The Voice Over

Seven of the included essays were also reprinted in Stepanova’s most recent collection of essays, Protiv neliubvi (Against non-love, 2019): these are the first and third essays in part III and all but the last essay in part IV.

INTRODUCTION

“Speaking in Voices”: On Maria Stepanova’s Literary Creation

BY IRINA SHEVELENKO

“Occupying oneself with poetry presumes a chain of greater and lesser deaths, each putting in doubt the possibility of continued existence. Poems move forward in gigantic leaps, rip themselves loose from familiar and fertile soil, rejecting (shaking off) the very soil they were only just clinging to. Poetry seems to preserve itself by way of disruptions, renouncing what only a moment ago comprised an inalienable part of it, and sometimes its very essence.”

▶ Maria Stepanova, “Displaced Person”

“Stepanova’s début was distinguished by brilliant poetic technique and a purity of style,” Dmitry Kuzmin, poet and publisher, wrote fifteen years ago. “Progress along this route would virtually have assured Stepanova of success with the reading public and with the critics, but she chose another and far riskier strategy,” he remarked. It was the ever expanding vocal range that became a hallmark of Stepanova’s development: “At times she engaged in a dialogue with the Russian tradition, with the archaic language and poetry of the eighteenth century; at others she introduced casual contemporary diction, close to slang, into a classical stanza reminiscent of Catullus. At one time, in a lyric miniature, she reached the heights of estrangement, observing the sufferings of the spirit and the body from some point of passionless elevation; at another, a sonnet cycle looked like total parody.”¹

Over the years since, new turns and transformations in Stepanova’s work have continued to surprise, irritate, and stir admiration in her readers, yet the stable core of this evolving system has also become more tangible. Russian Formalist literary critics once coined the term estrangement (also translated as defamiliarization) to describe the presentation of the familiar as unfamiliar through the use of an unusual trope or through the gaze of a speaker who does not understand the scene or object that he describes. In Stepanova’s poetry, it is not the external reality but the voice that is perpetually estranged, defamiliarized. That voice relocates, finding new bodies. These bodies—traditions and styles—are familiar, but the moment they acquire voice in Stepanova’s text, they aren’t what they used to be: neither sonnets, nor ballads, nor war songs. Or rather, they are all of the above but transposed in a new key, infused with foreign strains, sharing space with unlikely neighbors, and living unfamiliar lives.

Stepanova’s seminal long poem Spolia (2014) opens with the speaker reciting from a would-be digest of confused responses to her work:

she simply isn’t able to speak for herself

and so she always uses rhyme in her poems

ersatz and out of date poetic forms

her material

offers no resistance

its kiss is loveless, it lies motionless

she’s the sort you’d lift onto a chair

read us the poem about wandering lonely

she’s the sort who once made a good soviet translator

careful unadventurous

where is her I place it in the dish

why on earth does she speak in voices

(voices “she has adopted,” in quote marks:

obvs anyone-without-an-I cannot adopt anything

for anyone-without-an-I will wander, begging alms

pretending to be a corner, a jar of mayonnaise, a cat

although no one believes him quite)

[…]

let her come out herself and say something

(and we’ll listen to you)

she won’t come out

it won’t come right^*

The motif of a lacking I, whose place is taken by a multiplicity of voices, gradually gives way in this poem to an elaborate display of these voices gathered together from across time and space and transformed by this displacement; the voices coalesce and bounce off one another, and, interspersed with them, there appear glimpses of human images, whose voices are still waiting to be transposed and impersonated. Closer to the end of the poem the reading from the familiar digest seems to resume, but it turns out to be dedicated to a different one-without-an-I:

she simply isn’t able to speak for herself

so she is always ruled by others

because her history repeats and repeats itself

takes on ersatz and out of date forms

and there is no knowing where her quotes are from

nineteen thirty or nineteen seventy

they’re all in there  pell-mell  all at once

[…]

her raw material

her diamonds her dust tracks her dirt-colored trailers

ancient forests mountain ranges

snow leopards desert roses gas flow

needed for global trade arrangements

her raw material doesn’t want to do business with her

gives itself up without love will do as she wants

unclear what she needs

where’s your I, where is it hidden?

why do strangers speak for you