Maria Stepanova (b. 1972) left Russia almost immediately after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 to become one of the most outspoken critics of Putin’s regime and one of the most respected Russophone public intellectuals across the world. In the West, Maria Stepanova is better known as a prose writer than as a poet. Translated into English by Sasha Dugdale, Stepanova’s nonfictional “romance” In Memory of Memory (Pamiati pamiati, 2017) has garnered significant literary accolades, including the short list of the International Booker Prize and the long list of the US National Book Award (for the best book in translation). Two books of poems have also been published in English, War of the Beasts and the Animals (Voina zverei i zhivotnykh) and The Voice Over, which also includes selected essays. Among fans of Russian poetry, since the early 2000s Stepanova has been regarded as the most innovative of the poets working within a paradigm of Russian modernist poetry (a lineage defined by Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Khodasevich), her work further enriched by a serious interaction with Anglophone poetry (see, for example, Stepanova’s collection of free translations For Stevie Smith [Za Stivi Smit]).
Praised by the British newspaper the Guardian as “Russia’s next great writer” and “a writer who will likely be spoken about in the same breath as Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk and Belarus’s Svetlana Alexievich in years to come,” Stepanova in fact persistently eludes any attempt to pin her down to a trend or typology. She is at once classical and experimental, modernist and postmodernist. She is equally intuitive and rational, both intellectually and emotionally sensitive. While being a sophisticated stylist, she is at the same time receptive to the voices of popular culture and street speech. Stepanova’s original voice constantly oscillates between two opposite strategies. One strategy is defined by the quest for freedom through an escape from narrow and debilitating identity into a multitude of performed selves. The second is to ventriloquize the voices (or even “truths”) of others who would otherwise remain muted. Her freedom turns out to be a form of dependence, almost an addiction to diverting selves. This is one of her many aporias.
The critic Mikhail Iampolski made the following observation about the fluidity of Stepanova’s poetic subject: “Stepanova’s ‘personalities’ are unstable, they reflect each other and flow into each other [. . .] This indeterminacy transcends similarities based upon kinship, and mutates into an almost Ovidian stream of metamorphoses.” Curiously enough, his words precede by a number of years the appearance of Stepanova’s poetic cycle Holy Winter, in which Ovid emerges as one of the central voices. It is a work overwhelmingly dominated by the logic of metamorphoses. One may reasonably assume that Stepanova’s Ovid emerged from Covid. As a collection, Holy Winter 20/21, written during a time of pandemic and published in the shadow of Russia’s war with Ukraine, is full of images of snow and emptiness, its subjects taking refuge from a blizzard of events or exiled by hostile forces. Characters and works inhabiting this wondrous book include Kai from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, the Empress Catherine the Great and her general and lover Potemkin, Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia (the wardrobe in this poem originates with the first book), and frozen sounds from the tales of Baron Munchausen. But at its center we see and hear the exiled Ovid complaining about eternal cold and night in passionate poems that defy death and despair. With Ovid’s help, Stepanova unleashes a stream of metamorphoses blurring the borderlines not only between the self and others, but also between life and death, defeat and triumph. While all are seemingly controlled by a winter representing forces beyond everyone’s control, poets and translators prove able to thaw voices lost to repression and accidents of history.
Stepanova has a knack for aporias, and it may even be her preferred method of exploration. Stepanova’s aporias dwell on the impossibility of what is deemed necessary and the vital necessity of the impossible. She cannot avert her gaze from the yawning gap between what we see in reality and how we interpret what we see. There, in this baffling gray area, she detects a glimpse or rather a hope for the light.
Holy Winter explores the continuing condition of living-within-death—whether it is provisional or final, no one can say. This condition results from both the Covid pandemic and the Russian political winter, both of which may very well last longer than an individual’s own life. Stepanova’s vision in this book is simultaneously pessimistic and optimistic, and her wise conclusion is that one has to abandon hope in the knowledge that there will be no release and no escape from our historical condition. When one pandemic ends, another will begin. When this dictator dies, another will replace him. But this condition is not incompatible with creativity and metamorphoses—in other words, with life. We simply have to learn to live within this condition, whatever that seems to be.
To one degree or another, all the poems in the collection Holy Winter investigate the simultaneous flowing of life and death into another: of death on one level of existence and of life (which also means art) on another. These conditions are mutually contradictory, and yet they coexist. Stepanova wrote concerning this collection:
This winter [2020–21] I was struck by the inseparability of time-space-political winter in our general situation, and the fact that the pandemic was experienced as a ‘removal’ (including in the spatial sense) began to seem like a natural continuation of the dead end in which we had found ourselves. And the fact that, in this fatal dead end, it is still possible to write books and make jam doesn’t cancel out anything, but simply divides life into first and second stories, as in a wooden folk puppet booth. We live on one story (where miracles and texts, and the happiness of understanding are all possible), on the other—we know what is on the other.
The simultaneous presence of normal life and the condition of symbolic death, and also the parallelism of pandemic isolation and the political winter, which also leads to isolation, acquired new significance in February 2022, when Russia launched its war against Ukraine. Stepanova was one of the first Russian writers to declare her opposition to the war and the entirety of Russia’s national policy. The destruction of “all our notions of the contemporary world and a social contract,” and the realization of “the unthinkable,” had already been intimated by Stepanova in Holy Winter. […]
Excerpted from ALL THE WORLD ON A PAGE: A CRITICAL ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN RUSSIAN POETRY. Copyright © 2025 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.