Maria Stepanova

Longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2024

Longlisted for the Barrios Book in Translation Prize (NBCC Awards 2024)

Poetry Book Society Translation Choice

The outbreak of Covid-19 cut short Maria Stepanova’s stay in Cambridge in 2020. Back in Russia, she spent the ensuing months in a state of torpor – the world had withdrawn from her, time had ‘gone numb’. When she awoke from this state, she began to read Ovid, and the shock of the pandemic dissolved into the voices and metaphors of an epochal experience.

Her book-length poem Holy Winter 20/21, written in a frenzy of poetic inspiration, speaks of winter and war, of banishment and exile, of social isolation and existential abandonment. Stepanova finds sublime imagery for the process of falling silent, interweaving love letters and travelogues, Chinese verse and Danish fairy tales into a polyphonic evocation of frozen and slowly thawing time.

Following her previous book of poetry, War of the Beasts and the Animals – in part a response to the Donbas conflict – her book’s title is even more prophetic now, echoing a famous patriotic Soviet song from 1941, ‘a holy war is underway’.

Born in 1972, Maria Stepanova – as poet and essayist – was a highly influential figure for many years in Moscow’s cosmopolitan literary scene until its suppression along with civil liberties and dissent under Putin’s latter-day reign of terror. Her first prose work In Memory of Memory established her internationally as one of the most important intellectual voices of contemporary Russia.

Her poetry, which here echoes verses by Pushkin and Lermontov, Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva, is not hermetic. She takes in the confusing signals from social networks and the media, opening herself up to the voices of kindred poets like Sylvia Plath, Inger Christensen and Anne Carson. She has moreover mastered modern poetry’s rich repertoire of forms and moves effortlessly between the linguistic and traditional spaces of Russian, European and transatlantic literature.

In her prose, Stepanova searches for the essence of the moment in the maelstrom of historical time. As an essayist, she traces the reactions of her critical consciousness; taken together, her politically alert commentaries form a powerful chronicle of the troubled present.

‘A direct result of…individual and collective exile, Holy Winter is an intimate, reflective meditation that, over the course of some fifty pages, takes the reader on a latter-day Winterreise through frozen space and time […] Stepanova leads the reader on a digressive, polyphonic, hibernal odyssey. […] As so often in Stepanova’s work, … multiple voices jostle for space, ventriloquizing and speaking over one another. The constant “I” of the lyric persona seems almost to skate on the ice of allusion, weaving between and together not only canonical Russian writers such as Alexander Pushkin, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva, but also European folklorists and classical Chinese poets. In this respect alone, it is a great testament to the skill of Stepanova’s longtime translator, Sasha Dugdale, that these allusions come through so tellingly and with such immediacy in English. [...]  Yet for all these intertextual and interhistorical echoes, Holy Winter retains a distinct lyric voice that is at once cultured and intimate, eloquent and immediate. Punctuated by the ice, it speaks with a dreamlike gentility and subtle humour, waiting for the moment when, as Stepanova reminds us, the thaw finally comes...' – Bryan Karetnyk, The Times Literary Supplement

'In an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Stepanova said: ‘In a mental theatre, a single person plays all the parts.’ And one very much feels, on reading this book, that one is entering Stepanova’s ‘mental theatre’; the experience is something like looking through a kaleidoscope because the arrangement of voices and narratives keeps shifting, switching and returning, so that it is both disorientating and thrilling  [...] Holy Winter 20/21 is a powerful book for today that re-uses tales from Ovid, Pushkin, Mandelstam, Baron Munchausen, Dante and Homer’s The Odyssey to construct a quirky edifice that resounds to themes of exile, absolutism, conflict and mortality; and above all, perhaps, the endurance of the human spirit in the face of all those terrifying things.' – Colin Pink, London Grip

‘Maria Stepanova’s Holy Winter 20/21…traffics in magic and folk-tales, travel in distant lands and extraordinary transformations. It’s partly chrestomathy, a patchwork of direct quotations and translations, and partly an anthology of variations on themes of cold and winter […] Central to the book is the theme of exile, with translations of short sections from Ovid’s Tristia appearing throughout, a counterpart to the displacement Stepanova experienced on her return to Russia during the Covid-19 pandemic.’ – Anna Reckin, Long Poem Magazine

'Holy Winter’s a psychological study of a kind of ‘bereavement’ but also brings in – and this is one of its strengths – many references to the different kinds of isolation (including but not solely linked to exile) endured by others (real and fictional) ... the flow of this book is emotionally driven, its loose shape owing something to the notion of an undated personal journal, but the texture is strengthened through the introduction of independent characters spiritually linked with the poet’s own story.' – Dilys Wood, ARTEMISpoetry

‘Written in the shock of being so isolated during the Covid pandemic, Holy Winter 20/21 draws on Ovid (who, oddly, can be found nesting inside Covid). Stepanova writes here of being exiled now doubly: both by the pandemic and by her politics [...] Her home is now something that she once had – that’s gone – and her beautifully modulated language explores presence and absence in so impressive a way.’ – Barbara Epler, TANK (Recommended Books, Summer 2024)

‘This is dazzlingly beautiful poetry, in imagery and in sound, in Russian and in English, and in its variety of voices … precisely caught by Dugdale. The relationship between this poet and translator has been a particularly close and fruitful one. […] This work reminds us what pleasure there is in becoming absorbed in the world of a poem that is as all-encompassing as a symphony. A poem whose richness, strangeness and beauty can make our own winters holy.’ – Kate Pursglove, East-West Review

'Sasha Dugdale's latest collection, The Strongbox, and her translation of Maria Stepanova's collection Holy Winter 20/21 were both published in 2024. The two books stepped into the world hand-in-hand, and their reckoning with war, pandemic, ecological crisis and displacement are gut-wrenchingly pertinent.' – Rebecca Hurst, PN Review

'The outbreak of Covid-19 and the shock of an outside world gone numb transforms into this polyphonic epic. [...] within this space of social isolation and existential abandonment, we might find the inspiration that an elongation of time affords us. Stepanova interweaves love letters, travelogues, poems, historical anecdotes such as ‘the Russian Empress Catherine II (and her beloved Grigory Potemkin)'. There is a journey even within the stationary, even when a person cannot physically travel; that the external journey can be made internal by the passage of reading and literature. […] Stepanova asks us to encounter the many, to not limit understanding by just one source, trust in the process of change; frozen wintery time through its slow thaw heralding the arrival of Spring.' –    SK Grout, The Alchemy Spoon, on Holy Winter 20/21

'In this powerful book there is an acute sense of how words may put an individual in very real danger in times of political repression that shuts down any contradiction to the perceptions of the state.' – Jean Garforth, #RivetingReviews, European Literature Network

'... Stepanova weaves a work that is intimate and erudite, ambitious and self-deprecating. It is also – in Sasha Dugdale’s English translation – frankly gorgeous, sounding marvelously the lyrical possibilities of wintriness.' – Alexander Wells, The Berliner, on Holy Winter 20/21

'The moving, polyvocal latest from Stepanova (War of the Beasts and the Animals) is a book-length snowscape sequence that blends voices of fracture and love, evoking Ovid in exile and other historical touchstones, from Baron Munchausen to Hans Christian Andersen. Skillfully rendered by Dugdale, the air in these poems is infused with such dangers as “Airborne particles of frost ash/ Tiny cavalry officers” (noncoincidentally, the book was written during Covid-19 lockdowns). There is a feeling of arrest in these pages [...], but there’s equally a difficult hopefulness, the voices reaching for “that place where misfortune is not known,” however forlorn their searching. It adds up to a finely woven exercise in vocalization that always looks toward redemption, or at least respite, from its shocking precarity: “if time has a pocket then place me in it, gently.” A political undertow [...] adds to the collection’s depth. Bound together by a gently thoughtful steeliness, these poetic utterances are at once plaintive and resolute.' – Publishers Weekly, on Holy Winter 20/21

Launch reading by Jane Hirshfield & Maria Stepanova with Sasha Dugdale

Jane Hirshfield, Maria Stepanova and Maria's translator Sasha Dugdale celebrated the publication of their new poetry books at this online reading for Bloodaxe Books on 19 March 2024. They read live and discussed their work with each other and with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. The event also included readings of poems from the new Bloodaxe anthology Soul Feast, also published in March 2024 and which features four of Jane Hirshfield’s poems as well as Sasha Dugdale’s translation of a poem by Elena Shvarts.

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