In her project "Embracing Twilight: Older Women Poets and the Unfurling of Their Voices," 2025 Harvard Horizons Scholar Alex Braslavsky brings together the works of three Slavic poets to explore how the creative process evolves with age and what work by artists in their advanced age reveals about the human condition.
The figure of the young, tragic male poet has long dominated cultural narratives about artistic brilliance and early death. But what if poetic genius deepens, rather than fades, with age? In this talk given at the 2025 Harvard Horizons Symposium, Slavic languages and literatures PhD candidate and Harvard Horizons Scholar Alex Braslavsky explores the creative power of poets in their advanced age in her project, "Embracing Twilight: Older Women Poets and the Unfurling of Their Voices". Focusing on three radical women writers, Braslavsky examines how aging can become a source of artistic innovation, personal transformation, and visionary insight. Drawing on archival research and a deep connection to Slavic literary traditions, her work challenges dominant cultural myths of decline and illuminates the enduring power of late-life creativity.
Close your eyes and picture a poet. Whose face comes to mind, and how old are they? Many people might think of the youthful face of someone like John Keats, pictured here. His youth is fetishized, even to the point of being demarcated on his headstone. But what would it have meant if we had several more decades of work from someone like Keats? Would we expect his work to stay the same or continue to change? In my work, I look at an emerging counterpoint to the male poet who dies fatefully young, and that is the older woman poet who lives into her 90s.
If the younger poet of a bygone age cries, "carpe diem," an older woman poet might instead embrace a wider scope of time. We might expect these women writers to be outdated in their writing styles, but they are some of our most innovative contributors to the world of arts and letters. My research pulls together three aged women poets from across the Slavic world who find themselves beyond the traditional canon of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and who are radical practitioners of their art. Each of them lived through turbulent historical changes, Nazism, communism, the fall of the Soviet Union, and they wrote their way through these changes.
Bohumila Grogerová was a Czech experimental poet. At the age of 87, she wrote a poetry collection. And here's how she opens the book:
"The fog coils. I elbow my way out of this fog in vain. Everywhere I look, a porridge of gray-green pearls."
The poet wrote this collection as she was going blind. As she loses more of her ability to see, she begins having phantom hallucinations, common to those with profound vision loss, where the brain makes an image in the absence of one. She sees and observes these warpings and discolorations in her sight as beautiful images in their own right, here as pearls, renowned for their ethereal beauty.
She sees visions in her mind that come from her memory. She writes:
"Today, I see a thinning of radiant drops, fountains of lights, fireworks as the days go by."
Writing about the process of going blind becomes the reformation of her vision rather than the loss of it. The poet moves from the visual to the visionary. Age and agency dovetail on the page for her and her poetry pushes back against narratives of darkness and decline in old age. People might expect the elderly to write about the past, since there's so much behind them to write about. But Russian poet Elizabeta Mnatsakanova captures the unity of the arts and their eternity instead of solely focusing on the present moment.
Mnatsakanova believed that there was no separation between literature, visual art, and music. And we can see her mixing of mediums at play in her handmade art books. Working in the archive, I have honed in on one of these poetic cycles called The Book of Childhood, which she worked on for nearly half a century. And I have noticed that every 10 years or so, she produced a radically revised, entirely new version of the book.
There is no final version of it. From 1973 to 2018. What did the poet mean by doing this? Mnatsakanova was setting her poetry into motion and making a statement about the evolution, mutability, and eternity of poetic craft. Her art ages alongside of her.
Yet another aged woman poet might hone in on the intricacies of the present moment, as in the case of Polish poet Krystyna Miłobędzka. This is a poet who did not receive recognition for her work until she was in her 60s. Here's a poem that she published during that time of her emergence from obscurity:
[Spoken in Russian]
(Translated from Russian: “I am. Co-alive, co-active. Co-green, co-tree. Co-open with the window, co-flowing with the river. All of me but all of me nowhere to be found. Co-fleeting, co-skyward. Half a century I have lived for this!”)
There's a charged symbiosis between all living things in her work. The self coexists with her natural surroundings. And this dissipation of ego has come with the wisdom of years with the passage of half a century.
These women offer a number of ways that we may respond to our aging as human beings, seizing upon vivid memories and producing new visions, developing one's art in service of eternity, and surrendering the self to the present. And while the cultural zeitgeist tells us to fear aging, aging is more a part of the human experience than ever before.
These women show us through their work that time can be filtered through our perception of it, that time can be measured as much emotionally as it can empirically. And this image we have of the myth of the poet who flames out early is displaced by three poets who were long-lived, who grew and changed. Being long-lived was a blessing for them as they developed their work over time. Thank you.