The Voice Over

Despite “private history” appearing in the title of the book, it is “history writ large,” with which Stepanova often engages, viewed through the lens of family history. The core tension of “Sarah on the Barricades” emerges precisely from the dual perspective available to the speaker: one that engages both with the grand scheme of twentieth-century Russian and European history and with a family member’s position at one of its early critical junctures. Over a decade later, her great-grandmother Sarah Ginzburg, the title character of this poem, becomes one of the protagonists in the novel In Memory of Memory. In the poem as well as later in the novel, the figure of her great-grandmother foregrounds Stepanova’s sense of the feminine as the backbone of her “private,” that is, family history: “This feminist firmament—its swallow, its stormcloud. / The Noah of a female ark.”

The same prominence is given to the feminine in recounting history in “The Women’s Locker Room at Planet Fitness.” The opening sketch of a locker room in a modern gym gradually morphs into a vision of a catastrophe that would forever “classify” some as perpetrators (marching in raids on Kristallnacht) and others as victims:

This pillar of water might turn to ice,

Reason to a poison, air to gas,

Sweetie-pies will march and stride

In closed ranks through shops and shacks.

And the door that led out to the swimming cube

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