Ja, ne-ja i istorija. Eščë raz o poėtike "Vojny zverej i životnych" (2015) Marii Stepanovoj

It is well-known that one of the most debated issues in post-postmodern Russian poetry is the place of the lyrical first pronoun I, since the possibilities of direct expression of feelings and ideas by a single voice are perceived as aesthetically exhausted. Such concerns have always shaped Maria Stepanova’s works and has found an original realisation in the cycle of poems The War… The political context of this work and its fragmentary, cento-like form are usually emphasised, with occasional references to the literary sources; by contrast, the observations regarding the ways in which history and the voices involved in the cycle are represented are rarer and less thorough. Stepanova’s poetic texts are usually full of «fictitious authorial figures», who “exist” in the space of one single poem and interact with the author’s voice: the speeches of these “others” undergo micro-stylistic variations, signaling to the reader an authorial intrusion. A similar strategy can be found in The War of Beasts and Animals, in which, however, the voices of “the others” are recreated by employing more often to various quotations (albeit altered). The chaotic assembly of “voices” from various sources is used to create the impression of an anti-historicist, quintessential discourse of Russian and Soviet popular culture; from such a perspective, this poetic cycle does not require the precise identification of quotations in order to function, but rather the recognition of something familiar to the reader. Stepanova stages a “past-sickness”, a specific perception of the fatherland history commonly shared among many Russians, according to which even very distant events coexist in an indistinct contemporaneity.