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
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
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
“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
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