The Voice Over

or are you speaking

in the voices of scolds and cowards

get out of yourself

put that dictionary back on the shelf

she won’t come out

it won’t come right

Russia appears here as a double of the poet, a country-without-an-I, whose possessions, carefully accounted for, along with events and voices of her past, seem to be stored in a giant repository and available for ad hoc repurposing in ever new combinations—as spolia, as building blocks of obsolete structures. The Russia of Spolia is a country waging war in Ukraine, a war that flooded the public discourse with antiquated, seemingly long-forgotten propaganda clichés, a downpour of “quotes” oblivious of their birth time and place. What could aligning oneself as a poet with such a country possibly mean? The grotesque overtones of this juxtaposition are evident: Stepanova’s poet, with her professed belief in “speaking in voices,” confronts a caricature or a reflection in a (possibly distorting) mirror. Yet the effect of this juxtaposition is more complex. Both the poet and the country may be speaking in voices, and their shared history may be an explanation for that, but only the poet possesses a selfhood independent of these voices and knows where her voices and quotes come from, and why. In Spolia, Stepanova tackles the boundaries of poetic self-expression by synthesizing voices hitherto nonexistent in experimental poetry and by bringing voices of various provenances in contact with one another. Looking back at her creative career, we can now trace its milestones.

 

Like many members of her literary generation, Stepanova started publishing in the late 1980s, when she was still in high school. A few of her poems appeared in the first half of the 1990s, but it was not until the later part of that decade that she was published consistently. This dynamic testifies as much to the conditions of the time as it reflects Stepanova’s own choices. In an interview she gave in 2017 to Cynthia Haven, Stepanova spoke about the atmosphere of the early 1990s—the time following the collapse of the Soviet Union, when she studied at the Literary Institute in Moscow and contemplated “how to be a poet”:

When I was a teenager, a student, I saw how the people who belonged to the previous generation were traumatized by the crash of the Soviet system of literary education and literary work. The Soviet Writers’ Union had been able to give writers enough to live on after publishing a book or a collection of poems in some literary magazine—for the official writers, of course, not to the authors of samizdat. You could live for three years after publishing a book, but it had to be a bad book, because it was the result of an inner compromise. Nevertheless, lots of people had the feeling that they could stay themselves and still, somehow, occupy some cozy step on the enormous staircase of the official Soviet literary establishment. When the system crashed, people were disappointed and disorientated. By 1992 or 1993, it became evident that the utopia wasn’t working anymore, especially for poets. It became evident that a book of poetry would never have a press run of more than 2,000 copies. It would never bring you money or even fame. I saw people crushed, melted, changed because of that. They had relied on a system that had suddenly vanished into thin air. They were still willing to make compromises, but there was no longer anyone to make a compromise with.²

The early 1990s, along with political freedoms and a deep economic crisis, brought about new conditions for writing, both economic and existential. At the end of that decade, one of the most prominent prose writers of the time, Victor Pelevin, made the fate of a poet in post-Soviet Russia a theme of his novel Homo Zapiens (1999). The Soviet-era tradition provided Pelevin with a rich selection of narratives about “a writer’s fate,” from Konstantin Vaginov’s Works and Days of Svistonov to Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita to Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago to Andrei Bitov’s Pushkin House. In Pelevin’s post-Soviet revision of this plot, a young poet, Vavilen Tatarsky, abandons his creative aspirations because of the “disappearance of eternity,” for the sake of which alone he felt it would be possible to write. Put in less lofty terms, it was the alleged disappearance of a particular condition for writing—of the context that endowed writing with a mission of supreme importance, whether thanks to state support or state oppression. Tatarsky transforms himself from a writer into a copywriter, embarking on a career in advertising, then moving on to TV. In a parodic twist, Pelevin still allows his protagonist to become a “creator”—a mastermind behind the TV screen who supplants reality with the virtual reality of (mis)information.