Holy Winter 20/21

Poetry Book Society Translation Choice

The outbreak of Covid-19 cut short Maria Stepanova’s stay in Cambridge in 2020. Back in Russia, she spent the ensuing months in a state of torpor – the world had withdrawn from her, time had ‘gone numb’.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.

Her book-length poem Holy Winter 20/21, written in a frenzy of poetic inspiration, speaks of winter and war, of banishment and exile, of social isolation and existential abandonment. Stepanova finds sublime imagery for the process of falling silent, interweaving love letters and travelogues, Chinese verse and Danish fairy tales into a polyphonic evocation of frozen and slowly thawing time.

Following her previous book of poetry, War of the Beasts and the Animals – in part a response to the Donbas conflict – her book’s title is even more prophetic now, echoing a famous patriotic Soviet song from 1941, ‘a holy war is underway’.

Born in 1972, Maria Stepanova – as poet and essayist – was a highly influential figure for many years in Moscow’s cosmopolitan literary scene until its suppression along with civil liberties and dissent under Putin’s latter-day reign of terror. Her first prose work In Memory of Memory established her internationally as one of the most important intellectual voices of contemporary Russia.

Her poetry, which here echoes verses by Pushkin and Lermontov, Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva, is not hermetic. She 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. She has moreover mastered modern poetry’s rich repertoire of forms and moves effortlessly between the linguistic and traditional spaces of Russian, European and transatlantic literature.

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 powerful chronicle of the troubled present.

'In an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Stepanova said: ‘In a mental theatre, a single person plays all the parts.’ And one very much feels, on reading this book, that one is entering Stepanova’s ‘mental theatre’; the experience is something like looking through a kaleidoscope because the arrangement of voices and narratives keeps shifting, switching and returning, so that it is both disorientating and thrilling [...] Holy Winter 20/21 is a powerful book for today that re-uses tales from Ovid, Pushkin, Mandelstam, Baron Munchausen, Dante and Homer’s The Odyssey to construct a quirky edifice that resounds to themes of exile, absolutism, conflict and mortality; and above all, perhaps, the endurance of the human spirit in the face of all those terrifying things.' – Colin Pink, London Grip

‘Maria Stepanova’s Holy Winter 20/21…traffics in magic and folk-tales, travel in distant lands and extraordinary transformations. It’s partly chrestomathy, a patchwork of direct quotations and translations, and partly an anthology of variations on themes of cold and winter […] Central to the book is the theme of exile, with translations of short sections from Ovid’s Tristia appearing throughout, a counterpart to the displacement Stepanova experienced on her return to Russia during the Covid-19 pandemic.’ – Anna Reckin, Long Poem Magazine

‘Written in the shock of being so isolated during the Covid pandemic, Holy Winter 20/21 draws on Ovid (who, oddly, can be found nesting inside Covid). Stepanova writes here of being exiled now doubly: both by the pandemic and by her politics [...] Her home is now something that she once had – that’s gone – and her beautifully modulated language explores presence and absence in so impressive a way.’ – Barbara Epler, TANK (Recommended Books, Summer 2024)

‘I loved Sasha’s translation, a kind of scrap book – of lyrics, travel poems, children’s lit, and folk tales, prophesy – somehow pieced together so that every page has its own clarion excitements.’ – John McAuliffe, The Poetry Society (Books of the Year 2024)

‘This is dazzlingly beautiful poetry, in imagery and in sound, in Russian and in English, and in its variety of voices … precisely caught by Dugdale. The relationship between this poet and translator has been a particularly close and fruitful one. […] This work reminds us what pleasure there is in becoming absorbed in the world of a poem that is as all-encompassing as a symphony. A poem whose richness, strangeness and beauty can make our own winters holy.’ – Kate Pursglove, East-West Review, on Holy Winter 20/21

'... Stepanova weaves a work that is intimate and erudite, ambitious and self-deprecating. It is also – in Sasha Dugdale’s English translation – frankly gorgeous, sounding marvelously the lyrical possibilities of wintriness.' – Alexander Wells, The Berliner

'The moving, polyvocal latest from Stepanova (War of the Beasts and the Animals) is a book-length snowscape sequence that blends voices of fracture and love, evoking Ovid in exile and other historical touchstones, from Baron Munchausen to Hans Christian Andersen. Skillfully rendered by Dugdale, the air in these poems is infused with such dangers as “Airborne particles of frost ash/ Tiny cavalry officers” (noncoincidentally, the book was written during Covid-19 lockdowns). There is a feeling of arrest in these pages [...], but there’s equally a difficult hopefulness, the voices reaching for “that place where misfortune is not known,” however forlorn their searching. It adds up to a finely woven exercise in vocalization that always looks toward redemption, or at least respite, from its shocking precarity: “if time has a pocket then place me in it, gently.” A political undertow [...] adds to the collection’s depth. Bound together by a gently thoughtful steeliness, these poetic utterances are at once plaintive and resolute.' – Publishers Weekly, on Holy Winter

Maria Stepanova is a poet, novelist, essayist, journalist and the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays. Sasha Dugdale's translation of her book-length poem Holy Winter 20/21 was published by Bloodaxe in the UK and Ireland in 2024. Her earlier book War of the Beasts and the Animals (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), also translated by Sasha Dugdale, was the first English translation of her poetry. Both Holy Winter 20/21 and War of the Beasts and the Animals were Poetry Book Society Translation Choices and winners of PEN Translates awards, and War of the Beasts and the Animals was also shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2021. Maria Stepanova's 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.

Maria Stepanova has received several Russian and international literary awards (including the prestigious Andrey Bely Prize and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship). In 2022 she 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. She 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, she had to leave Russia and is now living in exile.

Sasha Dugdale was editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2013 to 2017, and is co-editor of the anthology Centres of Cataclysm: Celebrating Fifty Years of Modern Poetry in Translation (Bloodaxe Books/MPT, 2016). She has translated many works of Russian poetry, prose and drama, including Tatiana Shcherbina's Life Without: Selected Poetry & Prose 1992-2003 (Bloodaxe Books, 2004), Elena Shvarts’s Birdsong on the Seabed (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (BBC Radio 3, 2008), and the short story collection Moscow Tales (Oxford University Press, 2013), and has published five poetry collections with Oxford/Carcanet, The Estate (2007), Notebook (2003), Red House (2011), Joy (2017), and Deformations (2020), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her translation of Elena Shvarts' Birdsong on the Seabed was shortlisted for both the Rossica Translation Prize and the Corneliu M. Popescu Award for European Poetry in Translation. She won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2016, and received a Cholmondeley Award in 2017.