Maria Stepanova (II) — Holy Winter
Maria Stepanova (1972 –) is a Russian poet, novelist, journalist, and the founder of online arts and culture forum, Colta.ru. Born in Moscow, she is one of Russian literature’s most influential contemporary voices, having published over ten collections of poetry as well as the 2017 non-fiction novel, In Memory of Memory (shortlisted for the Booker Prize). Stepanova is a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin’s political regime and full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She lives and writes from Berlin, where she has resided February 2022. She is a poet of immense technical and stylistic mastery, renowned for her command over canonical Russian and world literatures, as well as the voices of popular contemporary culture, slang, and internet speech. Her poetic landscapes are incessantly moving, shifting, and oscillating between different genres and forms. Her poetic subjects are frequently fragmented, difficult to pin down or identify, composed of many voices, and engaged generally in a process of reckoning with their constituent parts.
Excerpt:
We have a gift. Some call us
The best poets of our age.
Our apartments alas are humbler than our fame
And even our fame amounts to fuck all.
Starving servants, dressed in rags
Regard us with disdain. The two of us
Hardly old—and look at our wrinkles!
Still, who cares less about us
Or our woes? We are
Our own readers, we know
Our own and each other’s worth.
Our texts will be placed in a deep ditch
With the work of the great dead poets—
That’s how we console ourselves, anyway.
At least we won’t die childless.
When the time comes to cross the waters—
Not here, where the river’s mouth clouds the sea
So even winter’s jade light is drowned—
But that crossing we all make, together with everything we know
Even then we’ll be divided into lines for boarding
According to our mother tongues:
The language we swear in in our dreams.
So my shade will stand separate from the rest
Under the sign marked “Citizens of R.E.”
At passport control,
And the people here will form a different line
Quite apart from me, not even looking my way.
Well, of course, they don’t speak our tongue,
When I speak they suppress laughter
And my lingua spills over like a sauce
No one wants to taste.
Yes, their hair hangs long, their furs are mangy
Their arrows, their bristling cheeks, their half-hidden eyes
And nothing to make small talk about at the shop
Because the weather is always the same
And it’s clear I’d be useless in their home guard.
But even when we are naked and hairless shades—
All these Getae and a single Roman
Waiting for the steamship—still no one will stand
Close enough for their warmth to heat my left flank.
Explanation:
Russian poet and prose writer Maria Stepanova’s epic poem, Holy Winter (2021), explores, in this second excerpt, the littoral border space as one of disintegrating paradigms of connection. Such connection is constituted by systems of language, shared threads of political and personal identity, history, the crossing of physical space, and touch. On the littoral shore, they are severed by the act of departure, and through an illumination of the experience of exile, or of becoming a refugee.
Source: Stepanova, Maria. Holy Winter 20/21. Trans. Sasha Dugdale, New Directions, August 2024, pp. 13-14.