Postmemory and the Russian Skaz

“Already an author of ten volumes of poetry, Stepanova’s debut was described by Dmitry Kuzmin as a display of “brilliant poetic technique and a purity of style.” Now, known as a chronicler of her Russian-Jewish lineage, Stepanova had written: ‘I would become a stranger, a teller of tales, a selector and a sifter, the one who decides what part of the huge volume of the unsaid must fit in the spotlight’s circle, and what part will remain outside it in the darkness.’ She is now widely regarded as both an important and popular contemporary writer—or in the words of Irina Shevelenko, ‘one of the most original and complex poets on the literary scene in Russia today.'”

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