The Voice Over

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: