The Poetics of “Youth” and “Maturity” in M. Stepanova’s Lyrical Poetry

Abstract

From the second half of the 1980s onwards, it only takes a decade for a generational change in poetry. In its rapid development poetry is perceived as “forever young”. The concepts of youth and maturity are multifaceted: they imply a set of human qualities and stages of creative development, socio-cultural factors of recognition, and the impact on the literary process. The author proceeds from the fact that the “maturation” of a poet can be found in means of poetics, and compares the composition, stanzas, language, style, and genre of poems in two books by M. Stepanova Here-light (2001) and The Lyrics, the Voice (2010). What dominates the tonality of the first collection which is mostly made up by love lyrics, is “odic exaltation”, without some meditative elegies reducing its overriding light tone. The stanzas of the poems analysed are mostly identical, they have a traditional structure; the poet experiments with words, their sound and compatibility. The style of the book can be defined as a game and a citation. The poems of The Lyrics, the Voice are much longer, their stanzas are not homogeneous, rhyming verses are anisosyllabic, and folk poetry becomes the main source of citation. The main genre is melancholy elegy, almost every poem expresses regret for the fleeting time, pity for the deceased relatives, for the author herself on the threshold of a new phase of life. All the poems combined help create an image of the lyrical heroine, and the contents of the book can be characterized as those typical of a novel. A comparative analysis shows that M. Stepanova is a representative of the generation of the 1990s, “young” Russian poetry, a bright innovator, however, she has completed the stage of “youth” as apprenticeship, she has developed her own style and deep “mature” viewpoint.