Maria Stepanova’s award-winning work, In Memory of Memory (2021), translated into English by Sasha Dugdale from the Russian original Pamiati, pamiati (2017), seamlessly blends transnational history, private archives, and memoir-in-essay—an oscillation beyond autofiction that the nonfiction reader in me had previously thought impossible. Also embedded in the novel are texts from various sources—from Phaedrus to Paul Celan, Heraclitus to Thomas Mann’s diaries, Orhan Pamuk to Nikolai Gogol—blended smoothly in Stepanova’s sinuous prose.
Already an author of ten volumes of poetry, Stepanova’s debut was described by Dmitry Kuzmin as a display of “brilliant poetic technique and a purity of style.” Now, known as a chronicler of her Russian-Jewish lineage, Stepanova had written: “I would become a stranger, a teller of tales, a selector and a sifter, the one who decides what part of the huge volume of the unsaid must fit in the spotlight’s circle, and what part will remain outside it in the darkness.” She is now widely regarded as both an important and popular contemporary writer—or in the words of Irina Shevelenko, “one of the most original and complex poets on the literary scene in Russia today.”
In this interview, I asked Maria about the genre-defying In Memory of Memory, political poetry since the Silver Age of Russian literature, and the literary tradition of folktales.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): In a previous interview, you spoke about being an eyewitness to a generation of writers who “were traumatized by the crash of the Soviet system of literary education and literary work,” stating: “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.”
Can you speak on that moment in time—when literary bureaucracy and censorship was prevalent, when Social Realism and traditional genres and forms were requisite, and at the same time, artists thrived?
Maria Stepanova (MS): Well, it was not exactly a good time from an artist’s point of view, as practically all the significant writers—not even mentioning the really big names—were pushed into the margins by this system. Some of them were killed, some jailed, some scared into silencing themselves, some forced to start writing in a “normal” realistic mode. And there are a couple of individuals who were appreciated by the Soviet system; though heavily censored, they were published after a lifetime of fear and loss, like Akhmatova—whose first husband was killed, third husband died in jail, and only son spent years and years in the concentration camps. It was long before the 1990s, but the Soviet utopia of Writer’s Unions, those big honorariums and that enormous audience, was actually shaped in the 1930s, over the backdrop of so many deaths, and it never transformed into anything that would allow arts or artists to thrive. Even later on, when the times became more or less vegetarian, there was an enormous split between independent culture and the official, “publishable” one that appeared in state-funded exhibition spaces or in bookshops. If you were willing to make an official career out of writing, you had to prepare yourself for the lifetime of compromises—to agree that your writing would get cropped and reshaped according to the Party line. But, of course, the benefits were significant, and the life of an underground author was not the easiest—still, the most interesting poetry and prose being written in Russia in the twentieth century were produced by the authors who had chosen such a life, who were writing “v stol”: unpublishable books that were kept in the desk.
It’s important for me to say it, banal as it is, because lately, one might hear people referring to the Soviet times with some weird sort of nostalgia; as if the books we are able to read and quote now were a result of that system, and not a desperate attempt to resist it. The very names of the writers who had perished or were silenced in the 1930s (or remained in danger and unpublished in the 70s and 80s, until the Soviet empire crashed) are used as showcases for how an oppressive society might produce great works of literature. It somehow reminds me of the way ducks are tortured to produce foie gras: the amount of pain involved in the process is unjustifiable, whatever the results are.
AMMD: Irina Shevelenko, the editor of The Voice Over (Columbia University Press, 2021), a selection of your poetry and essays, contends that the distinctive challenges facing a translator working from experimental Russian poetry into English include “metric organization, rhythmic expressiveness, and rhyme.” And that this is particularly true to your poetry because of its “complex syntax, lexical and morphological inventions, and disjointed diction.” Do you, as the poet, think there is more that might have been overlooked or unsaid?
MS: I suppose what I am trying to do might really be challenging for a translator. My way of working with the language includes a number of transformations; words and syntactic structures are distorted, endlessly metamorphosising, as if language is still a hot undone thing, ready to be molded. And there is rhyme, of course, maybe not in a traditional sense, but it is present sometimes.
But the main problem is maybe more fundamental. There is an additional level that is extremely hard to translate: the language itself conveys an extraordinary amount of repressed and forgotten violence coiled deep within, making itself known only in metaphors, slips of the tongue, unconscious correspondences. Now, in the time of Russia’s war against Ukraine, it is becoming even more and more explicit. I am trying to make some sense of it; I think that the Russian language had to undergo some change that is deeply necessary. Now it’s a sort of minefield (or maybe a ghosthouse, which might be no less dangerous), and it craves a different purpose, a different form of existence.
But these archeological layers of oral and literary traditions (with their hidden sources of pain and violence) are extremely hard to transmit into a foreign language; there are too many references that don’t mean a thing for, let’s say, an English-speaking audience. How is one supposed to work with a line that references a war song from the 1940s, which, in turn, refers to a romance song that was popular in the late nineteenth century—and both of these resonances are very much present in your mind when reading the text? The translator might add some footnotes, but it doesn’t exactly help with poetry – not in the moment of a first encounter. Or she may work only with the upper layer, the part that is actually translatable, eliminating the bits that don’t make sense in a different cultural space. Or she might treat the poem as an event, a happening that should happen again, in a different language—as a new poem, a new possibility. And then she will invoke similar stories, neighbouring layers of pain, fear, and shame that lie within the English language, with its own story of imperial violence. That’s what happens when I work with my translator; Sasha Dugdale is such a brilliant poet, and when she is translating my stuff, I know that she will make the memory of English verse work together with the Russian. And with Eugene Ostashevsky—we are engaged in a radical translation project that makes me feel the extent to which translation is a voyage and how far it can take you.
AMMD: A lot has been said about you in terms of canon-making; you have been included in the canon of the new wave of Russian political poetry, the Post-Soviet revival group, and the reflexive school of postmodernist Russian aesthetics. What is your take on this critical attention of your work?
MS: I’m not sure any of these descriptions helps a lot, to be frank. I tend to think of my writing in different terms, and it’s a solitary work. I am not a part of any literature movement, so my recipes and explanations won’t be helpful for someone who is trying to get a broader picture of Russian literature—its generations and trends. It’s the job of a literary scholars to make generalisations that might or might not lead to creation of a certain canon—and they need some names to name.
I do write poetry that might be considered political (and I think that poetry is political by definition), but I am not exactly sure if I am partial in any kind of Post-Soviet revival. Sometimes it feels a bit like someone has tagged you on Facebook and you don’t know exactly what to do with it.
AMMD: Years ago, in a review of your collection Pesni severnykh iuzhan (Songs of Northern Southerners), Elena Fanailova said that you are proof of the growing interest younger Russian poets have in longer, nonlyrical poems. Can you comment on what such critics have said—that you are “a product of a process of dismantling and reassembling the heritage of Soviet poetry”?
MS: Of course I am, as much as I am a product of Europe with its traumas and catastrophes—maybe a waste product, or at least one that is badly damaged. I am always feeling that my existence is a lucky chance, a coincidence, and in a way that could be said about all of us, those who survived the twentieth century. We are living in a world that had the potential to be very different, and in my part of the world it practically means that you inhabit this ghosthouse, a place where so many people were killed or displaced that there is not a single patch of space that fully belongs to you. You are always sitting in some other person’s chair, sorting out a memory deck that belongs to the past but haunts the present. So, Russia, as my own writing, is very much a territory of the uncanny. For a long time I used to think that working with the past, giving voice to the past, is a moral activity—that we are living in a time of post-catastrophe, when resurrecting the past is a personal duty. Now I understand that catastrophe is never a one-time event; it’s a sort of a pendulum, destined for a comeback. It makes me rethink a lot, including my relationship with the Soviet past.
AMMD: In the second chapter of In Memory of Memory, you confessed: “To start writing was to cease to be a curious listener, an addressee, and to become instead the horizon point of the family line, the destination for the many eyed, many decked ship of family history.”
Is this, for you, the writer’s role—beyond being a living witness, the archetypal survivor who lived to tell the tale?
MS: In a way, yes. But now it’s feeling entirely different. Back then, my whole existence was devoted to looking back into the past, allowing its X-rays to go through my physical body, to make myself a sort of a delivery point. Now the horizon has shifted; what matters is the future and a way it can become conceivable again.
AMMD: In Memory of Memory was also a product of digging into materials from many libraries and archives; in what ways is the title a nod to Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, which states that individuals can sometime remember experiences that have been told or relayed to them, more clearly than their own?
MS: I owe a lot to this concept. For me it explains not only my own sensibilities, but also the contemporary obsession with the past. The latter has its consequences, some of them quite horrifying.
Marianne Hirsh writes about the Holocaust survivors of the second and third generation, those who haven’t witnessed the atrocities and don’t remember the pre-existing world that was put to an abrupt end. But strangely, they feel closer to this world than their parents did; it becomes so significant to them that they consider their own lives to be less important when compared to what used to be and doesn’t exist anymore. They know and remember the coffee shops and street signs from the 1930s much better than the memories of their own childhood. They are assembling and reassembling the past as if everything is dependent upon their efforts. It’s completely futile of course, as it goes with memory, but it doesn’t stop them from trying.
I am fully a postmemorial being in this sense, and I suppose that Hirsch’s concept can be applied to a much wider field; it’s the new zeitgeist, this flooding of the globe with images and stories of the past, which push the present away. And when the obsession with the past is used as a political tool, as it is happening nowadays, it leads us to dark places. I think that in a certain way, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine might be considered a memory war, something that starts with the notion that a certain version of the past can be imposed on others, violently forced upon them, and that this should be done no matter what. It’s a hard thing to live with; our longing for connection, our willingness to save whatever may be saved, has, as it seems now, a grim doppelganger, and something has set it in motion.
AMMD: In relation to the postmodernist intelligentsia, Mark Lipovetsky says your work veers towards the experimental and elitist end of the cultural spectrum, impacting particularly those who are highbrow intellectuals but ultimately, influencing a latter generation’s counterculture. Experimental? Sure. But elitist?
MS: Hopefully not. And to add something, I am deeply sure that poetry which feels obscure or unapproachable at the time it’s written becomes shiningly clear, almost transparent, in some twenty or thirty years. Maybe the process owes something to readers themselves, their joint effort of living within the poem—up to the point when the very texture of language changes to fit the poem. In this way, poetry is language in progress, a way of providing language with a destination and a road map. And in many cases we are able to get there—if the writing is good enough.
AMMD: It has been argued that your poetry from the 1990s until the 2000s was shaped by Marina Tsvetaeva’s “polyphonic mode of writing and dialogicity”. You even wrote an essay about her: “The Maximum Cost of Living”. You have been interpreted as someone who thinks of literary inheritance as a form of unauthorised squatting—thus I wonder if you agree to the idea that Tsvetaeva is an “important subtext and model for women poets”, yourself included.
MS: I have been squatting in Tsvetaeva’s realm for a long, long time—since I was seven and stumbled upon a book of her prose. It was a gift for my mother, but I was so mesmerized with Tsvetaeva’s writing voice that I just couldn’t part with the book for months. It was a strange encounter; I wasn’t enough of a grown-up to make sense of her philosophy or the quality of her writing, but it wasn’t necessary. My reaction was that of a person meeting another person and feeling that it’s a game-changer. I still feel the same way, and I suppose that her presence has largely shaped the way I think—but it is primarily and mainly a personal influence. My own kind of writing happens to be very different. But the way she approached (scrutinized, actually) herself, and the entire world, and herself again, provides a sort of an ethical frame that is very important for me. She has an essay called “Art in the Light of Conscience”, where she says some harsh truths about the nature of art and its misgivings. I suppose that’s how she used to live, in this blinding light of self-doubt, forever trying and failing, but still insisting on the necessity of an ethical approach to everything, from human nature to political decisions.
AMMD: Let’s talk about the skaz, generically the traditional Russian folktale; skaz heavily permeates your works, highlighting the postmodernist proclivity to appropriate in literature what used to be in folklore, enmeshing literacy with oracy and exploring the tensions between the “substandard” speech of the working-class and the “bookish” writing of the middle-class Sovietese publitsistika. What interested you in this storytelling form?
MS: Thank you for the question—I wish I had enough space to answer it properly. In an important essay titled “The End of a Novel”, Osip Mandelstam named skaz as an alternative to the current Western literary tradition. In his view, during the times of huge societal shifts, the novel genre doesn’t serve its purpose anymore. An individual destiny is not an issue when you are witnessing a mass catastrophe; an individual choice becomes invalid when one’s decision doesn’t change anything. As he said, “A person without a biography cannot be the thematic core of a novel, and conversely a novel is unthinkable without any interest in the individual human fate, the fabula and everything than accompanies it. Moreover the interest in psychological motivation . . . has been ripped up by its roots and discredited by the growing impotence of psychological motive in the face of real powers, increasingly harsh in their dealings with psychological motivation. Even the very concept of individual ‘action’ is being substituted for the more socially significant concept of ‘adaptation’”.
Mandelstam’s answer to the challenge (together with his interest in documentary prose) is a turning back to impersonality of folklore, with its oral tradition and nameless contributors. I feel the same way, and my own reading largely consists of non-fiction books and folktales, songs, ballads and so on. It’s mainly a visceral thing, but what feels important to me is the way certain oral genres give life to something that might be called another non-written literature (or at least a literary tradition that strays from established forms and official canons). Familial history was able to survive during Soviet times by the means of storytelling, kept alive on the margins and delivered mainly by female voices. In the same way oral narratives—as well as folk songs and later, street songs—was a separate verbal universe, where the leading role was given to human voice, for centuries. There is no stability in these songs and stories, no polished form, and the performer is able to make changes and take liberties—a perfect antidote to the written forms of literature with its rigid system of expectations. I am deeply indebted to this tradition and sometimes try to pay homage to it in my own way.
AMMD: If you were to write a course syllabus on Russian Literary Postmemory, what books and works in Russian and in English translation would be included as key texts? Who are the writers, classic and contemporary, that you feel should be on it?
MS: Oh, that’s such an enormous field, even if we stay within the borders of contemporary literature, leaving aside the groundbreaking works written in the 1960s and on: Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Lydia Ginsburg, Nina Berberova, Varlam Shalamov (whose “Kolyma tales” were considered by its first Western publishers to be so unartistic that they treated his prose as raw material, editing his work to their liking). In the twenty-first century, I’d name at least Polina Barskova, Elena Fanailova, Linor Goralik, Sergey Lebedev (with his magnificent Oblivion), the late Alexander Goldstein, and Andrey Sergeev—some of them translated, some not translated enough.
But the way this question is posed is a bit limiting, or so it feels, as we don’t know what exactly constitutes a work as belonging to Russian literature or Russian postmemory. Is it the language, or is it a matter of being a Russian citizen? Does it have to be written on Russian territory? Does it has to have Russian or Soviet history as a subject? Linor Goralik lives in Israel, and Polina Barskova in the US. Some of the authors I named write in Russian but not necessarily about Russia, though they are deeply grounded in this territory of postmemorial thinking.
And there are also authors I am not mentioning, even if they are important for this imaginary syllabus, because they would rightfully protest against being seen as a part of Russian heritage. These authors are not Russian but they write in Russian and/or engage Soviet-period traumas while having Russian as one of their home languages. Svetlana Alexievich, for instance, is Belarusian, and her books are essential for understanding the Soviet and post-Soviet world. I also think of the Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets, a Ukrainian writer (check out her war diaries!) who writes in Russian. Katja Petrowskaja, a Ukrainian author who writes in German, is creating a translingual space where memory is able to manifest itself. And so on.
I even have to say that I’d much prefer to teach a different course today. From my point of view, a defining thing about postmemory is its trans-border nature. It’s transgenerational, transnational, translingual, and it’s also a form of a solidarity with the living and the dead that does not fit into a concept of national literature. So I’d better forget the concept and stay with the authors I love, Russian or not, and add a couple books of W. G. Sebald to the syllabus on “Postmemory/Post Twentieth Century”.
Photo credit: Andrey Natotsinsky
Maria Stepanova is a poet, essayist, journalist and the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays. She has received several Russian and international literary awards (including the prestigious Andrey Bely Prize and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship). In Memory of Memory won Russia’s Bolshaya Kniga Award in 2018 and France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in 2022, and was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker. Her collection of poems, War and the Beasts and the Animals, is published by Bloodaxe in Sasha Dugdale’s translation in 2021, and is a Poetry Book Society Translation Choice. Stepanova is the founder and editor-in-chief of the online independent crowd-sourced journal Colta.ru, which covers the cultural, social and political reality of contemporary Russia.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), essayist, poet, and translator from the southern Philippines, is the editor-at-large for the Philippines at Asymptote. Author of Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021), contributor to The Best Asian Poetry, and nominee to the Pushcart Prize for their lyric essay, their latest works have appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Oxford Anthology of Translation, Sant Jordi Festival of Books, and the University of Alabama Press anthology Infinite Constellations. They’re formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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