A Conversation with Maria Stepanova Kevin M. F. Platt (bio), Mark Lipovetsky (bio), and Translation from the Russian Translated by Kevin M. F. Platt (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution PHOTO BY ANDREY NATOTSINSKY Maria Stepanova is a prizewinning poet and the author of In Memory of Memory, a volume of creative nonfiction that has been recognized with many Russian and European awards and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize (see WLT, Spring 2021, 95). As founder and editor in chief of Colta.ru, one of the most influential culture portals in Russia, she has voiced consistent and outspoken opposition to the Putin regime for years. Stepanova was among the first Russian authors to protest the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine with her essay "The War of Putin's Imagination" in the Financial Times. When we spoke with her by Zoom in October 2022, Stepanova was in residency as a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. This issue of WLT also includes poems from Stepanova's still-unpublished book of recent poetry. Kevin M. F. Platt: Let's begin at the beginning—actually, long before the beginning. I think we could draw a contrast between the current situation of Russian writers, such as yourself, who have found themselves outside of Russia and that of emigration in the 1920s. Perhaps at the start of the revolutionary upheavals of a century ago, people hoped that everything could suddenly be resolved and it would be possible to return home. Yet what we are witnessing today is an unsettled temporality of a more significant sort, leading to a kind of fermentation. So how does this peculiar situation affect authors? Does one write differently? Maria Stepanova: That's exactly right: this has nothing or little in common with that emigration. The first-wave emigrants had a sense that they were victims of a catastrophe. A huge explosion that, regardless of how one related to it, had thrown people to all sides in the blast wave. You hope it's not the end of the story. You try to find your way in the new circumstances. You build new institutions. Or learn to drive a taxi. Somehow, you attempt to place yourself in relation to the catastrophe. Now, the situation is fundamentally different, because, to be blunt, it's not us who are the refugees. It's not clear who we are—unless we begin to address the things we really ought to be thinking about, in my opinion. I am talking about the degrees of responsibility we all bear for what happened on February 24 and for the war that began in 2014. Responsibility, guilt, participation, complicity, involvement—you can call it by various names. Yet one way or another, at [End Page 42] present, we Russians are not those who are fleeing as refugees, but those from whom others are fleeing. Only after that, secondarily, can we be counted among those who have fled, right? Today, to be a Russian writer—to be a Russian, even—is a kind of stigma. It's an externally imposed stigma, rather than one that comes from within. And it's not clear how it is defined, according to what characteristics or parameters. What identifies me, with my 75 percent Jewish ancestry, as a Russian writer? Is it my Russian passport or the language I write in? Is it the forty-odd years I've lived in Russia? If we are talking about others, not just me, maybe it's just Russian heritage. A person might not even have been born in Russia but can still feel complicit. And what about a completely American or French person, yet one who has been a part of things Russian—does a certain measure of … involvement … extend to such a person as well? We don't have the right word for this: imbrication, presence, partiality? Yet one thing I'm certain of is that the least apt response to this condition is to say: This has nothing to do with me. Overall, I was a good person. I never voted for Putin. I wrote articles, tried to analyze what was happening around me. … That doesn't work. The truth...