Holy Winter 20/21 – Maria Stepanova

[New Directions; 2024]

Tr. from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale

From Charli XCX’s how i’m feeling now to Bo Burnham’s Inside, the work of art in the age of pandemic production often expresses a yearning for human interaction. For many, the early months of 2020 were a time of unprecedented social isolation. Natural, then, was the longing for anthems in the club, or moans about endless scrolling in place of face-to-face interactions. Maria Stepanova’s 2021 collection, Holy Winter 20/21, composed nearly four years ago and now appearing in English translation by Sasha Dugdale, represents the celebrated Russian poet’s foray into the pandemic sub-genre. While COVID-19 is not invoked as explicitly as in XCX’s or Burnham’s work, the collection echoes these other works’ themes of alienation and displacement. Stepanova is one of the most celebrated Russian poets of her generation and a prominent critic of the Putin regime since the 2010s. She is known for intellectual density and formal virtuosity, often resurrecting archaic verse forms and engaging with historical memory in contemporary Russophone spheres. Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory (2017) engages with contemporary post-memory studies to reveal the way personal and national history continually reappears in the present in the Russian Jewish experience.

Holy Winter is, especially on first reading, even more “difficult” and “dense” than Stepanova’s previous work, bewildering the reader with multiple voices between the constituent texts. In the original Russian, the book bears the subtitle “poema,” or long poem, suggesting that the collection should be taken as one extended piece. However, the smaller poems (all of them appearing without a title), are difficult to piece together. The different voices are marked off graphically, through italics, switching between verse with line breaks and prose poetry. They range widely in time period and gender. One of the voices is an exiled male poet reflecting on his time in Rome and his past glory in the seat of imperial power:

Dawn broke—and half the night spent burning manuscripts and documents.

I took no clothes, I chose no slaves to take with me.

When I think back I find myself on the ship

The sea all around me, the sea on the decks . . .

The line “burning manuscripts” immediately draws a connection, in the Russophone context, to Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a novel woven around the image of a genius male writer, fighting to survive in a totalitarian society. At the same time, the references to “choosing slaves” and traveling by sea point to an earlier time period. This blending of historical time periods in the representations of the past remains a persistent feature throughout the collection. Another voice is an explorer, traveling to Nova Zembla, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean:

We continued here three weeks in this dismal plight. At length, upon a turn of wind, the air about us began to thaw.

At times, even more contemporary voices emerge, speaking about a non-specific war raging around them:

At night special ops

Were sometimes seen

Crossing the transparent border

Dispersing into our darkness

The looming threat of war is a transhistorical constant, no matter if the war is fought with bombs or spears:

Lights out. The girls disperse to their tents

Clean their weapons, check their ammo:

All in order. You ask how I am

I’m battle ready.

No point in crying over spilt milk

Or a pierced shield, or a life suspended

Like a plush monkey on a string

Jugging up and down, back and forth

While a reader can work through some of the voice’s identities based on context and extra-textual knowledge, the collection is disorienting at first, as the reader struggles to place themselves vis-a-vis the kind of stable speaker they would expect from lyric poetry. Stepanova often problematizes the unitary poetic voice (a recent anthology of her work in English was aptly titled Voice Over), but the swift shifts are especially jarring within the context of a single piece. In some ways, the collection recalls Burnham’s “Welcome to the Internet,” the rapid switching between different voices having a similar “a little bit of everything all of the time” sensibility. With none of the guardrails of in-person interaction (relevance, cohesion, intelligibility), language in isolation appears disjointed, communicating only its own disjointedness. The northern explorer narrates:

For every man was sensible, as we afterwards found, that he spoke as well as ever, but the sounds no sooner took air than they were condensed and lost. It was a miserable spectacle to see us nodding and gaping at one another, every man talking, and no man heard.

Even in face-to-face proximity, normal interaction becomes one-sided. Another voice goes even further:

Whoever speaks, speaks in a whisper.

I think about how these letters mean nothing.

Along with recurring references to military conflicts, Stepanova ties the failures of communication to images of journeys, voluntary or otherwise: ranging from the exiled poets’ voyages to a little boy on his sled in a retelling of Hans Christian Anderson’s “Snow Queen.” The collection opens with a quote from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, an eighteenth-century German novel with specific staying power in Russophone culture, that casts the entire collection as a trip across a wintry Russia. Continual displacement and dislocation work in concert with the frozen landscape to prevent stable communication. Context clues aside, only at the close of the collection does the reader get an explicit gloss on the voices that have popped up here and there through its pages.

When the cold abates, the words begin to thaw. But as they thaw

they all resound at once, and so cannot be fully understood.

Sometimes they speak in different languages, although they

are saying more or less the same thing. In this book you

can hear these once-frozen and now thawing voices

as they multiply in the telling, flushed by translation,

crackling in the cold. . . .

The poet represents the emergence of the different voices in her collection as an intuitive and nearly unconscious process. However, despite the overt polyphony, there is nonetheless a resulting resonance between the voices, which all seem to express the failure of language itself. Stepanova proceeds to list the voices that thaw throughout the book, including Erich Raspe and his fictionalized depiction of Baron Munchausen; the Russian Empress Catherine II and her favorite Grigory Potemkin; and others. And the exiled poet is revealed to be Ovid as he exists in various translations and cultural mediations. As Stepanova’s longtime translator and collaborator, Sasha Dugdale masterfully handles the shifts in diction and style that define the collection: from the colloquial and contemporary “My boi calls me his babe, his girl / His ex calls me “it” or “that cow”” to the archaic and courtly “Tell me, sovereign of my heart, how things are and whether I am in your favor?” Dugdale has previously translated both Stepanova’s poetry and her In Memory of Memory. In an enjambments interview with Poets.org, Dugdale humorously notes that her family calls her a “method translator,” referring to her practice of poring over texts like Catherine the Great’s correspondences and Ovid’s original poetry until she “felt [she] had all those independent voices in [her] head.” The rapid switching between registers she accomplishes thanks to this immersive approach is only accentuated through the intermingling of time periods, the collapse of clear historical boundaries between past and present.

Communication failure is part of the collection’s metaphor of winter and the pandemic: All opportunities for genuine communication are frozen over. In the afterword to this translation, Stepanova fixes the metaphor of snow and thaw to concrete referents: the pandemic and the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, respectively. Certainly, the image of a snowy winter is analogous to early pandemic lockdowns through their shared isolation and disconnection. The collection’s title in Russian recalls the name of Stravinisky’s famous ballet Rite of Spring [lit. “holy spring” in the original]. The beginning of the pandemic, to someone not deemed an essential worker or otherwise privileged enough to stay inside, did have a ritualistic aspect to it with all of the handwashing and mask-donning brought about by fear of the invisible yet ever-present virus. While acknowledging this fear as the dominant emotion of the time, Stepanova also admits in her afterword that she often looks back fondly on the early months of the pandemic as a strange utopia. Many cultural critics, such as Slavoj Žižek, shared this feeling in early 2020, imagining new radical futures and opportunities for international unity in the face of an unprecedented external threat. However, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine ended any dreams of a newfound unity, recasting them as idealistic and naive. As Stepanova writes, “the pandemic was over for me on February 24, 2022.” And while the collection is primarily a “pandemic” collection, it is impossible to ignore the context of the war in Ukraine as central to Holy Winter’s evocations of looming threats of violence. Stepanova’s previous collection Spolia and her long poem “War of the Beasts and the Animals” responded to the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas, respectively. However, as the afterword makes explicit, the English translation of Holy Winter grapples even more with the position of Russian culture and literature and their imperial dimensions.

Throughout her career, Stepanova has fractured the unified poetic voice as a response to imperial consolidation, undermining a hegemonic view of a singular speaker and a singular history. The voices in Holy Winter are never represented as “direct” and “unmediated,” continually alluding to the mechanisms of cultural transmission. This is especially apparent in the sections written from the perspective of Ovid or, more accurately, Ovid in multiple translations into Russian. The exiled Roman poet is a frequent touchstone for the Russophone tradition, specifically for poets who find themselves at odds with imperial power. From Aleksandr Pushkin analogizing his own “southern exile” with that of Naso to Osip Mandelstam recasting his house arrest in Voronezh as a proverbial Tomis, the famous dynamic of the Russian poet speaking truth to power and suffering a heroic defeat has found solidarity with this historical and cross-cultural “rhyme.” In the collection, Ovid joins Mandelstam in his place of exile:

And Caeser himself, before retiring to his chambers

Would ask his secretary: any news from Naso?

What’s he scribbling in that Voronezh of his?

Optimistically, Holy Winter can be read as drawing on the past, much like Pushkin and Mandelstam, as a source of inspiration for resistance against imperial power.

However, Holy Winter 20/21 is not so straightforwardly invested in the power of historical rhymes. The frequent evocations of a non-specific military conflict, looming as a threat throughout various poems, show that war recurs just as much as resistance. In addition to the motif of failed communication, the collection’s many voices can also be understood as being set at various distances from the center of imperial power, including the fairy tale Snow Queen and the real-life Count Potemkin attempting to establish intimacy with his empress. This collection’s version of Ovid in exile is subjected to passport control:

So my shade will stand separate from the rest

Under the sign marked “Citizens of R.E.”

While “R.E.” in this transhistorical poem most clearly stands for “Roman Empire,” “Russian Empire” is just as logical a reading. Just as the past can be a source of inspiration, it can also return to haunt.

Throughout the traditions of Russophone poetry, a sense of lineage through a set of shared intertextual references has been a source of community that was supposedly able to withstand political repression. As many, including poet and scholar Mikhail Gronas, have argued, poetry is a technology of memory, a means of preserving a sense of community in the face of Stalinist purges and time served in the Gulag. Most notable in advocating for this mnemonic role of poetry in the Soviet Union was Anna Akhmatova, who even mused that, perhaps, all poetry is but one “glorious quotation” as she became the self-appointed embodiment of Russian cultural in the post-Stalin era.

The beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the widespread interrogation of the imperialism at the core of Russian culture have challenged the uncritical acceptance of this liberal imagination of the Russian poetic tradition as a means of resistance. The “greatness” of Russian literature, as has become abundantly clear to an ever-wider readership, is based on a perception of its unity and internal coherence, its being a single “glorious quotation” and a shared community that can recognize it. What is called “coherence” is, in fact, the consolidation of imperial power. While Stepanova emphasizes the mediation of the voices in an attempt to disrupt this “coherence,” her postmodernist dissimulation does not fully disrupt her reliance on this strategy implemented by Russian poets throughout history. Indeed, the kind of community offered by historical rhymes is difficult to distinguish from the historical rhymes exploited by the Putin regime to justify the “historical unity of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples.”

Stepanova’s collection is deeply ambivalent about the role of historical rhymes, falling back on earlier notions of them preserving a cultural community in the face of historical tragedy, while also somewhat skeptical of these repetitions as truly allowing for resistance. In a recent interview with fellow poet and critic Igor Gulin, the poet remarked that we react to repetitions differently in art than in the real world or in history. Whereas repetition is in many ways the basis for an artistic construction, the cyclical returns of past epochs bring horrifying consequences. The collection acknowledges the impossibility of uncritically embracing historical rhymes in an era when such “rhymes” are not just literary but also gestures at the impossibility of thinking beyond such “rhymes.” One poem notably ends with an injunction to “Go home! Go digest / The present tense”—but the command appears almost ironic in a collection so thoroughly in the past. How does one “digest” the present tense without memory and tradition? While as a pandemic collection, Holy Winter expresses a deep longing for community and communication, perhaps, as Burnham concludes at the end of his Netflix special, it would have been better to “stay inside,” to reject the kinds of imaginary communities that prove politically dangerous. However, Stepanova’s wintery landscape, defined by failures of languages, is only a utopia by comparison to the nightmare of the thaw. Though the afterword and the act of translating Stepanova’s work attempt to bridge the gap between the pre-full-scale invasion time of the pandemic and the war, Holy Winter, much like Charli XCX’s album, is most effective as a snapshot of a given moment, a “how i’m feeling now” for a time when historical rhymes could still claim to be only textual.

Venya Gushchin is a poet, literary translator, and PhD Candidate at Columbia University, writing a dissertation on the late styles of Russian modernist poets. His translations of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Elizaveta Mnatasakanova have received the Columbia University Slavic Department Pushkin Prize. Blockade Swallow, selected poems by Olga Berggolts, translated by Gushchin, appeared from Smokestack Books in 2022. Most recently, his translation of Yevsey Tseytlin’s Rereading Silence was published by Bagriy & Company. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus; Action, Spectacle; Midway Journal; No, Dear; and elsewhere.