The Voice Over

The cycle Four Operas, included in Kireevsky as an “addendum,” offers an additional perspective on Stepanova’s mode of working with sources. As Ilya Kukulin noted in his analysis of that cycle, “The narratives in its poems are ‘pointillistic,’ outlined in general features, written for those who know the operas’ plots, but, for all that, the stories told in Four Operas markedly diverge from the plots specified in the librettos.”⁸ Indeed, a similar principle is at work here as in Stepanova’s treatment of her Russian sources in Kireevsky: opera settings—of Carmen, Aida, Fidelio, and Iphigenia in Aulis—are transferred to a different context (the first three of them to contemporary Russia) and their narrative structures are distorted to the point that readers recognize in them neither Russian nor foreign but “universal social conflicts that lie at the heart of the plots of classic operas.”⁹ This helps to highlight an important aspect of the three cycles of Kireevsky. Their groundedness in Russian sources and Russian experience is at once an important gesture and a synecdoche that points at the rich twentieth-century legacy of violence and trauma across the world—a theme that will be at the heart of Stepanova’s novel seven years later, and that is brought forward in the concluding poem of Four Operas—“Iphigenia in Aulis,” a poem about war par excellence:

The action continues by the water,

A fatal war, trenches, swords, cuirasses,

The yids occupy the war’s left bank,

The faggots stand in formation on the right.

This battle takes place on foot, it will never end,

Will grind through and chew up five hundred generations,

Will have its way, like a nuclear winter,

Because cavalry attacks them from the heavens,

While darkness comes on from under the ground,

Piercing the heel and poking the knees apart.

[…]

With a sword in my chest I sing and do not die

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”)