Over the years since, new turns and transformations in Stepanova’s work have continued to surprise, irritate, and stir admiration in her readers, yet the stable core of this evolving system has also become more tangible. Russian Formalist literary critics once coined the term estrangement (also translated as defamiliarization) to describe the presentation of the familiar as unfamiliar through the use of an unusual trope or through the gaze of a speaker who does not understand the scene or object that he describes. In Stepanova’s poetry, it is not the external reality but the voice that is perpetually estranged, defamiliarized. That voice relocates, finding new bodies. These bodies—traditions and styles—are familiar, but the moment they acquire voice in Stepanova’s text, they aren’t what they used to be: neither sonnets, nor ballads, nor war songs. Or rather, they are all of the above but transposed in a new key, infused with foreign strains, sharing space with unlikely neighbors, and living unfamiliar lives.
Stepanova’s seminal long poem Spolia (2014) opens with the speaker reciting from a would-be digest of confused responses to her work:
she simply isn’t able to speak for herself
and so she always uses rhyme in her poems
ersatz and out of date poetic forms
her material
offers no resistance
its kiss is loveless, it lies motionless
she’s the sort you’d lift onto a chair
read us the poem about wandering lonely
she’s the sort who once made a good soviet translator
careful unadventurous
where is her I place it in the dish
why on earth does she speak in voices
(voices “she has adopted,” in quote marks:
obvs anyone-without-an-I cannot adopt anything
for anyone-without-an-I will wander, begging alms
pretending to be a corner, a jar of mayonnaise, a cat
although no one believes him quite)
[…]
let her come out herself and say something
(and we’ll listen to you)
she won’t come out
it won’t come right*
The motif of a lacking I, whose place is taken by a multiplicity of voices, gradually gives way in this poem to an elaborate display of these voices gathered together from across time and space and transformed by this displacement; the voices coalesce and bounce off one another, and, interspersed with them, there appear glimpses of human images, whose voices are still waiting to be transposed and impersonated. Closer to the end of the poem the reading from the familiar digest seems to resume, but it turns out to be dedicated to a different one-without-an-I:
she simply isn’t able to speak for herself
so she is always ruled by others
because her history repeats and repeats itself
takes on ersatz and out of date forms
and there is no knowing where her quotes are from
nineteen thirty or nineteen seventy
they’re all in there pell-mell all at once
[…]
her raw material
her diamonds her dust tracks her dirt-colored trailers
ancient forests mountain ranges
snow leopards desert roses gas flow
needed for global trade arrangements
her raw material doesn’t want to do business with her
gives itself up without love will do as she wants
unclear what she needs
where’s your I, where is it hidden?
why do strangers speak for you
or are you speaking
in the voices of scolds and cowards
get out of yourself
put that dictionary back on the shelf
she won’t come out
it won’t come right
Russia appears here as a double of the poet, a country-without-an-I, whose possessions, carefully accounted for, along with events and voices of her past, seem to be stored in a giant repository and available for ad hoc repurposing in ever new combinations—as spolia, as building blocks of obsolete structures. The Russia of Spolia is a country waging war in Ukraine, a war that flooded the public discourse with antiquated, seemingly long-forgotten propaganda clichés, a downpour of “quotes” oblivious of their birth time and place. What could aligning oneself as a poet with such a country possibly mean? The grotesque overtones of this juxtaposition are evident: Stepanova’s poet, with her professed belief in “speaking in voices,” confronts a caricature or a reflection in a (possibly distorting) mirror. Yet the effect of this juxtaposition is more complex. Both the poet and the country may be speaking in voices, and their shared history may be an explanation for that, but only the poet possesses a selfhood independent of these voices and knows where her voices and quotes come from, and why. In Spolia, Stepanova tackles the boundaries of poetic self-expression by synthesizing voices hitherto nonexistent in experimental poetry and by bringing voices of various provenances in contact with one another. Looking back at her creative career, we can now trace its milestones.
Like many members of her literary generation, Stepanova started publishing in the late 1980s, when she was still in high school. A few of her poems appeared in the first half of the 1990s, but it was not until the later part of that decade that she was published consistently. This dynamic testifies as much to the conditions of the time as it reflects Stepanova’s own choices. In an interview she gave in 2017 to Cynthia Haven, Stepanova spoke about the atmosphere of the early 1990s—the time following the collapse of the Soviet Union, when she studied at the Literary Institute in Moscow and contemplated “how to be a poet”:
When I was a teenager, a student, I saw how the people who belonged to the previous generation were traumatized by the crash of the Soviet system of literary education and literary work. The Soviet Writers’ Union had been able to give writers enough to live on after publishing a book or a collection of poems in some literary magazine—for the official writers, of course, not to the authors of samizdat. You could live for three years after publishing a book, but it had to be a bad book, because it was the result of an inner compromise. Nevertheless, lots of people had the feeling that they could stay themselves and still, somehow, occupy some cozy step on the enormous staircase of the official Soviet literary establishment. When the system crashed, people were disappointed and disorientated. By 1992 or 1993, it became evident that the utopia wasn’t working anymore, especially for poets. It became evident that a book of poetry would never have a press run of more than 2,000 copies. It would never bring you money or even fame. I saw people crushed, melted, changed because of that. They had relied on a system that had suddenly vanished into thin air. They were still willing to make compromises, but there was no longer anyone to make a compromise with.2
The early 1990s, along with political freedoms and a deep economic crisis, brought about new conditions for writing, both economic and existential. At the end of that decade, one of the most prominent prose writers of the time, Victor Pelevin, made the fate of a poet in post-Soviet Russia a theme of his novel Homo Zapiens (1999). The Soviet-era tradition provided Pelevin with a rich selection of narratives about “a writer’s fate,” from Konstantin Vaginov’s Works and Days of Svistonov to Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita to Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago to Andrei Bitov’s Pushkin House. In Pelevin’s post-Soviet revision of this plot, a young poet, Vavilen Tatarsky, abandons his creative aspirations because of the “disappearance of eternity,” for the sake of which alone he felt it would be possible to write. Put in less lofty terms, it was the alleged disappearance of a particular condition for writing—of the context that endowed writing with a mission of supreme importance, whether thanks to state support or state oppression. Tatarsky transforms himself from a writer into a copywriter, embarking on a career in advertising, then moving on to TV. In a parodic twist, Pelevin still allows his protagonist to become a “creator”—a mastermind behind the TV screen who supplants reality with the virtual reality of (mis)information.