Maria Stepànova: "In Russia, a lesbian book is more dangerous than one about the war."

BarcelonaJournalist and writer Maria Stepànova (Moscow, 1972), a self-proclaimed great admirer of Mercè Rodoreda, had a bumpy trip to Barcelona, ​​where she is participating in the CCCB's international residency program. She experienced something similar to M., the protagonist of her book. Disappear (Angle / Cliff), translated into Catalan by Miquel Cabal Guarro. M. is an exiled writer who no longer writes and suffers many misunderstandings and setbacks while trying to reach a literary festival. There is a moment when she glimpses the possibility of freeing herself from her former life. She can get a job in a circus and be someone else. Is it really possible to get rid of one's own identity? Is it legitimate to desire it? What responsibility do we have for the atrocities committed in our country? Who owns a language? It is almost impossible to label. Disappear, It moves between essay, autobiography, and the absurd, and Stepànova's poetic voice resonates throughout. With a great sense of humor, the writer, who lives in exile in Berlin, raises many of the great questions of our time.

We only know the protagonist by an initial, M. Why doesn't she want to make her identity explicit?

— I wanted to make it clear that this isn't an autobiography or autofiction, although it plays with that idea. There's an obvious parallel between me and my heroine. The name begins with the same letter, she lives in exile, and the description of where she lives makes it clear that it's somewhere in Northern Europe. So it's easy to play along and start reading it as if it were a confession, which it isn't. And when everything spirals out of control for the protagonist and the book takes a grotesque turn, the reader might collapse. Nothing is as it should be. At the same time, I don't name my heroine, nor do I identify the country she comes from or where she lives, because what happens to her could happen to any writer. We can all feel the same guilt, the same shame. I didn't want everything to be limited to Russia and my story.

It's not first person. There's a narrator who observes the heroine from a distance.

— In some places, I emphasize that distance. I think my protagonist is a bit like all of us. She can be somewhat pathetic and emotional, and she falls into self-pity. That's why I needed a narrator capable of looking at the situation with irony and a certain detachment.

At one point in the book, M. suggests the impossibility of ever being who she once was. She doesn't know how to become that person again. Does she long for the life she had in Russia before her exile?

— Not so much about the life I had, but about the person I was before. Because I was much more naive, much more hopeful, and more full of life. I sincerely believed that we were living after the catastrophe and that our moral duty was to gather its remains and make them visible. I didn't expect another catastrophe. In that sense, I was very naive.

But this is very human.

— Exactly. It's human nature. And you can't protect yourself either. I've read hundreds of books about exile, displacement, war, war memoirs, war diaries, exile memoirs, exile diaries from many countries. It's an endless story. Even so, it never occurred to me that the same thing would happen to me. I never wanted to emigrate. I always hoped things would get better, which is also quite naive. I feel nostalgic for my former naiveté.

M. gets irritated when people constantly ask her where she's from. Does that happen to you too? To what extent does our place of origin define or trap us?

— There's a shocking figure: 123 million displaced people. I think we'll end up losing our roots. It's both good and bad. Bad because it's part of the globalization process, which I believe we must resist in some way, because it's important to maintain the uniqueness of each place, its flavors, its language. At the same time, we see more and more people living in countries they can't call home because they lack the same connection to folk songs or traditional stories. So they create a distinct translingual culture. It's an interesting process. Perhaps a person can live without roots or create new ones, connected to the land or to other people or diasporas. But we also lose something.

At one point, M. says that being ashamed of one's own language is absurd. But she also says that language bears the marks of its owners. Can a language have owners?

— I think so. And it's sad, because I don't believe in linguistic purity. Language shouldn't be pure; it should be open to new things, it should flirt with other languages ​​and registers. But the problem is that language can't prevent the wrong people from using it. It's the language of poets and thinkers, but also of murderers, torturers, and liars. And everyone can use it and transform it. The Russian soldiers who invaded Ukrainian homes, Looting and killing, they spoke Russian. And they changed the language. Neologisms have appeared. To get used to a life with so much violence, they no longer use simple dictionary words; they create new ones, like "flesh storms." Words that sound strange, that seem foreign to the language, but I know that decades from now they will remain like scars. This is what I mean when I say that language has owners. But it also belongs to everyone. You can kill with language, just as you can with any object: if someone kills with a candlestick, the candlestick isn't guilty, but it was a tool.

The desire to disappear that runs through the book also seems like an attempt to break free from identity. Is it possible to break free from oneself?

— It's clearly unrealistic. There's no escaping yourself. But we constantly try. Many 20th-century immigrants in the United States, at Ellis Island, changed their last names to become a new person. It's a temptation. Escaping yourself isn't easy, if it's even possible, but we can wish for it.

And then there's the beast in the book. The protagonist doesn't have it in front of her or behind her; it's part of her. We might think it's Russia or imperialist ambition, but it could also be anywhere.

— Yes, I think it's broader than Russia. Being a fable, it's not easy to give it a concrete definition. It lives on within Russia's borders, but it's above all the capacity for violence that resides in the human mind. In Russia, as in Spain, Germany, or anywhere else, there's a tradition, a historical spirit that persists in the human psyche for a long time and then resurfaces. It's like a possession: everything seems calm, and then suddenly it returns.

The book also raises the issue of individual and collective responsibility in the face of history. We can feel vulnerable. What can an individual do when something like what happened in Russia occurs? You were very critical of Putin and now live in exile.

— It's a difficult question. The line between guilt and responsibility is blurred. You can not believe in collective responsibility and still feel guilty. As a citizen of a country responsible for an invasion, you're condemned to always consider your degree of involvement. I lived there my whole life, wrote about the regime, analyzed its politics for fifteen years, participated in protests… But is it enough? What does "doing enough" even mean? There's no right answer. And I don't believe in the possibility of overthrowing Putin with a popular revolution either. I've seen attempts, and I don't think it's possible. What should you do in a situation where there seems to be no hope? It's a question that will always haunt me.

I said earlier that we don't learn from past mistakes. Do you think we're repeating the same ones?

— For decades, intellectuals thought we wouldn't repeat mistakes like Nazism. I myself grew up reading memoirs of the 20th century and thought I understood what happened. Now I'm rereading those books and only now do I truly understand, because I'm living it. It's disheartening. I also see young people who feel nostalgia for the Soviet Union without ever having actually experienced it.

The book may not be easy to read in Russia.

— It was published thanks to the cooperation of several Russian publishers in Europe and Russia. The Russian edition was censored: two sentences had to be blacked out because there was a risk of legal repercussions. I didn't want to remove them, but they appear covered with black lines.

Exile has changed the way you write. If you could distance yourself from that historical context, what would you like to write now?

— I've finished a very different novel: a documentary novel about the British writer Anne Lister and her trip to Russia. It won't be published in Russia because the protagonist was a lesbian, and these days you can't publish anything that deals with LGBT issues in a positive or neutral way. A lesbian book is more dangerous than a book about war.

What attracts you to the circus?

— The circus is a space where everything is both unreal and real. They create miracles: they jump, breathe fire, there are lions… it is beautiful and terrifying, requiring courage and physical strength. Circus people are a nomadic, international tribe whose language isn't a language at all, but rather one of gestures and images. You don't need to speak German, Catalan, or Russian to understand the circus.