We can acknowledge today that there were brighter alternatives to Tatarsky’s fate. And yet Stepanova could have easily crossed paths with him: “I started in the mid-1990s as a copywriter in a French advertising agency, and then I switched to TV.” This choice, Stepanova explained, was a way for her to sever links with the vanishing Soviet-era support system for literature and with the kind of literary community that system cultivated: “I was quite young and opinionated, so my attitude was rather harsh. I didn’t want to have anything in common with them. I refused to rely on poetry to make a living, to attain a position in the world. I would find some other professional occupation and would be as free as I could be in terms of poetry. It was the easiest way for me to stay independent. I split my world into halves.”3
In one way or another, all poets of that generation had to find their “second professions”—in editing and the publishing industry, in media and journalism, and in teaching and research. Individual choices aside, the pressing issue was the viability of a new type of literary community. The experience of “unofficial” culture of the late Soviet period provided some models for that, but the situation was quite different already, and no one in Russia had a clear sense of how exactly not just poets but experimental poetry itself would exist in a market economy. That knowledge was yet to be acquired, while the larger context seemed unfavorable for young authors in the 1990s: it was a time when the country was avidly reading all the books, Russian and foreign, that had been banned or barely accessible during the Soviet period. It is therefore noteworthy how quickly this generation of poets reinvented itself as a literary community, establishing venues for readings, publication, and intellectual exchange. It was in the mid-1990s, as Stepanova herself recalled later, that the sense of belonging to a remarkable poetic community became a shared feeling: “Everything changed then, just as if you had discovered a new room no one had noticed in an old communal apartment, and it could be settled in and filled up to suit one’s own preference. It seemed like an incredible stroke of luck—that possibility of the simultaneous existence of not three, not five, but fifteen or twenty major authorial practices” (“In Unheard-of Simplicity”).
In 2001, Stepanova published, one after another, three books of poetry: Songs of the Northern Southerners, On Twins, and The Here-World. They were followed by the collections Happiness (2003) and Physiology and Private History (2005). A selection of translations from these books and from the cycle O (2006) form part I of this volume. The transformations of Stepanova’s poetics in this period do not allow for linear description, but the pattern of “speaking in voices,” which she would later assert as quintessential for her practice, may be observed in these works as well, albeit in a different guise—as the transposition of “voices” of particular literary traditions. Indeed, “ersatz and out of date poetic forms” nod to us from many poems, and modulations of the speaker’s voice intermittently conform to and sharply contradict these forms. Metric regularity with pointed rhythmic shifts and the predominantly rhymed verse may seem particularly “out of date” to an Anglophone reader, but it is the very regularity of the verse and its archaic flavor that looms as a contrasting backdrop, once the reader begins to stumble over vocabulary, images, syntactic structures, and plot collisions strikingly at odds with tradition. Thus, in the ballad “The Pilot,” a female narrator describes a meeting of the title character with his family in the following fashion:
So when he came back here forever to stay,
An empty descendant from the freedomless sky,
Mysterious like a suitcase,
We went out by the staff door, the night chill and clear,
The boy in my arms and the girl hanging near,
And he gave me a whack on the face.
But that was OK by and large.
Like the flowing blush when we hear the word “love,”
All over my face his sky-blue glance roved,
While he hurt me, time and again.
And we plopped on the lawn, all the pedigree, staring
At the horizon where the sky was flaring
And no one put out the flame.
And life continued itself.
Besides the mismatch between the archaic genre frame of a ballad and the register and subject of the narration, the peculiarity of this and other ballads from Songs of the Northern Southerners rests on a bizarre amalgam of familiar patterns of everyday life and of fantastic elements, such as the Pilot’s celestial and earthly encounters with The Heavenly Daughter, “dressed every time as a Young Pioneer” (that is, as a member of the Soviet mass youth organization). His wife’s attempt at bridging these two worlds results in her killing a twelve-year-old girl wearing that uniform on a local bus.
The title of the book, Songs of the Northern Southerners, alludes to Alexander Pushkin’s cycle Songs of the Western Slavs (1834) and to the literary hoax that inspired it—Prosper Mérimée’s La Guzla (1827), a collection of pseudo-folk songs from South Slavic lands that Mérimée wrote as a mockery of the Romantic fascination with couleur locale. Unlike these works of her predecessors, Stepanova’s book locates “singers,” with their voices and stories, in a geographical limbo (“northern southerners”), emblematic of their fluid identity; their songs, however, are utterly “authentic” in conveying the singers’ insecurity about who they are and what space they inhabit. One may posit that the horror ballad is a form of cultural production in this space because of the experience of mental dislocation that unites its dwellers as they are trying to cope with the aftermath of trauma. It is thus the fantastic plane of the ballads that makes them, as Stepanova once said about a work of contemporary Russian fantasy, “an accurate ‘physiological sketch’ of Russian life, drawn from nature” (“Intending to Live”).
Stepanova’s poems from On Twins and The Here-World, in contrast to Songs, in most cases use a more conventional lyric voice, and their poetic utterance is centered on private space, in which love, death, creativity, and solitude are landmarks of experience. If anything, many of these poems echo the Romantic fragment, but their distinguishing poetic feature is intense experimentation with language, and their verbal and syntactic density, coupled with the regularity of meter and rhyme, make them particularly difficult to translate. Of the few poems translated for this volume, one stands out in its use of tradition: “For you, but the voice of the straitened Muse,” which is the final poem in The Here-World. Its opening line is almost identical to the first line of the “Dedication” that opens Pushkin’s historical narrative poem Poltava (1828), which lends Stepanova’s poem an aura of nineteenth-century Romantic verse. Her vocabulary, tone, and subject, however, progressively depart from her source. Stepanova’s poem is a dedication-turned-elegy, and, appearing at the end of the book, it renders the entire collection an epistle. This epistle cannot be read or heard by the deceased addressee, Stepanova’s mother, but it owes its hereworldly shape to the speaker’s impulse of seeing beyond and including there between its covers: