Maria Mikhailovna Stepanova

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Maria Stepanova (2006)

Marija Stepanova, also Maria Stepanova ( Russian Мария Михайловна Степанова , born June 9, 1972 in Moscow ), is a Russian writer , poet and essayist .

Life

Marija Stepanova studied at the Maxim Gorki Literature Institute , a university for literary creation and artistic translation in Moscow. From 2007 to 2012 she headed the Internet magazine OpenSpace.ru . Since 2012 she has been editor-in-chief of the online magazine Colta.ru, an internet magazine for culture, society and politics. She lives in Moscow. Stepanowa teaches as a visiting professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin (Siegfried Unseld Professorship).

Literary work

Marija Stepanowa is the author of numerous collections of poems and essays. Her texts have been translated into several languages ​​and her books have received various awards.

Her first novel "After Memory" caused a sensation among critics and readers in Russia and in 2018 received the Bolshaya Kniga Prize. The family novel is a mixture of report, narration, document assembly and reflection. The main theme of the book is the processing of memory in the country where the regime wanted to erase both personal and historical collective memory. In her novel, the author wants to oppose the ban on remembering and collective memory loss. Stepanova follows in the footsteps of her family members, who fortunately survived all the dangers of the Russian 20th century, and tries to put together a less spectacular family story and to recognize individual fates based on letters, photos and research trips. “With all the others, the family consisted of participants in the story, with me only their subtenants”, writes the author and formulates the “survival strategy”: “My grandmothers and grandfathers spent a considerable part of their energy on remaining invisible. To become as inconspicuous as possible, to dive into the domestic darkness, to keep away from world history with its larger-than-life narratives and its tolerance of a few million human lives. "

The German translation of the novel was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 2018 (from the Russian by Olga Radetzkaja) and has been praised by reviewers as an important event in today's Russian literature. "Maria Stepanova's" After Memory "is a multi-layered essay on the nature of remembering, primed by doubts," wrote Wiebke Porombka in her review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . “The forced denial of one's own existence - as also happens in the numerous political questionnaires and self-composed and modified résumés of their relatives, which Stepanova quotes - the constant danger that what is life-saving in a moment, under changed political conditions The silent side of the catastrophe of the Russian twentieth century, which Stepanova wants to memorialize with her book. ”The reviewer of the NZZ highlighted the style characteristics of the novel in his review:“ Maria Stepanova are the sofa forms of classic storytelling repugnant. For them the truth lies in discontinuity and gaps. Deep humanity and outstanding acumen characterize this book, which offers the highest instruction and the highest enjoyment. It is the extremely lively, sensual language that holds the centrifugal forces of the book together. The lyricist in Stepanova finds metaphors and symbols of things of poetic ease and intellectual elegance. Last but not least, the humor prevents them from falling into a blind cult of the past. "

Awards

Works in German translation

  • According to memory. Novel. Translated from the Russian by Olga Radetzkaja. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-518-42829-0 .

Web links

Commons : Maria Mikhaylovna Stepanova  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ OpenSpace.ru - Редакция . OpenSpace.ru. Archived from the original on June 2, 2012. Retrieved November 26, 2011.
  2. ↑ http://www.bigbook.ru/
  3. ↑ "Are we just the insulation material of history?" By Wiebke Porombka, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , January 10, 2019
  4. ^ "A defense of the dead - Maria Stepanova traces her family and finds the secret of memory" by Andreas Breitenstein , Neue Zürcher Zeitung , January 12, 2019
personal data
SURNAME Stepanova, Maria Mikhailovna
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stepanova, Marija; Степанова, Мария Михайловна (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian writer and poet
DATE OF BIRTH June 9, 1972
PLACE OF BIRTH Moscow