Memory Tricks

When Sasha Dugdale was growing up in England, a teacher told her she could never learn Russian, that it was too difficult. “That was like a red rag to a bull,” she tells me. It’s a good thing Dugdale likes a challenge because as the principal translator of Maria Stepanova, arguably Russia’s greatest living poet, she has her work cut out for her. Stepanova’s brilliance is matched only by her legendary difficulty. Rather than write in free verse, she sticks to the metric strictures of classic syllabotonic Russian poetry and fills traditional forms with a dizzying mix of references and registers, drawing on everything from Slavic folklore to social media. A single poem moves seamlessly between quoting the kind of political rhetoric spewed on cable news to medieval epic poetry that glorified the princely battles of ancient Rus’. “Trying to capture that in English, the intensity of the poems combined with their formal qualities, is probably impossible,” says Dugdale, who is herself an acclaimed poet.

English-language readers have a bounty of that impossibility this year, with three new collections of Stepanova’s work out in English translation. Two are from Dugdale: War of the Beasts and Animals (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), a collection of poetry inspired by the fighting that broke out in eastern Ukraine following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and In Memory of Memory (New Directions, 2021), an experimental memoir that follows Stepanova’s family as Russian Jews navigating their country’s turbulent 20th century. The third, The Voice Over (Columbia University Press, 2021), is an expansive, thematically eclectic collection of Stepanova’s poetry and essays edited by Irina Shevelenko, a professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, who gathered contributions from nearly a dozen translators. One, Sibelan Forrester, a professor at Swarthmore College, shares Dugdale’s awe at Stepanova’s ability to innovate and experiment even within the confines of conventional poetics. “She is using traditional Russian verse but putting in things that are quite unexpected,” says Forrester, praising Stepanova in particular for her use of colloquial Russian within classic forms and alongside highbrow literary allusion. “She has access to the complete stylistic range of the Russian language,” Forrester says. That includes the language of internet trolls. In the war poem “Iphigenia in Aulis” (translated by Forrester), Stepanova mimics the kind of speech splashed across Russian social media during the onset of fighting in Ukraine in 2014: “Let me join the yids or the faggots, / I’ve been dreaming of this since third grade: / To become a stag or a ram for you, / A fatted heifer or a pudgy aunt, / A maiden, revealed in the bushes!”

Stepanova’s work is marked by her voracious appetite for references and quotations, the latter often unattributed. Peppered throughout In Memory of Memory are lines from W.G. Sebald, Nikolai Gogol, and Heraclitus, among many others. Some of Stepanova’s Russian critics take issue with this, suggesting that her poetic voice is little more than a pastiche. In turn, Stepanova adds their critiques to her palette. The second stanza of her 2015 poem “Spolia” begins with “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.” Shevelenko, who writes about “Spolia” in her introduction to The Voice Over, argues that Stepanova is writing not just about herself but also about Russia, a country “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.”

Indeed, much of Stepanova’s play with older forms and past literary traditions is rooted in her broader interrogation of collective memory, a political project she tries to complicate, and perhaps even dismantle, through poetry. In Russia, Putin’s government has manipulated mass media and textbooks in an effort to rewrite the country’s history, with an eye toward stoking Russian nationalism and recasting former authoritarian leaders, including Stalin, in a more favorable light. In “Spolia,” (translated by Dugdale), Stepanova satirizes militarism’s penchant for anachronism to make her point about the malleability of history, using the very melody that soldiers march to: “say the word that don’t belong // put in on and march along // forget the old and step anew // and the word will march with you.” Throughout her poems and nonfiction, she depicts the act of remembering as little more than a fool’s errand, the result of which, at the personal and national level, is an improvised patchwork of decontextualized impressions. Such instability, her work suggests, cannot be the foundation for politics: “a memory / won’t save us / lies in the ashes / biting its own tail” (from “Spolia”).

This complexity is what attracts scholars and translators to her, even as it makes the task before them all but “impossible,” as Dugdale says. One of the most pressing issues translators faced leading up to Stepanova’s “American debut” is how to render work so rooted in national mythmaking and collective consciousness legible to an entirely different audience that has its own myths. Other translators have recently grappled with that riddle as well. This past year, a spate of English translations of contemporary Russian poetry appeared, particularly poetry by young women—among them Life in Space by Galina Rymbu, The Scar We Know by Lida Yusupova, and the anthology F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry—who write within a distinctly different, post-Soviet feminist history. Given this flurry of English-language debuts, I ask Stepanova what she thinks contemporary Russian poets have to say to Americans at the moment. She cautions critics and readers not to look for some kind of uniquely Russian answer to American problems. “I don’t really believe in this mysterious Russianness of the Russians that is supposed to convey some secret knowledge,” she tells me. The problems the world faces, Stepanova argues, are global and cross-generational. They require a new framework to receive and categorize literature, one that denaturalizes national identity. Stepanova believes that translation, particularly of poetry, can help. As she says, “Poetry is maybe the main thing happening now in Russian literature: powerful, daring, cutting-edge, diverse.”

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Stepanova became a writer during one of the most epochal moments in Russian history. She was born in 1972 in Moscow (where she has lived ever since) and began writing poems as a teenager. She came of age during the twilight of the Soviet Union and later the turbulent post-Soviet 1990s. For many writers, the collapse of the Soviet system also meant the dissolution of their careers. The Soviet Writers Union, founded in 1932 by the Central Committee to exert greater control on literary production, made being a member of the literati financially viable, particularly if writers were willing to make political compromises in their art. One bad book of state-sponsored poetry could launch an entire career and a comfortable lifestyle, but by 1991, all that was over. “I saw people crushed, melted, changed because of that,” Stepanova told the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2017. “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.” The experience convinced Stepanova she did not want to live by her pen, so she began working as a copywriter for a French ad agency and later worked in television.

In 2007, Stepanova founded OpenSpace.ru, a cultural daily that published essays, criticism, and reported features. Five years later, widespread protests broke out across Russia in advance of the country’s 2012 presidential election, the results of which activists and opposition leaders later contested. Though state-controlled media largely ignored the protests, the independent TV channel Dozhd (translation: Rain) broadcast regular coverage of the unrest and street demonstrations. In response, the Russian government intensified pressure on independent journalism outlets, and the financial backers of OpenSpace.ru anxiously withdrew from Stepanova’s website, forcing it to shutter. Undeterred, she subsequently launched the arts and culture website Colta.ru with the aid of a massive crowdfunding campaign.

The platform gave Stepanova a central role in shaping the landscape of cultural commentary in Russia and, by extension, contemporary Russian culture itself. Colta.ru can best be described as politically liberal (it has been compared to HuffPost), though such labels don’t always translate in an international framework in which “the issues” vary. For instance, the website came under fire last summer when it published an essay by the political consultant and Harvard University fellow Vitali Shkliarov. The essay, part of a larger series about Black Lives Matter, trafficked in racist stereotypes about African Americans. Shkliarov even suggested that racism among police officers is understandable because Black people, according to him, are more likely to commit crimes; as evidence, he cited Wikipedia. Colta subsequently published an essay by Shevelenko that rebutted Shkliarov’s claims.

For her part, Stepanova sees parallels between what happened in the United States in the summer of 2020 and events in her own country. Both Russia and the United States are in the midst of something like “a civil war of memory,” she tells me. As Americans fight over Confederate monuments, Russians exchange polemics about what counts as an atrocity and who should be blamed. “The Russian authorities are pushing forward their own version of history, with a number of new laws and prohibitions that are strictly limiting the possibilities of presenting an uncensored view on Russian history,” Stepanova says. Russian scholars who research the GULAG have come under police scrutiny, for example, and many critics hear in Putin’s rhetoric an effort to rehabilitate Stalin. According to a 2019 poll conducted by the independent Levada Center, 70 percent of Russians said Stalin, who oversaw the murder of millions of Russian citizens as part of the purges of the 1930s, had a positive impact on the country.

“For the contemporary Russian mind,” Stepanova says, “all our much troubled history is a sort of minefield: no event or time period, no matter how distant it is, provides a base for common consensus. Everything is questionable and subject to never-ending debate.” This collective ambivalence has been a source of both political consternation and artistic possibility for her. The slipperiness of history and the improvisational quality of historical thinking are hallmarks of her work, which will likely resonate with new audiences in the United States, riven by racism and culture war skirmishes, and in a Britain still reeling from Brexit.

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The most wide-ranging of the Stepanova translations being released this year, The Voice Over, is part of the Columbia University Press Russian Library series. Launched in 2016, the imprint is dedicated to publishing Russian literature in English translation, with a focus on less-frequently translated works and authors. It has been especially praised for publishing work by women writers—from Sofia Khvoshchinskaya, author of the satirical novel City Folk and Country Folk (1862), to the contemporary poet Linor Goralik. Russian women authors are generally less known to English readers than the male “greats” of the 19th century (whom scholars lovingly but dismissively lump together as “Tolstoyevsky”).

With The Voice Over, the Russian Library imprint continues in that tradition, helping to deepen Anglophone readers’ understanding of the contemporary poetry scene in Russia. The collection spans 20 years of Stepanova’s work, including poetry and essays originally published in Russia between 1996 and 2016, beginning with work from her early collections The Here-World (2001) and Physiology and Private History (2005). One poem from the latter is the seemingly light-hearted “The Women’s Locker Room at Planet Fitness”:

From watches, juxtaposed rags, our voices’ sounds.
And into nostrils, ears and mouths, like out a kettle spout,
En masse they’ll surge and spill, souls
Who broke the lock.

It quickly becomes apparent that the locker room is a metaphor for Stepanova’s broader project to define, or at least think through, womanhood as a kind of communal experience in being pushed to one’s physical limits. Also in that vein is “Sarah on the Barricades,” a poem about Stepanova’s great-grandmother, who participated in the 1905 Revolution, a mass uprising in Russia that pressured the tsar into establishing the Duma, the country’s first multiparty legislative assembly. The poem places Sarah within a longer tradition of women’s political participation in Russia that continues with Stepanova:

I know (it would be better not to know)
That these universal birthing pains,
Rhythmic as a cannonade, are
The coming of a whole new strain. That into sleepless bassinets
Yawn these gaping hatches.
That this demo-graphic tide
Boils and bubbles with every type.

Such continuity seems to be something Stepanova recognizes as a kind of precious anchor, a steadying force in a world where history and tradition are often fragmented or broken off and repurposed by bad actors. This comes through in her essays, wherein she not only delves into the work and legacy of women writers (Marina Tsvetaeva, Susan Sontag) but also mimics their style in the process, as if to insist on an unbroken aesthetic lineage that’s palpable at the sentence level.

Forrester, who translated Stepanova’s essay on Tsvetaeva, tried to preserve Stepanova’s stylistic playfulness, including the way the poet borrows Tsvetaeva’s signature use of dashes and parentheticals. “The dash,” Forrester explains, “jumps you over a connection that might otherwise take several words.” Like Stepanova, Tsvetaeva was a poet who occasionally wrote essays, but they were “belittled by critics” who did not know how to categorize them, says Forrester. She adds, “They would call them ‘autobiographical fragments.’ It took the next generation to appreciate what [Tsvetaeva] was doing.”

The Voice Over contains a number of Stepanova’s essays ranging on topics from avant-garde graphic design in the 1930s to the state of contemporary Russian poetry. Of the latter, Stepanova bemoans the incursion of market logic into the post-Soviet cultural scene: “Lacking market suited poetry,” she writes, “cheap to produce, not very attractive to an outside observer, it regulated itself, saved and ruined itself on its own” (translated by Forrester). In her introduction, Shevelenko reminds readers that the essay is a “genre that does not have a stable tradition in Russian literature.” Stepanova, she says, “is virtually the only Russian author of comparable caliber in her generation who has worked consistently to reestablish the essay as an important form of creative discourse—a work of art and an intellectual statement.”

The Voice Over also includes poems from Stepanova’s more recent collection, Kireevsky (2012). The title takes its name from Pyotr Kireevsky, an early-19th-century folklorist who collected songs; fittingly, Stepanova’s book comprises primarily ballads. The poems engage with the cultural legacy of the Russian Revolution, the Stalinist Great Purge, and World War II, and they draw rhythmically from popular war songs and military jingles, as evidenced in a line from “Young Maids Sing,” translated by Eugene Ostashevsky: “Hole in my belly / Ice water within / Many tank turrets / Tear nets in the spring.” In a note, Ostashevsky echoes other Stepanova translators I spoke to who all identify the same difficulty: to translate Stepanova’s poetry means finding not only new words but also new cultural shorthand, new familiar echoes, new memories and national myths. As Ostashevsky asks, “How do you translate the meaning that inheres in the half-said, when the intended reading depends on shared historical experience that the reader of the translation will most certainly lack?” For writers and scholars who work at the intersection of Russia and the West, the need to work through this difficulty feels particularly urgent. When violent histories are forged in tandem, how can they be reckoned with singularly?

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For Dugdale, this question became especially prescient when she was translating “War of the Beasts and Animals,” a long Stepanova poem inspired by the 2014 war in Ukraine. The eponymous collection also includes the aforementioned “Spolia,” another long poem about the fighting in Donbass. Spolia, Latin for spoil, as in “spoils of war,” was a medieval term for repurposed ancient marble used to construct new buildings. Stones from old monuments were cut and refashioned to fill in alongside brick, resulting in a patchwork architecture. In 2014, a similar situation was unfolding in Russia at the level of language. Using an erratic jumble of nationalist rhetoric, the state-run media promoted the narrative that the pro-Russia separatists were patriots defending themselves from a fascist Ukraine backed by the United States. “My poem was the result of utter shock,” Stepanova told the Los Angeles Review of Books. “Language was changing all around me. Not only was it heavily peppered with hate speech, but it also became utterly hybrid. People were quoting Stalin’s speeches or brilliantly and unconsciously imitated the style of Pravda’s columns from the 1930s or ’50s, never realizing that they hadn’t invented these words.”

Stepanova wrote those elements into the poems, making them electrifying reads for Russian audiences but difficult to parse for anyone unfamiliar with such culturally specific references. Dugdale has a deep understanding of Russian literature and culture, but she was nonetheless tentative to translate “War of the Beasts and Animals” because she was too distanced from the material. That all changed in 2016 when Great Britain voted to leave the European Union. “The debates around the referendum were often emotional and irrational,” Dugdale explains, “but the rhetoric from the winning side focused largely on the imperial and military victories which had made us a force to be reckoned with; we were an ‘exceptional country.’” As leaders in Great Britain and Russia stirred up nationalist sentiment, Dugdale felt she was finally ready to turn her attention to translating Stepanova’s poem, finding new resonance in lines such as “so, setting out rooks and queen / in their chequered chambers / culture leads fear / down the gauntlet of human nature.”

Stepanova largely draws on Russian and Soviet culture, including relatively obscure sources (arcane political speeches, medieval war epics, etc.) that would puzzle even native Russians. That proved an advantage for Dugdale. Because Russian readers might be only vaguely familiar with the references, she could likewise pull widely and creatively from an Anglophone repository of memory. She adapted lines from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: “Thou art the armourer of the heart.” Elsewhere, she inserted words from the Rudyard Kipling empire-celebration poem “Mandalay” (which Boris Johnson, now Britain’s prime minister, quoted, to much horror, at a Burmese temple in 2017), not necessarily expecting readers to instantly recognize it:

masha learns on breakfast tv
’er petticoat was yaller an’ ’er little cap was green
till apples grow on an orange tree
breaches of password security.

These lines “may dimly remind [people] of something,” she tells me. “I swap in resonant English language allusions, echoes, so that the reader gets a sense of being implicated, having those memories.”

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The most anticipated of the new translations is In Memory of Memory, recently longlisted for the Booker Prize. It’s a quasi-memoir of Stepanova’s family based on scrapbooks, journals, diaries, and ephemera that also functions as a critique of memory itself. The story Stepanova weaves together takes readers through what one would expect to be an eventful period in Russian history—the 20th century—but she refuses to offer a sweeping history or a dramatic retelling of the period’s marquee moments. “Maybe I am trying to push back against the commodification of the past that is becoming an important trait of our everyday life, in Russia as everywhere,” Stepanova tells me.

Early in the book, Stepanova writes about growing up with a strong desire to have an exciting family story, one that fit into her country’s national myths about the heroism of its people. To her shame, she found little intrigue in her genealogy. “None of [my family] had fought or been repressed or executed … none had lived under German occupation or fought in the battles of the century,” she writes. It seemed to Stepanova that her family ultimately “led very quiet lives, appearing to live utterly apart from the grinding mills of the era.”

Throughout In Memory of Memory, Stepanova lays bare the fallibility of memory, mocking, as she does in her poetry, the idea that anything certain can be built atop a vision of the past. In one early scene, she travels to Saratov, a city in southwestern Russia, where she tracks down, with the help of a friend, the address of her great-grandfather. Once she arrives, she writes, “I recognized my great grandfather’s yard unhesitatingly” despite never having been there before. “I remembered everything,” she continued “with such a sense of heightened native precision that I seemed to know how it had all been, in this, our, place, how we had lived and why we had left.” When she returns to Moscow, the same friend who helped her locate the home calls her and apologizes—he mixed up the address. It was the right street but the wrong house. “And that,” Stepanova concludes, “is just about everything I know about memory.”