The Voice Over

In both Spolia and War the stage is turned into a linguistic battlefield. The poetic method of Kireevsky meets with social catastrophe, which gives it a dramatic boost. Each poem becomes that “gigantic installation with a displaced center” of which Stepanova wrote in “Displaced Person.” In Spolia, as we already saw, the juxtaposition of the poet and the country as they engage in the enterprise of literary and historical allusions is central. The opening of War evokes the opening of The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, and the high degree of allusiveness is a pattern both texts share. However, in War, one of the strongest effects produced by this allusiveness is that of the discord of voice-quotes that get tangled up in impossible combinations—a chorus-turned-chaos. Yet it is precisely this chaos—the fragmentation of reality and the failure of channels of communication, clogged by competing arsenals of (un)fitting quotes—that Stepanova means to portray and to demystify. At the end of War, the graves of Russian soldiers killed in the “unacknowledged” war in Ukraine bear witness to reality, which those looking at them deny, and it takes the author’s voice—in the very last line of the poem—to put an end to the delirium of this denial:

like a mound

under a snowdrift

means nothing

writing on a tomb

sees no one

writing on a stone

nothing, we read

it not

but it is

Commenting in her interview on the two “digests” that frame Spolia, which were quoted in the beginning of this article, Stepanova noted, “I was, in fact, identifying with the country. Not with the awful thing that was happening—the invasion of Donbass, the annexation of Crimea; there is no explanation or excuse for acts of evil, pure and simple, and these are among them. But to oppose the evil you have to learn the language of love. And to love Russia at that moment was a hard job. One had to become Russia, with its wastelands, faded glory, and the horrifying innocence of its everyday life—to speak with its voices and see with its multiple eyes. That’s what I was trying to do: to change my optical system, to dress my hate in a robe of light.”¹¹ Spolia ends with a striking quasi-erotic invitation: “place your hand on my I and I will give way to desire.” It is addressed to all those “who speak as I can’t yet speak,” to contemporaries, to whom the poet is ready to lend her “I,” whom she is willing to impersonate. In one of the middle sections of Spolia, long lists of other characters appear: we understand that they are no longer alive, and the speaker lists them as if drafting some outline: “twenty-year-old lyodik killed in action / his father, a volunteer, bombed troop train / his mother who lived right up until death / a little girl who will remember all this.” Side by side with the theme of “speaking in voices,” with the theme of love as a mode of relating to those caught in the turmoil of the present, another theme appears—of remembering those in whose voices the poet would never be able to speak, a tribute to whom requires different means. The reader of Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory would easily identify characters in this outline: the work on Spolia immediately precedes or even overlaps with the beginning of Stepanova’s work on her novel.

 

The essays included in the last part of this volume were written in the period 2010–2013, and they present Stepanova as an interpreter of the work, personalities, and life strategies of other authors. Three of them—Marina Tsvetaeva, W. G. Sebald, and Susan Sontag—are among the authors with whose work Stepanova has been deeply engaged. Her pieces on Lyubov Shaporina and Alisa Poret, on the other hand, anticipate some of the documentary novellas in her In Memory of Memory, which explore individual stories of coping with changing frameworks of historical existence.