War of the Beasts and the Animals

War of the Beasts and the Animals is Russian poet Maria Stepanova's first full English-language collection. Stepanova is one of Russia's most innovative and exciting poets and thinkers, and founding editor of Colta.ru, an online independent site which has been compared to Huffington Post in its status and importance. Immensely high-profile in Russia for many years, recognition in the West has followed the publication of her documentary novel In Memory of Memory, first in German translation in 2018 and now with Sasha Dugdale's English translation published by New Directions in the US longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021. War of the Beasts and the Animals includes her recent long poems of conflict 'Spolia' and 'War of the Beasts and Animals', written during the Donbas conflict, as well as a third long poem 'The Body Returns', commissioned by Hay International Festival in 2018 to commemorate the Centenary of the First World War. In all three long poems Stepanova's assured and experimental use of form, her modernist appropriation of poetic texts from around the world and her constant consideration of the way that culture, memory and contemporary life are interwoven make her work both pleasurable and deeply necessary. This collection also includes two sequences of poems from her 2015 collection Kireevsky: sequences of 'weird' ballads and songs, subtly changed folk and popular songs and poems which combine historical lyricism and a contemporary understanding of the effects of conflict and trauma. Stepanova uses the ready forms of ballads and songs, but alters them, so they almost appear to be refracted in moonlit water. The forms seem recognisable, but the words are oddly fragmented and suggestive, they weave together well-known refrains of songs, apparently familiar images, subtle half-nods to films and music.

Table of Contents:
7 Acknowledgements 9 Translator’s foreword from SPOLIA (2015) 21 Spolia 45 War of the Beasts and the Animals from KIREEVSKY (2012) from Girls, Singing 69 Young aeronauts, floating to land… 70 In the white white sky… 71 Mother and Father didn’t know him… 73 What is that sweeper, mother… 75 A train runs right across Russia… 76 Over the field the guns howled… 77 Empty featherbeds cooling… 78 Two classical athletes, Culture and Sport… 79 Running, running… 80 By the church’s black fence Kireevsky 81 1. The light swells and pulses at the garden gate… 82 2. In the village, in the field, in the forest… 83 3. Tear tears along, chasing tear, and kicks it… 84 4. My lady neighbour drives out on black sables… 85 5. Where the dance was shaped in flame… 86 6. Chorus line, on our feet… 87 7. You my gifts, o my gifts… 88 8. Who guards our picket fences, our blooming hedges… 89 9. A deer, a deer stood in that place… 90 10. The last songs are assembling… from Underground Pathephone 91 Stop, don’t look, come close… 92 Don’t wait for us, my darling… Poems from earlier collections 97 Bus Stop: Israelitischer Friedhof 100 (as they must) 102 Fish The Body Returns (2018) 107 The Body Returns

About the Author :
Maria Stepanova is a poet, essayist, journalist and the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays. She has received several Russian and international literary awards (including the prestigious Andrey Bely Prize and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship). Her book In Memory of Memory is a documentary novel. It won Russia's Big Book Award in 2018 and was published in English by New Directions in the US in 2021 and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. It has been published in Germany as Nach dem Gedchtnis (Suhrkamp, 2018). Sasha Dugdale's English translation of her collection of poems War of the Beasts and the Animals is published by Bloodaxe in 2021. Stepanova is the founder and editor-in-chief of the online independent crowd-sourced journal Colta.ru. Colta.ru covers the cultural, social and political reality of contemporary Russia, reaching audiences of nearly a million visitors a month in the past.

Review :
'... Dugdale has channelled a force of nature into English. War of the Beasts and the Animals is pure energy, dynamic and unstoppable, a call to protest by an emotional archivist. Entrenched in mythology and folksong, supported by research with a political message, with Tolstoy, Mayakovski, Whitman, and T.S. Eliot simmering below, what arises is a swirling collage of images that scroll past lightning fast with the reader left crawling around on the floor looking their lost dropped jaw... If you want to relive that moment when you first discovered Akhmatova, Ginsberg, Angelou, Silverstein, or Plath―that sense of inner revolution, that lift of possibility, that melody which keeps evil away―read Stepanova, because the next generations will.' - D M O'Connor, RHINO Poetry '...2021 is the year of Stepanova: in addition to In Memory of Memory, her poetry collection War of the Beasts and the Animals, and a collection of essays and poems titled The Voice Over, will also be published in English this year... Stepanova's poetry collection War of the Beasts and the Animals was written in 2014 and 2015, during Russia's conflict with Ukraine... What emerges is another archive of sorts, a home for language's changing and motley complexion.' - Matthew Janney, The Guardian [in his profile of Maria Stepanova] 'Like T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, Stepanova allows a multitude of voices to speak through her lines... Poetry and the study of literature have potential to open borders between the living and the dead, and between cultures; to speak "as if respect, compassion, goodness have not lost their their meaning".' - Rachel Polonsky, Times Literary Supplement 'Stepanova's poetry is porous. Were it a fabric, it would be complete with rents through which darkness - and truth - might leak... Stepanova is a powerhouse. Her scornful wit is bracing and, throughout, the reader is on a switchback: you never know what waits around the next bend.' - Kate Kellaway, The Observer, Poetry Book of the Month(on War of the Beasts and the Animals) 'The collection opens with two long poems; 'Spolia' and 'War of the Beasts and the Animals'. Similar in form, they are both chaotic and deeply layered. In both poems, Stepanova sifts through language, culture and identity in an attempt to make sense of them all. She reaches no conclusions, but something fascinating is revealed in the attempt. In her poetry, Russia is a country torn apart and remade line by line, a patchwork of truth, myth and dogma stitched together with shreds of memory.' --Ellie Julings, DURA (Dundee University Review of the Arts) 'The slipperiness of history and the improvisational quality of historical thinking are hallmarks of her work, which will likely resonate with new audiences in the United States, riven by racism and culture war skirmishes, and in a Britain still reeling from Brexit.' - Jennifer Wilson, Poetry magazine [on the poetry & prose of Maria Stepanova] 'This is the year of Maria Stepanova. A translated collection of her long, densely allusive, political poems, War of the Beasts and the Animals, was published in March to much acclaim... Her poems...have the immediacy and intimacy of a photograph, brought to life by the intensity of her language.' - Aviva Dautch, Jewish Renaissance 'Wildly experimental, and yet movingly traditional. Ironic, and yet obsessed with spell-making. Full of allusions to various different canonical voices, and yet heart-wrenchingly direct. What, friends, is this? It's that glorious thing: the poetry of Maria Stepanova.' --Ilya Kaminsky, Poetry Book Society Selector, on War of the Beasts and the Animals, his Translation Choice for Spring 2021 'With the publication of three of her books in English this year, Stepanova is finally receiving the attention she deserves in the Anglophone world. Subtle and erudite in its treatment of politics and history, her work is a much-needed antidote to the crude depictions of Russia that have filled the English-language media in recent years... Stepanova produced two long poems - 'War of the Beasts and the Animals' and 'Spolia' - that explore war and peace, public and private memory, and the violent fragmentation of language and attempts to salvage it... Together, the poems offer an unparalleled depiction of the flattening of time and violent instrumentalization of history and language in contemporary Russia.' --Sophie Pinkham, Harper's Magazine '... the collection couldn't be more prescient in the urgency with which it speaks to this particular moment... a tour de force introduction to Maria Stepanova's urgently political poetry.' - Dzifa Benson, Modern Poetry in Translation, on War of the Beasts and the Animals 'Stepanova has long been a major force in Russian literature and now, with Sasha Dugdale's translations of her prose, the International Booker-shortlisted In Memory of Memory, and poetry, War of the Beasts and the Animals, Anglophone readers are finally catching up.' - Tom Jeffreys, The Guardian 'The writer I translate, Maria Stepanova, who wrote the prose book In Memory of Memory, has a poetry collection which is in English translation called War of the Beasts and the Animals, and the title poem for this collection was written as the war in Donbas started. It's really about the way that culture enables a people to turn into an aggressor... I think it's a really important text for our time.' - Sasha Dugdale, speaking on Radio 4's Open Book