#maria stepanova

[heavenlyyshecomes]

For the interested reader, diaries and notebooks can be placed in two categories: in the first the text is intended to be official, manifest, aimed at a readership. The notebook becomes a training ground for the outward self, and, as in the case of the nineteenth-century artist and diarist Marie Bashkirtseff, an open declaration, an unending monologue, addressed to an invisible but sympathetic ear. Still I’m fascinated by the other sort of diary, the working tool, the sort the writer-as-craftsperson keeps close at hand, of little apparent use to the outsider. Susan Sontag, who practised this art form for decades, said of her diary that it was ‘an instrument, a tool’ – I’m not sure this is entirely apt. Sontag’s notebooks (and the notebooks of other writers) are not just for the storage of ideas, like nuts in squirrels’ cheeks, to be consumed later. Nor are they filled with quick outlines of events, to be recollected when needed. Notebooks are an essential daily activity for a certain type of person, loose-woven mesh on which they hang their clinging faith in reality and its continuing nature. Such texts have only one reader in mind, but this reader is utterly implicated. Break open a notebook at any point and be reminded of your own reality, because a notebook is a series of proofs that life has continuity and history, and (this is most important) that any point in your own past is still within your reach. Sontag’s notebooks are filled with such proofs: lists of films she has seen, books she has read, words that have charmed her, the dried husks of completed endeavours – and these are largely limited to the notebooks; they almost never feed into her books or films or articles, they are neither the starting point, nor the underpinning for her public work. They are not intended as explanations for another reader (perhaps for the self, although they are scribbled down at such a lick that sometimes it’s hard to make out what is meant). Like a fridge, or as it was once called, an ice house, a place where the fast-corrupting memory-product can be stored, a space for witness accounts and affirmations, or the material and outward signs of immaterial and elusive relations, to paraphrase Goncharov.

—Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory, tr. Sasha Dugdale (emphasis mine)

[violettesiren]

Wind. The blue of the mountains invisible In the twilight, under winter stars Our little house is covered in snow I hear the dogs barking By the village gates Through snow and wind Someone is coming home.

Foreign words melt in the cheek Like sugar cubes.

from Holy Winter by Maria Stepanova (Translated by Sasha Dugdale)

[donnainnominata]

Sometimes it seems like it is only possible to love the past if you know it is definitely never going to return.

—From, In memory of memory, by Maria Stepanova

[sebchevalier]

Les histoires qui commencent ainsi: (M. Stepanovna)

J’aime beaucoup les livres, les films, les histoires qui commencent ainsi: un homme arrive, par exemple, dans une modeste maison de la province  française profonde, il ouvre les fenêtres, sort sur le balcon, déplace les meubles pour les agencer à son goût. Il déballe ses livres crapahute sous la table pour brancher son ordinateur, étudie le contenu du buffet et choisit la tasse qu’il utilisera. Il emprunte pour la première fois un sentier forestier qui le mène au village, achète du fromage et des tomates, s’installe à une table de l’unique café du lieu, boit du vin ou un petit noir, plisse les yeux au soleil, rentre chez lui. Il regarde la télévision, admire le paysage par la fenêtre, jette un coup d’oeil dans un livre, admire le plafond. S’il est écrivain, il se met au travail dès le matin. Son dimanche sera gâché parce que la guerre éclatera.

En mémoire de la mémoire, p.290.

[lohtulauluja]

To start writing was to cease to be a curious listener, an addressee, and to become instead the horizon point of the family line, the destination for the many-eyed, many-decked ship of family history. 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.

- Maria Stepanova, from In Memory of Memory

[juzjuz]

Maria Stepanova, Winterpoem 20/21, 2023, Berlin, Suhrkamp Verlag, S.15.

[fl0ra]

...like a character from a Jane Austen novel I sat for hours at the window watching passers-by... Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory, trans. Sarah Dugdale

[heavenlyyshecomes]

I was reading Marianne Hirsch’s classic work, The Generation of Postmemory, as if it were a travel guide to my own head. I knew everything she described immediately and intimately: the ceaseless fascination with one’s family’s past (and, beyond this, with the densely populated human context for these lives, the thick undercoat of sounds and smells, the coincidences and concurrences, the synchronized turning of the wheels of history) and the clinical boredom with which I roll my own contemporary world backwards to that past, back to them, and feel quite certain, in-my-gut certain, of how it was back then, the tram routes, the stockings that sagged around the knees, the music from the loudspeaker. Any story about myself became a story about my ancestors. There they were behind me like an opera chorus encouraging my aria – only the music was written seventy years ago. The structures that emerged from the black waters of history fought shy of linearity, their natural state was co-presence, the simultaneous sounding of voices from the past, contradicting the obvious: time and slow disintegration.

—Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory tr. Sasha Dugdale

[patricedumonde]

This is perhaps my favorite video to exist on youtube! I watch it way too often lol. These students were so lucky to share a stage with the dancers from Bolshoi.

It is so difficult to even choose favorite dancers in this performance. I would say Xenia Zhiganshina and Yulia Stepanova stood out for me though. Alyona Kovalyova danced my favorite variation, and I think she did a marvelous job here. I thought it was breath-taking. She's so tall though that in the end when she does the tour jete, it low key looked like she tripped lol. I know it's part of the choreography but my heart still skipped a beat. This performance is my Avengers Endgame haha.

Ooh, also. In the mazurka, look at how tiny the 2023 graduates are. Time flies. I still find it unacceptable that I'm now older than some prima ballerinas. Anyway, take a break for an hour and make sure to watch this the whole way through! I can also compile a playlist of the variations if anyone's interested. Oscar Frame 2017 graduate (variation from the ballet Le Conservatorie, music by H.S.Paulli) Eleonora Sevenard 2017 graduate (variation from the ballet Trilby, music by Y.Gerber) Alyona Kovalyova 2016 graduate (variation from the ballet Le Roi Candaule, music by C.Pugni) Xenia Zhiganshina 2014 graduate (variation from the ballet Gretna Green, music by E.Guiraud) Olga Smirnova 2011 graduate (variation from the ballet Paquita, music by L.Minkus) Mikhail Lobukhin 2002 graduate (variation from the ballet Don Quixote, music by L.Minkus) Yulia Stepanova 2009 graduate (variation from the ballet The Little Humpbacked Horse, music by C.Pugni) Evgenia Obraztsova 2002 graduate (variation from the ballet Le Pavillon d’Armide, music by N.Tcherepnin) Denis Rodkin (variation from the ballet La Source, music by R.Drigo) Svetlana Zakharova 1996 graduate (variation from the ballet La Sylphide, music by R.Drigo)

[female-buckets]

this is now the best video ever

https://twitter.com/phoenixmercury/status/1680426962098208771?s=46&t=QnOPd_tNZm2Sd6S-49-JCg

nothing else compares

I can only think of one thing to compare this to...

In 2005, Diana did this little Q&A. A fan asked if she had a celebrity crush.

She said "WNBA president Donna Orender"

I'm happy that BG is keeping the tradition alive 😂

[tikitania]

Which bolshoi ballerinas do you think could become primas at the mariinsky and vice versa?

This is hard to answer because I don't follow the Bolshoi as closely — just don't have the time. (I work, I have kids!) BUT… I could see Eva Sergeenkova at the Mariinsky. She has a regal, reserved style that could work very well there. Bulanova has always seemed like a Bolshoi-style of dancer to me. Natural charisma, bravado, theatrical. She just projects on stage in a way that vibes with the Bolshoi, but happy to see her thriving at the Mariinsky. On another note. If I could go back in time...I really, really, really wish that Stepanova could have had a career at the Mariinsky. She just doesn't seem to fit in at the Bolshoi style. (At least to me.) She's refined and elegant, just a lovely dancer. If she had been supported (and I have no idea why she wasn't) she could have done so well in St. Petersburg.

[sebchevalier]

Le territoire de la mémoire déviée (M. Stepanova)

Le monde contemporain, avec ses projets conservateurs et ses reconstructions — tentatives de devenir great again, de réinstaurer un ordre ancien chimérique —, respire le postmémoriel. L’écran se révèle à double face. Peuvent y projeter leurs peurs, leurs espoirs et leurs histoires, non seulement ceux qui se trouvent au bord du cratère, mais aussi les petits-enfants et arrière-petits-enfants de la majorité silencieuse, qui a su attendre son heure et la possibilité d’exhumer à la lumière sa propre version des événements anciens. La Russie, où le tourbillon de violence s’est prolongé inlassablement, formant une sorte d’enfilade traumatique que la société traverse de malheur en malheur, de guerres en révolutions, famines, assassinats de masse, nouvelles guerres et nouvelles répressions, est devenue, avant d’autres, le territoire de la mémoire déviée. Les versions dédoublées, détriplées, voilées des rides de non-coïncidences et divergences, de ce qui s’est passé au cours des cent dernières années, masquent la lumière sur le présent, comme une couche de papier opaque.

En mémoire de la mémoire, p.110-111.

[tetsuhirowakabayashi]

Novel Cover -- My circus painting is used for the cover of a novel by Maria Stepanova, published by Nirstedt/litteratur, a Swedish publishing company.

Maria Stepanova is a Russian poet and novelist.

https://nirstedt.se/flyktpunkten/