leningrad: Izdatelstvo pisatelei, 1934.
- Na svoikh plechakh [On their own shoulders], Moscow and Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1948.
- Goroda i vstrechi [Cities and meetings], Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2008.
External links
- Boris Frezinsky, Затаившаяся муза (in Russian; includes selection of Polonskaya's poetry)
- Selection from Goroda i vstrechi (memoirs) (in Russian)