In the war waged on the foothills of paradise.
The derogatory vocabulary of Stepanova’s poem, Kukulin remarks, is “a ‘smutty’ parody of the style of social media hate speech,”10 but it also exposes hate speech as a structural element of war as such. No one could have guessed that a new war was just around the corner in 2010. When it came, Stepanova called her long poem about it War of the Beasts and the Animals, a title pointedly mocking hate speech.
“National traitors, Chekists, Banderites, fascist goons—this lexical collage is glued together from elements that the last century had already discarded,” Stepanova wrote in her essay “Today Before Yesterday” in August 2014, about half a year after the Russian annexation of Crimea and a few months into the Russian covert intervention in eastern Ukraine that sparked an armed conflict in that territory and caused its breakaway from Ukraine. Stepanova’s poems and essays from 2014 to 2016, included in part III of this volume, mark a high point in her work as a poet and essayist, and they are all in one way or another commentaries on the power of language to shape imagination—that is, to shape the vision of today, yesterday, and tomorrow. The proliferation of hate speech is but a symptom of a large-scale backslide, Stepanova argues:
Interviews with warlords of the Donetsk and Lugansk “People’s Republics” bubble with the excitement of people who have finally found themselves in the right place, feeling useful and important, taking their position, attacking, rising up off their knees—in a new kind of sense, for which a mere year ago they would have had to reach back to the ’20s, to Babel’s Red Cavalry with its splendid murderers. This sense of history as laughing gas, a wild carousel of possibilities, where any volunteer will receive an automatic weapon and a live target as part of the bargain, was until recently untranslatable to the language of the present.
(“After the Dead Water”)
In both Spolia and War the stage is turned into a linguistic battlefield. The poetic method of Kireevsky meets with social catastrophe, which gives it a dramatic boost. Each poem becomes that “gigantic installation with a displaced center” of which Stepanova wrote in “Displaced Person.” In Spolia, as we already saw, the juxtaposition of the poet and the country as they engage in the enterprise of literary and historical allusions is central. The opening of War evokes the opening of The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, and the high degree of allusiveness is a pattern both texts share. However, in War, one of the strongest effects produced by this allusiveness is that of the discord of voice-quotes that get tangled up in impossible combinations—a chorus-turned-chaos. Yet it is precisely this chaos—the fragmentation of reality and the failure of channels of communication, clogged by competing arsenals of (un)fitting quotes—that Stepanova means to portray and to demystify. At the end of War, the graves of Russian soldiers killed in the “unacknowledged” war in Ukraine bear witness to reality, which those looking at them deny, and it takes the author’s voice—in the very last line of the poem—to put an end to the delirium of this deniaclass="underline"
like a mound
under a snowdrift
means nothing
writing on a tomb
sees no one
writing on a stone
nothing, we read
it not
but it is
Commenting in her interview on the two “digests” that frame Spolia, which were quoted in the beginning of this article, Stepanova noted, “I was, in fact, identifying with the country. Not with the awful thing that was happening—the invasion of Donbass, the annexation of Crimea; there is no explanation or excuse for acts of evil, pure and simple, and these are among them. But to oppose the evil you have to learn the language of love. And to love Russia at that moment was a hard job. One had to become Russia, with its wastelands, faded glory, and the horrifying innocence of its everyday life—to speak with its voices and see with its multiple eyes. That’s what I was trying to do: to change my optical system, to dress my hate in a robe of light.”11 Spolia ends with a striking quasi-erotic invitation: “place your hand on my I and I will give way to desire.” It is addressed to all those “who speak as I can’t yet speak,” to contemporaries, to whom the poet is ready to lend her “I,” whom she is willing to impersonate. In one of the middle sections of Spolia, long lists of other characters appear: we understand that they are no longer alive, and the speaker lists them as if drafting some outline: “twenty-year-old lyodik killed in action / his father, a volunteer, bombed troop train / his mother who lived right up until death / a little girl who will remember all this.” Side by side with the theme of “speaking in voices,” with the theme of love as a mode of relating to those caught in the turmoil of the present, another theme appears—of remembering those in whose voices the poet would never be able to speak, a tribute to whom requires different means. The reader of Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory would easily identify characters in this outline: the work on Spolia immediately precedes or even overlaps with the beginning of Stepanova’s work on her novel.
The essays included in the last part of this volume were written in the period 2010–2013, and they present Stepanova as an interpreter of the work, personalities, and life strategies of other authors. Three of them—Marina Tsvetaeva, W. G. Sebald, and Susan Sontag—are among the authors with whose work Stepanova has been deeply engaged. Her pieces on Lyubov Shaporina and Alisa Poret, on the other hand, anticipate some of the documentary novellas in her In Memory of Memory, which explore individual stories of coping with changing frameworks of historical existence.
It is striking how the authorial perspective in these essays connects authors as different as Shaporina (a member of the Soviet cultural establishment, whose voluminous diary demonstrates remarkable independence and freedom from self-censorship) and Sebald. Shaporina’s diary is “obviously, flagrantly overabundant,” Stepanova writes, “as if it lacks a filter to distinguish the important things from the unimportant, the superfluous from the essential, the verisimilar from the fantastic. Rumors, gossip, dreams, jokes, conversations in lines and worldly salons, news of banishments, executions and hungry deaths come billowing in a thick, blind wave. The index of names at the end of the second volume takes up twenty-seven pages; the book, issued by NLO Press, is a Noah’s Ark where everything that breathes and talks swims out of nonbeing: peasants, Red Army soldiers, literary functionaries.” Stepanova emphasizes this same pattern—“everything is so important”—in Sebald’s texts, where the same “rescue of the drowning” takes place, rescue “of all those displaced and forgotten persons of world history, of everything that disappears, from people and peoples to obsolete crafts and gas lamps.” For Stepanova, this is an essential trait of authors who bear witness to epochs of destruction and obliteration, and it is Sebald, as far as Stepanova’s literary sensibilities are concerned, whose sense of purpose is exemplary, including ways his ethical impulse transforms the aesthetic:
In the realm of literature, Sebald steps up against the tyranny of the engaging—on behalf of everything uninteresting, which is invariably deprived of the right to a reader. […] What Sebald does is a kind of soft, almost speechless revolution: we see the floors collapse and the snowy dust pour down. He doesn’t try to persuade you that uninteresting is the new interesting. He doesn’t insist that you ought to feel bored, as his guild colleagues often will.