Holy Winter by Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale

A deeply moving poem about winter and exile, war and the pandemic from “Russia’s greatest living poet” (Poetry) and the acclaimed author of In Memory of Memory.

The outbreak of Covid-19 cut short Maria Stepanova’s 2020 stay in Cambridge. Back in Russia, she spent the ensuing months in a state of torpor—the world had withdrawn from her, time had “gone numb.”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 a transformative, epochal experience. Her book-length poem Holy Winter, 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 time and its slow thawing.

As a poet and essayist, Stepanova was a highly influential figure for many years in Moscow’s cosmopolitan literary scene until it was strangled by Putin, along with civil liberties and dissent. Like Joseph Brodsky before her, she has mastered modern poetry’s rich repertoire of forms and moves effortlessly between the languages and traditions of Russian, European, and transatlantic literature, potently yet subtly creating a voice like no other.

Her poetry, which here echoes verses by Pushkin and Lermontov, Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva, is not hermetic. She takes in and incorporates 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.

Praise for Holy Winter

“In the manner of the Baroque poets, heirs to Ovid too, Maria Stepanova creates a continuous flowing poetics of brilliance and beauty in Holy Winter. The effect is that of a kaleidoscopic collage, made of moving parts that deftly merge the lyrical and historical, making the whole reverberate with sounds and images. The inside is the outside in this icy, claustrophobic world; the existential questions posed by Stepanova go unanswered. Yet there are glimmers of light that shine through the cracks in the ice, the promise of sweetness as ‘Foreign words melt in the cheek / Like sugar cubes’ to lift us out of our collective dark night of the soul.'” —Beatriz Hausner, author of She Who Lies Above

“Like a heavy, Russian snowfall, Maria Stepanova’s Holy Winter seems to cover everything: survival, dreams, and the anger of the gods. Heavy, but also bright: the brilliance of fresh fallen snow under clear and boundlessly bright skies. But Stepanova’s dazzling long poem—adroitly ranging across historic borders and lyric traditions—is more than a paean to winter, it is also the promise of a coming spring, the buried but inevitable renewal of what must be. Rendered skilfully for English readers in Sasha Dugdale’s fluent translation, Holy Winter is an essential book for our time, burning with wonder and smoldering with dissent.” —Paul Vermeersch, author of Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020

“Wildly experimental, and yet movingly traditional. Ironic, and yet obsessed with spell-making. Full of allusions to various canonical voices, and yet heart-wrenchingly direct. What, friends, is this? It’s that glorious thing: the poetry of Maria Stepanova.” —Ilya Kaminsky