Maria
Stepanova

“Mad Russia hurt me into poetry,” says Maria Stepanova, born in Moscow in 1972, one of Russia’s major poets and a powerful voice of freedom. She belongs to a generation who came of age during the latter days of the Soviet Union. For her, the collapse of Soviet institutions was a new beginning. She studied at the Gorky Institute, her first volume of poetry was published in 2000, and dozens have followed since. Her revival of the ballad form, in general her virtuoso handling of poetic technique, her masterful recourse to literary traditions, and her intellectual horizon extending far beyond the Russian sphere soon brought her renown and prizes. Under Putin, she experienced how the future was first frozen, then began to crumble. It was, she once said, as if “a past that had been buried in the furthest corners of consciousness for decades was suddenly moving through the streets as a parade of dead things.” 

Amidst growing patriotic invocations and the hollowing out of language in the public sphere, she founded the independent online magazine OpenSpace.ru in 2007, followed by the successor platform colta.ru in 2012, not least to wrest reflections on the past and present from imperial clutches. Then, she achieved her international breakthrough with the novel In Memory of Memory (de: Nach dem Gedächtnis, Suhrkamp, 2018). 

The labor of memory runs throughout much of her work. Her poetry creates a kind of “time within time” that offers space for sounds, rhythms, images, and experiences from all places and times; it undermines any pathos with humor and sarcasm, with songlike lyricism and impish playfulness.  

“I keep looking at photos of these never-ending days of the war in Ukraine,” she said in 2022, “of a war so unimaginable that you can’t believe what’s happening is real.” In her texts, Stepanova concentrates all her senses on “what’s happening.” “Many-eyed” and “many-voiced,” she succeeds in not avoiding reality while also not succumbing to it. That is (her) great art.  

Olga Radetzkaja translates the works of possibly the most innovative and productive Russian author today into German with enormous linguistic force. In addition to the novel, for which they both received the Brücke Berlin Prize in 2018, Radetzkaja also translated the poetry collections Der Körper kehrt wieder, Mädchen ohne Kleider, and Winterpoem 20/21. In autumn 2024, she will publish Stepanova’s novella Absprung, in which a poet disappears on her way to a festival—another act of resistance against what’s happening?  

Maria Stepanova has received numerous international awards, including most recently the 2023 Berman Literature Prize, Stockholm, and the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding. In 2023/2024, she was a fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, and in 2024/2025 she is a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. 

Text: Marie Luise Knott
Translation: good & cheap translations