The poet Maria Stepanova has a set of formal skills and a vibrant poetic imagination that earned her immediate and sustained attention from readers and prize-giving juries alike. Admired initially for her ballads, she essentially reinvented this nineteenth-century form for postmodern audiences. But her wide-ranging oeuvre includes work in expressive prose, as well as a distinctive reinvention of the lyric as a kind of epic folk narrative that is capacious enough to unfold subtle political and ethical arguments.
Stepanova’s sheer virtuosity could make her seem a poet’s poet, but she has also emerged as a commanding public intellectual, a rare attainment for women in Russian public life. Most important here is her work as chief editor for the web-based journal OpenSpace (2008–12) and for its successor, the vibrant and crowd-funded Colta. With these platforms, she created sites for essays and reviews of cultural innovations and events, as well as for freedom-loving writers and thinkers to share fresh ideas. Like [Elena] Fanailova at Radio Svoboda, Stepanova became an important figure in journalism, if largely working behind the scenes. That work’s ripple effects are great, and it should change how we view Stepanova: she brings a nuanced, well-informed sense of Russia’s history to all that she writes.
She is particularly adept as an essayist, often taking a text or event as a jumping-off point for a broader statement about Russia’s past and present. Stepanova’s leading cultural position was solidified when she published the genre-defying book In Memory of Memory (Pamiati pamiati, 2017); it won prizes in and out of Russia and appeared in foreign translation in multiple languages at high-profile presses. Many parts of this huge book began as separate essays published on high-traffic online sites, teaching an audience how to read its excavation of the poet’s family history. In Memory of Memory was oriented around the process of discovery rather than the facts uncovered. There is a moment when Stepanova lists the traumatic historical events of the twentieth century thought to have spared her family: Revolution and Civil War, the Holocaust, the Terror, the War. But she discovers that images of her family’s safety were largely illusory. That realization lets her inscribe her own family into the shared cultural memories of her generation. None of us is untouched, she suggests, as she draws on Marianne Hirsch’s work with post-memory. Stepanova thus has another thing in common with Fanailova: a readiness to probe the stories of her own family as a means to rejigger the common language for understanding identity and history. That labor can be seen quite early, in a poem she wrote about her great-grandmother, “Sarra on the Barricades” (“Sarra na barrikadakh,” 2005).
Still, something changed when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and went to war with Ukraine. Like Fanailova, Stepanova let the violence of the war into her work, but rather than the centrifugal and generative energies of Fanailova’s many poems, Stepanova concentrated the topic into individual long poems, or cycles. Her subsequent work shows that this is a sustained, generative development in her poetry. […]
Excerpted from THE FREEST SPEECH IN RUSSIA: POETRY UNBOUND, 1989–2022. Copyright © 2024 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.