A compendious family scrapbook that tells the story of a turbulent century of Russian life
Russian poet Maria Stepanova, born in 1972, came of age amid all the upheaval of the post-Soviet 90s, and the accompanying new challenges for writing. She has won important Russian and international literary awards, is editor-in-chief of online arts journal Colta.ru, and is now being published in English for the first time (she was in a Zephyr anthology in 2013). Bloodaxe has brought out a selection of poems, War of the Beasts and the Animals, translated by Sasha Dugdale. It will take a while for readers in the UK to learn how to take in these poems, crowded as they are with different voices and types, dense with allusions to Russian life and culture past and present, as well as to wider European literature and history. At first encounter they seem sensuous, haunted, significant, ambitious. Meanwhile Fitzcarraldo has published her prose memoir In Memory of Memory, which probably gives us as good a guide as any to the shapes and motifs of Stepanova’s thought.
She tells us that she’s been trying to write this book of her family history for years, in some sense ever since she was an only child, growing up with parents and grandparents and, for a while, a great-grandmother, too, in an apartment in Moscow crowded with the leftover possessions of past generations: their books, teacups, newspapers, clothes, postcards, toys, photographs, as well as fragments of family anecdote. It’s the same apartment where she begins typing the memoir we are reading. That child was smitten with a sense of responsibility in relation to all this memorabilia, and when she grows up it’s as if, until she’s written about it, she can’t get beyond it into her adult present. There may be something particularly Russian in this anxiety: as though its 20th-century dead demand their reckoning with a special urgency, because the question of their lives had to be postponed, in all the surreal chaos of revolution and state violence and war.
Related: 'Love’s labours should be lost': Maria Stepanova, Russia's next great writer
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