Will open just a tad, like a zipper on a boot.
And we’ll step out of slippers, nails and crowns,
From watches, juxtaposed rags, our voices’ sounds.
And into nostrils, ears and mouths, like out a kettle spout,
En masse they’ll surge and spill, souls
Who broke the lock.
The haunting horrors of the historical past that break through the contours of contemporary life is a motif that repeats in Stepanova’s work, becoming later a subject of reflection in her essays and the novel In Memory of Memory. The unwarranted intrusion of such visions is exemplified in the witty and meditative “Zoo, Woman, Monkey” from the cycle O, where the anxieties of pregnancy and imminent childbirth suddenly take on the form of wartime fears—fixed images from narratives of the Russian Civil War and the Second World War, deeply ingrained in collective memory:
You open your eyes: time to file in the ark:
Spring comes and swallows you up,
The Czechs are close, Kolchak advances from the east
And under Moscow undressed Germans stand like sharpened pales.
And flayed forest partisans like flanks.
And dead pilots without their holsters or their watches.
Death and birth are two motifs that run through Physiology and Private History—common denominators for both counterparts of the title. Two poems that have cemeteries as their central locus offer a frame for this motif structure: “July 3rd, 2004,” a reflection on visiting Joseph Brodsky’s grave in Venice, culminates in an affirmation of poetry’s eternal rebirth, and “Bus Stop: Israelitischer Friedhof,” the last poem in the collection, ends with a eulogy to “the eternal act of bringing forth.”
“Journalism happened rather late in my life,” Stepanova remarked in her conversation with Cynthia Haven. “I cannot say it doesn’t affect my poetry, because it does. Of course it does. The things I deal with as a journalist get mixed up with the problems that make me tick as a poet. That space I was hoping to make—you know, the enclosed garden—is not secluded enough. It’s not enclosed now—the doors are wide open, and the beasts of the current moment are free to enter. Because I’m changing, too. You have to open the doorways to let the world in—to make the words come in, in fact.”6 In 2007, Stepanova became editor-in-chief of the online media resource OpenSpace.ru, which endeavored to set new standards of cultural journalism in Russia. In 2012, as a consequence of the government crackdown on independent media projects, following a series of anti-government rallies in Moscow in 2011–2012, OpenSpace was discontinued by its owners, and its team soon founded another cultural journalism portal, Colta.ru, the first media resource in Russia that has no owners and operates on the model of crowdfunding, and of which Stepanova remains editor-in-chief today.
Stepanova’s engagement with journalism and changes in her poetic practice were not causally related, however: the two coincided, rather than one being predicated on the other. In the poem “And a vo-vo-voice arose” from The Lyric, the Voice (2010), which opens part II of this volume, transformations in poetic practice are explicitly linked to a new sense of self:
At thirty years old
I was not very old.
At thirty-three
’Twere a babe inside me.
At thirty-five
Time came back alive.
Now I am thirty-six
Time to eat myself up quick.
Scoop out my head
With a big pewter spoon,
So new beer can be poured in
And topped off after settling,
So that she not, like the olive tree,
Spend the winter blue and empty
Proverbially famous Soviet-period “announcements” that instructed customers to demand “topping off one’s beer glass after the foam settles” serve here to frame a statement about creative renewal. The pointedly low stylistic register masks the sublime subject matter: scooping out one’s head with a pewter spoon makes room for the world and words that are new, alien, and unfamiliar.
The poems of The Lyric, the Voice were written in 2008, following Stepanova’s work on two long narrative poems, both carrying the designation “prose” in their titles: The Prose of Ivan Sidorov (2006) and Second Prose (2008). Against the backdrop of that experiment, the title of the new book of poems pointed to an increased level of reflection on the properties of lyric utterance. Several strains of such utterances run through the book, three of which are represented in this volume: meditative (“Saturday and Sunday burn like stars”), politically engaged (“In every little park, in every little square”), and metapoetic (“In the festive sky, impassivable, tinfurled” and “And a vo-vo-voice arose”). It is within the metapoetic strain that a new presentation of the speaker’s subjectivity emerges: it becomes diffuse, now including “everyone” and “anyone,” now split between two “I”s.7 Testing the limits of the “vocal range” accessible to the contemporary poet becomes central to Stepanova’s work in the first half of the 2010s.
In 2008, Stepanova translated into Russian e. e. cummings’s famous poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town,” which seemed to respond to her new sensibilities. In her volume of collected poems, Protiv liriki (Against lyric), published in 2017, that translation opens a section of the book that includes poems from Kireevsky (2012) and two long poems, Spolia and War of the Beasts and the Animals (2015). Cummings’s poem is often interpreted as a poem about contemporary man’s lack of individuality. For Stepanova, it seems important rather as a starting point for turning “anyone,” cummings’s hero, from an object of description into a subject of poetic utterance. If transformations of Stepanova’s voice before drew on age-old literary traditions, in Kireevsky she turns to modern and archaic folk idioms, compiling an anthology of trauma as reflected in songs sung in labor camps, at war fronts, and then over entire Russia, reaching every household and train car:
I walk in a state-owned throw
Through train cars full of people
And sing as earnestly
As a saved soul in paradise
It’s a dirty job, even dirtier
Than the bossman-conductor might deem
For a quality song in our business
Always rises up to a scream
[…]
My voice makes a hole in the comfort
Of the car like an out-of-nowhere shiv
Everyone starts feeling downcast
And takes turns beating me by the toilet
(“A train is riding over Russia”)
In part, the turn in poetics that Kireevsky demonstrates is related to Stepanova’s concern expressed in her essay “In Unheard-of Simplicity” (2010), also included in part II. Reflecting on the successful integration of experimental poetry in the consumer-driven culture of the prosperous 2000s in Russia, she suggests that distancing oneself from it becomes a matter of sustaining one’s integrity and creative independence: “The chill of having no place […] is the only thing that gives poetry a chance not to participate in the parade of general achievements, not to wind up as a passkey that opens the doors for a third-party, external meaning. In this situation opacity seems like the only choice: a murky, closed, unpopular, unentertaining, unsuccessful existence in the catacombs, one that remains aloof.”
Kireevsky is at once opaque in its relation to the present and to tradition: mastering the languages of twentieth-century historical traumas, languages of loss, misery, and excludedness, might have seemed an exotic endeavor in 2010–2011, when Stepanova wrote most of these poems, and it is striking, of course, how less and less exotic, by the year, it has been looking since. Her other essay included in this part of the volume, “Displaced Person,” reads as an extended commentary on her work on Kireevsky, although its implications are broader. Its title is a pun: “person” in this case is a grammatical category (as in a “first-person pronoun”), and the displacement refers to the conscious transfer of the “I” of lyric utterance to a voice—or indeed to a self—that is not the author’s. Stepanova calls such selves, subjects of poetic utterances, “fictive figures of authorship,” whose existence is limited to the “space-time of one cycle or one book of poems,” a territory that “exists according to laws that are not entirely identical to those the author recognizes over himself.” This affords new freedom to the poet: