The Voice Over

“I” turns out to be not an actor now, but a camera; suddenly several cameras appear—a lot of them—and they aren’t pointed at you. […] But if we suppose that all the cameras are working, all the voices are speaking (singing, coughing, whistling, stuttering; one of them, obviously, belongs to the author himself, but we can’t say with any certainty which)—and if this sheaf or whiskbroom of diverging intonations exists as a text, as a unity, we can consider the experiment a success. In that case a poet’s oeuvre appears as a kind of gigantic installation with a displaced center—and what happiness to know that you aren’t the center, but the radius.

Kireevsky was an experiment in new vision and new hearing. For the title of the book, Stepanova took the last name of Pyotr Kireevsky (1808–1856), a nineteenth-century collector of folk songs, whose voluminous collection (1860–1874) was published only after his death. It was the first comprehensive collection of Russian folk songs, and Kireevsky’s name became emblematic of the enterprise of Russian folklore collection in general. An amateur collector, he relied on many submissions from his contemporaries, also amateurs, who would often edit and correct the texts they recorded or even submit their own imitations of folklore alongside original folk songs, as Pushkin claimed to have done. Stepanova had this premise in mind when calling her book Kireevsky: as an author, she writes her texts over the tradition, infusing it with a strain of experimental poetry and thus ensuring its transition into a new age.

The three cycles comprised by Kireevsky are distinct in their pragmatics. The first, from which the already quoted poem comes, is Young Women Are Singing, translated in this volume as Young Maids Sing (see translator’s note on the reason for that); it consists of balladlike songs predicated on the experience of trauma—wars, purges, prison camps, and post-Soviet havoc. They evoke a variety of sources, from the medieval vita of Alexis the Man of God (“Mama, what janitor”) to the song “Katyusha,” a love song, whose heroine’s name became a nickname for a Russian rocket launcher in the Second World War (“Ordnance was weeping in the open”). The title of the cycle, however, adds a layer of complexity to the text: young women who are singing these songs aren’t the subjects or voices of these ballads. These songs are seemingly not about them, and yet they actually are. The singers are vested in the experience these songs relate—they appropriate and reenact it in their singing. The second cycle, which shares its name with the title of the book, Kireevsky, features a different “voice-over,” that of a sophisticated author-reader, who mixes archaic and more modern folk idioms with literary sources of various provenances, to the effect of capturing the transhistorical cyclicity of trauma, conveyed here by evoking the cyclicity of calendric songs. Finally, the third cycle, Underground Pathephone, gives voice to the deceased, to their vision of life and death from the point of ultimate awareness:

There he lies in his new bed, a band of paper round his head,

Such a mustachioed gentilhomme, now in the coffin all alone,

So here he lies, all numb and quiet, and the collar of his face

Is growing yellow from inside, but you would best avert your gaze,

For deep within, just like a clock that’s scratching its tick-tock-tick-tock,

He still produces, dull and low, his never-ceased Iloveyouso,

But all the people at his side, they wouldn’t hear him if they tried,

Just us, we look from the plafond, invisible, but not for long,

Each one of us, so well we know:

I too had squadrons to command,

Wore in my mouth Iloveyouso,

Wore round my head a paper band.

This succinct outline of a life, in which the catharsis is born from the grotesque, is but one of the reflexes of the vision from beyond. Voices in Underground Pathephone are often captured in the moments of their dialog with the songs they once sang. Thus, in the concluding poem of the cycle, “Don’t strain your sight,” one such song is “Dark Is the Night” (“Temnaia noch”), one of the most famous Russian songs from the Second World War era, and at the same time an archetypal wartime song about love safeguarding a soldier in combat. Picking up a familiar tune, a voice from under the ground quotes (these phrases are in italics) and contests the song’s promise:

However I love

The depth of your tender gaze,

Still sparrows will arrive,

And peck at our remains.

I am earth, march-’n’-marsh, muck-’n’-mold,

Collarbone, flowers in season.

Naught will happen to me, I know,

For a whole ’nother reason.