Maria Stepanova's Holy Winter 20/21, reviews & features
'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 is one of Russia’s most innovative and exciting poets and thinkers. Her book-length poem Holy Winter 20/21 was published by Bloodaxe in the UK in March 2024, and is translated by poet and Russian specialist Sasha Dugdale. It was a Poetry Book Society Translation Choice for Spring 2024 and was longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2024.
Maria Stepanova was founding editor of Colta.ru, an independent cultural website 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. Coltra.ru has been compared to Huffington Post in its status and importance.
Her prize-winning meta-memoir In Memory of Memory (Fitzcarraldo Editions) was published in February 2021, followed by her first full English-language collection War of the Beasts and the Animals, a Poetry Book Society Translation Choice, in March 2021. Both books were translated by Sasha Dugdale, and were both shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2021. In Memory of Memory was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2021. A third book by Stepanova, 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.
Sasha Dugdale’s translation of Stepanova’s book-length poem Holy Winter 20/21 was published by Bloodaxe in the United Kingdom and Ireland in March 2024. It was published in the United States by New Directions on 13 August 2024 under the title Holy Winter. Scroll down for review coverage of the US edition.
Three poems from Holy Winter are featured on the US website Poets.org: https://poets.org/poet/maria-stepanova
TANK Magazine, Summer 2024
Russian poet Maria Stepanova’s new collection Holy Winter 20/21 was featured as one of US publisher Barbar Epler’s recommended books in the Summer 2024 issue of the UK magazine TANK. ‘As director of the singular New York-based publisher New Directions, she delivers a list of the most inventive and ingenious books published in English and in translation today.’
Barbara Epler’s comments about Holy Winter 20/21 were accompanied by a poem from the book featured in Sasha Dugdale’s English translation (‘You, whoever you were: a refugee, forgot your name’ from page 35-36).
‘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)
In print. Also available online via the link below – one article is available for free.
https://tank.tv/magazine/issue-99/fiction/barbara-epler
UK ONLINE REVIEW COVERAGE
Long Poem Magazine, online 11 July 2024
An excellent in-depth joint review of Russian poet Maria Stepanova’s new collection Holy Winter 20/21 and her translator Sasha Dugdale’s new Carcanet collection The Strongbox has gone online in Long Poem Magazine. Reviewer Anna Reckin opened her review by saying: 'These are two of the most absorbing poetry books I have come across for some while.' The piece links to a 2021 Scroll.in interview with Sasha Dugdale in which she speaks about translating from Russian poetry (read the interview here).
‘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
Read the full review here.
London Grip, online 21 May 2024
A brilliant and very thoughtful review of Russian poet Maria Stepanova’s new collection Holy Winter 20/21, translated by Sasha Dugdale, went online in London Grip on 21 May 2024.
'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.' – Colin Pink, London Grip, on Holy Winter 20/21
Read the full review here.
REVIEW COVERAGE OF THE US EDITION
'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
https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780811235143
'... 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
https://www.the-berliner.com/books/holy-winter-maria-stepanova-review-everyone-i-meet-is-an-exile/
BLOODAXE ONLINE LAUNCH EVENT - Holy Winter 20/21
Tuesday 19 March 2024, 7pm
Launch reading by Jane Hirshfield (USA) and Maria Stepanova (Russia) with Sasha Dugdale
This free Bloodaxe launch event was streamed on YouTube Live and is now available on this YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV8-QP8bdxg.
Jane Hirshfield, Maria Stepanova and translator Sasha Dugdale from their new books, and discussed them with each other and with host Neil Astley. Maria read in Russian, with Sasha reading her English translations. An international event of exceptional quality.
[11 July 2024]
