Venya Gushchin (Ph.D. Candidate, Slavic) reviewed Maria Stepanova’s Holy Winter 20/21, translated by Sasha Dugdale (New Directions, 2024) for Fullstop. Stepanova’s book was the subject of a symposium, convened at the Harriman Institute, in November 2024. Stepanova was the Spring 2022 Harriman Writer in Residence.

Stepanova’s collection is deeply ambivalent about the role of historical rhymes, falling back on earlier notions of them preserving a cultural community in the face of historical tragedy, while also somewhat skeptical of these repetitions as truly allowing for resistance. In a recent interview with fellow poet and critic Igor Gulin, the poet remarked that we react to repetitions differently in art than in the real world or in history. Whereas repetition is in many ways the basis for an artistic construction, the cyclical returns of past epochs bring horrifying consequences.