Overview

This book-length poem one of Russia's most important and outspoken contemporary poets, written in a frenzy of poetic inspiration, speaks of winter and war, of banishment and exile, of social isolation and existential abandonment. In early 2020, the outbreak of Covid-19 cut short Maria Stepanova’s stay in Cambridge. Back in Russia, she spent the ensuing months in a state of torpor – the world had withdrawn from her, time had ‘gone numb’.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.  In her poetry, Stepanova 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. 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 chronicle of the troubled present.

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9781780376950

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Reviews

Wildly experimental, and yet movingly traditional. Ironic, and yet obsessed with spell-making. Full of allusions to various different canonical voices, and yet heart-wrenchingly direct. What, friends, is this? It’s that glorious thing: the poetry of Maria Stepanova. -- Ilya Kaminsky * Poetry Book Society Bulletin * The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation has also done important work in shifting the gender imbalance, with Sasha Dugdale’s translation of Maria Stepanova, War of the Beasts and the Animals on the shortlist this year and surely likely to appear on many books of 2021 lists. I can only compare my experience of reading the title poem to that of reading ‘The Waste Land’ for the first time – it is so astonishing, and the effort that has gone into translating it immense. -- Clare Pollard * TS Eliot Prize website * Stepanova’s poetry is porous. Were it a fabric, it would be complete with rents through which darkness – and truth – might leak… Stepanova is a powerhouse. Her scornful wit is bracing and, throughout, the reader is on a switchback: you never know what waits around the next bend. -- Kate Kellaway * The Observer *

Author Information

Maria Stepanova is a poet, novelist, essayist, journalist and the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays. Her book War of the Beasts and the Animals (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), translated by Sasha Dugdale, is the first English translation of her poetry. It is a Poetry Book Society Translation Choice and was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2021. Stepanova has received several Russian and international literary awards (including the prestigious Andrey Bely Prize and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship). Her documentary novel In Memory of Memory won Russia's Big Book Award in 2018 and was published in English in Sasha Dugdale's translation by Fitzcarraldo in the UK and New Directions in the US in 2021. In 2023 she was awarded the Berman Literature Prize for In Memory of Memory. It was also shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2021, and the 2022 James Tait Black Prize for Biography. A third book by her, The Voice Over: Poems and Essays, edited by Irina Shevelenko, was published by Columbia University Press in the US in its Russian Library series in 2021. In 2022 Maria Stepanova was awarded the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding 2023 for another book of poetry, Mädchen ohne Kleider (Girls Without Clothes), published in German by Suhrkamp Verlag. Sasha Dugdale's translation of her book-length poem Holy Winter 20/21 will be published by Bloodaxe in the UK in 2024. Stepanova founded and was editor-in-chief of the online independent crowd-sourced journal Colta.ru, which engaged with the cultural, social and political reality of contemporary Russia until the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine when all dissenting media in Russia were forced to shut down. As a prominent critic of Putin’s regime, Stepanova had to leave Russia and is now living in exile.

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