[Music]
This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison, and we're coming to you from the Stanford Campus.
[Music]
I would like to start off today with a special greeting to all of the listeners who tune into entitled opinions from Russia.
That extravagant land with its extravagant soul and its incomparable tradition of letters.
I know there's a fair amount of you over there.
Listeners, I mean.
Thanks to the emails I've received and to anecdotal evidence.
This week, my friend and Stanford colleagues, Zep Gumbrecht, a frequent guest on this show,
wrote to me from Moscow, where he was delivering lectures,
and he said everywhere he went, someone asked him about entitled opinions.
There you go.
So this is for you, our friends in Russia, from Stanford, California with love.
Speaking of which, I have with me in the studio today, one of Russia's leading poets and public intellectuals,
Maria Stepanoa, who has come to Stanford to deliver a lecture on Putin's
Russia in search of identity.
That will be followed by a poetry reading.
Maria Stepanoa is one of the most visible figures in post-Soviet culture,
as a poet, a journalist, a publisher, and a powerful voice for freedom of the press.
The kind of freedom we take for granted over here,
but that calls for a great deal of resolve, conviction and courage to defend over there.
Maria Stepanoa is the founder and editor of the online journal OpenSpace,
which has been compared to an amalgamation of the Huffington Post and the New York Review of Books.
OpenSpace was Russia's only daily website devoted to cultural and political commentary.
It was closed down in 2012 after private funders
withdrew their support in an increasingly hostile environment for independent journalism.
It was then re-established as culta, another online journal that has closed to a million readers a month.
I, for one, am very much looking forward to what Maria Stepanoa has to say about Russia's cultural and political life in the present,
and how Russia and see, or do not see their future these days.
Maria, it's a pleasure to welcome you to Stanford.
Thanks for joining us on entitled opinions today.
Thank you so much for having me here.
It's another.
So I take it that OpenSpace, that online journal was mostly funded privately,
and that culta, unlike OpenSpace, is publicly funded. Is that correct?
OpenSpace was very much similar to every media outlet in Russia that are privately or state-owned,
and what is meaningful for me now is that culta is totally, absolutely, 100%,
crowdfunding. It makes it an only existing public media in the whole Russia, and it is something that, well,
you know, takes constant efforts to keep, but it is really meaningful.
I know a range of different publications that are using crowdfunding as a separate working tool,
as a one method of raising money in a range, but we are the only side who are relying on it in our everyday existence.
You mean you're relying on it exclusively?
Yes.
And crowdfunding means what exactly?
It means that a number of individuals make their own small donations.
Not necessarily, but it is the base.
You see, when the OpenSpace was closed so rapidly, we were looking, we decided to do something about it.
We just couldn't take our, how do you call it in English that compensation packs you're getting from the owners if you get sacked?
So we were thinking, what to do with that? We could go to Italy and have our month of digital cheerleader.
But we decided, in fact, we were not deciding it was just quite clear what we are going to do.
We'll just use the money to make some new or old new website.
And the reaction of our audience was extraordinary.
What they did is the programmers, we didn't know, made us a brand new website, a working system.
And a designer, a brilliant one, one of the best Russian designers at the Pashanka, made us a brand new design.
And people were calling me and saying, what can we do?
And with that amount of audience loyalty, we decided to track road funding.
And it was the moment when no one in Russia was even thinking about it.
It was just something, absolutely blank, something that works at the West, but no one was even trying it in Russia.
And that's what we did. We asked our readers for small donations.
And it worked brilliantly.
We have managed to raise funds and to start a new site after two weeks, after the closure of the closing of the first website of open space, just in two weeks.
And two weeks time difference, yeah.
And it was amazing.
Now it works mostly along the same lines.
We're having a big amount of private denators, just your ordinary readers who are willing to give us some money once in a month or once in a year.
It is a bit different now with the background of financial crisis.
It is becoming more and more hard for people to donate in anything, in any cultural entity.
And we also have this board of trustees, which are just some people we know or don't know, but who are willing to donate in huge amounts.
And the important part of the story is different kinds and types of partnerships we are doing with Russian and foreign foundations.
With Heinrich Bilge, Tieftung, Germany, with Pragilweitz, Fanden, Switzerland, with MIM with Fond Hilsen and Russia.
We are doing different projects and it is quite interesting.
Right now, Tumero, we are starting a special gender section.
We are doing together with Heinrich Bilge Foundation.
And it's hugely important in Russia, where the whole concept of gender is something that is constantly ridiculed.
My gender just means gender studies.
The whole concept, not necessarily gender studies, but both,
but both gender studies are about.
And gender studies as an optical system, as a way of treating those measures.
And it is important I was just talking just yesterday about a scandal that emerged in the Russian media maybe a year ago.
It was called the Tiolichke scandal. Tiolichke is a special term as "Lankturman Russian" that is used for describing sexually attractive young females, like cheeks or bros, whatever.
And people and editorial staff had some highly respectable website in the pandemic, widely read and all that decided to do an article on feminism.
And they were trying to make it as good as possible. They were interviewing scholars, they were making research.
Then they published it.
And the whole story has to appear in the social networking on Facebook.
And what do they do?
The tagline is, "Now you guys will know for us how to treat the brods so they would feel happy."
And it was a matter of huge scandal of course, but what is the most striking point for me is the editorial staff was really unaware of what they are doing.
And they were trying to explain something and they were like, "Well, you guys, you just don't have a sense of humor. We were joking. It is funny."
And that is why I guess we need to start the gender section.
So in your section that you are starting tomorrow, you said?
Yes.
So what will it feature articles, opinion pieces, documentation?
We will start with visual lectures.
Video lectures, yeah.
We are scholars and scientists are talking on that first layer of vocabulary you need to speak on the subject.
What is gender? What does it mean? What is feminism and story?
What is the difference between homosexual and queer and the debate around it? All the interesting stuff there is to be spoken about.
And it is very starting tomorrow.
I see. So it is a very broad topic indeed.
It is just one word. It is something totally educational.
I am absolutely sure it is not to raise huge audiences.
And I have examples that are showing people are interesting in several sorts of goss-seps candel
who are verifying examples of domestic violence, for instance. But they are never willing to read anything deep.
Maybe because it has too strong a resemblance to the reality around them.
They do not want to face it.
But can I ask you about the gender question from the historical point of view with the Communist Revolution,
where gender equality, at least in the workplace, and even ideologically, was very much of a founding article of the Communist Manifesto.
And then there is a way in which you could say that in some of the Communist regimes, there was at least this sort of elevation of women to the same level of men in the workplace
and professions like doctors and so forth.
Do you see that, am I getting, am I accurate when I describe it that way, and has there been some sort of retrogression in the last few decades from that, if I am right?
It is an interesting topic, because you are absolutely right.
In the beginning, and at the end, in the 30s, the Soviet thinking of the equality of sexes was much ahead of its time.
But there is one thing to be, and you're right, as the presence of Soviet ideology, the Communist ideology was slowly expiring towards the 70s, the 80s, and the crash of the whole Soviet system.
Things were getting different, they were coming back to something very primal.
Like more, as the resurgence of adivistic sexes and so forth.
But what is interesting is, I was trying to talk about it yesterday, there is this concept of a "shazoid" New Makeover treatment of the past and present,
that is very common in Russian way of seeing the world.
What I mean is that you have your official Soviet history, that is treating things as the state, once it to be treated, and the story is very much different from the two answers to the third or the third is, it is mostly rewritten memories erased, then it is resurrected.
It is very much different from how it works in the Mediterranean cultures, in Russia, dead are never dead enough.
But they are not spoken to, you are not communicating with them, it is not an exchange.
Sometimes it even seems to me that our inner reality is kind of ruled by the dead.
They are the inner deities who are making us doing this or that, saying this or that.
You can speak about it in terms of post-memory, expanding it from the Holocaust studies to the history of the last century.
But it is also something very intimate, the way we are communicating with the dead.
Do you mean the national dead, I mean do you mean the national daisies of the dead or do you mean the private dead of the individual family kin and so forth?
I mean the national tinners, because while I was speaking about it I was meaning mostly the familial branch of the thing, but after we are living in a country where at the Red Square we are having a corpse that is lying there for almost 100 years.
This means that the state itself, the nation itself, I don't like the term but there is no other, maybe.
It, the population, the citizenship or whatever, people still think that the dead are the best governor in us.
That is why the country is so much obsessed with the concept of the past.
But these dead go only as far back as the revolution, not before.
Absolutely no.
And that is amazing.
Right now I am hosting a festival at the Yucherinburg.
The place where the last Russian serenkola, the second in his family was brutally killed.
And I am hosting this festival so I spend a lot of time over there and the city is quite impressive, but there is a point in the very middle of the city that is important for the city, seen.
It is a kind of a landmark.
And they are having this big, high-yacht mansion where a western like steel and glass and everything.
And it is standing viewing the pond.
You cannot skip viewing it because all the huge windows are facing the pond.
And at the opposite bank, what you are seeing is a big and rather ugly new church built in your posh, sealed Russian style with lots of blue and gold and whatever.
And it is absolutely clear that the church is kind of a naval.
It is very hard.
It is the most important place in the city.
And I just asked someone, the reception, what kind of church it is and what does it mean and what is important.
And they told me it was built at the site of the Ipatiyevskidom, that house where the church family was killed.
And so they are having a beautiful, beautiful, wonderful theater and photographers.
And some nice wooden buildings from the 19th century and a big neighborhood of Russian bow house, the constructivism.
But they are not treated as a landmark, as a main source of interest.
And all the city is centered around that very point of loss, of tragedy, of the source of trauma.
And that is how it works.
I mean there is no exact point in Russian history, Prairie Revolutionary or Post-
Revolutionary.
That may be treated as a point of common consensus, a point everyone agrees at.
It does not work like that.
Past never dies.
It never goes away.
It is still active.
And the past I gather from what you came to Stanford to speak about that in Russia, the past is in conflict.
And it is a territory that is struggled over.
And let's call it undetermined.
So the title of your talk was Time Backward, Putin's Russia in search of identity.
What do you mean by Time Backward?
What I mean is, I guess.
Putin's regime Putin's way of treating things is subconsciously maybe.
It is paradigm.
It is predecessor, the Soviet Empire.
And the main difference is there is no meaning under the Putin's reign.
No inner meaning, no hidden meaning and no explicit meaning, no kind, no brand of an idea.
There is no ideology you were saying.
Absolutely no.
We are having, what we are having is a pastiche of miscortations and images that is trying
to replace what could be an ideology.
But the reason nothing you cannot use it as an optical system to understand anything about what
is going on in Russia today, you have to go back to the source of miscortation and look for the exact
of the real version and to make your comparisons.
And that's how it works.
And it works very much the same and the official media when you have to take a sort of
cognitive quiz to understand what is really written.
And it's very much similar to the Soviet times when people had no way of getting the
information in the in-officially.
So they were treating the parabola as they were distorting it while reading in order to get the exact
information.
They were so much used to the number of distortions and the missions used by the state that they could
master command that is of language of propaganda and grasp the real meaning.
But now there is no real meaning and so people are disoriented.
So is this what you mean when you talk about Putin's regime and this hybrid RKSism as a new model of
statehood?
That's what I'm quoting you.
Yes.
So this is miscortation from the past and that it's a pestish and it's hybrid and it's RK.
Do you find that Putin is so devoid of a ideological commitment or that he might be have a nostalgia for,
you know, the Soviet Empire as such and is doing his best to without making it obvious to
at least keep open the possibility of a rebirth of some sort of that.
So that he's committed to a very specific narrative of Russia's communist past.
Well, I'm sure Putin is quite and his team are quite nostalgic about the Soviet past.
The thing I don't think is nostalgia can become an ideology.
It doesn't have a vehicle for it and it can be built vehicle to move things.
And it is a shady fragrance.
It is not a working tool.
And I guess that's why any time when Putin's – when the state is trying to do reconstructions,
it fails. It doesn't know how to do things.
I have this special feeling that the real problem of contemporary Russia lies maybe not even in this obsession with the past,
but in deep fear for the future.
And I guess it's a global thing.
Yesterday I was really, really seeing on the time when I was writing something,
something, something, and trying to understand what happened to the ideal, the future in Russia.
And then I suddenly realized it was something much more wide.
And to get a few of it, I was browsing through the American movies box offices for the last three decades.
And what I find striking is the last movie that is dealing with the future is something nice, something to be expected, something endearing or encouraging is back to the future.
And it's 1985. And it is amazing.
And even there they are treating the future, they are speaking of the future in terms of gadgets, some miraculous, you know, flying, sneakress, whatever.
And this kind of, you know, seeing the future is something very much instrumental and very close to us, not the distant future.
And when we're treating the distant future, it is always a number of catastrophes, as we're reviewing it at the West.
And it is even more intense in Russia, because in Russia nothing is solid.
You're always expecting some ugly turn of reality, of your own biography, or of the country's story.
Anything can happen. And so if the future is to be avoided, and you're not exactly satisfied with the present, which is deeply faulty, you are again coming back to the past.
You don't know well enough, because there is this official version constituted by the Soviet narrative, and there is this in official family version of the past.
It goes the same with gender thing. Officially, there is absolute equality, and yes, women can take leading chairs and some editorial boards or wherever.
But it doesn't mean that your colleague is not, you know, sleeping here behind at the elevator.
It is just two different levels, two different floors that are not communicating. There is no staircase to unite them.
That's what works.
In Urosine, you wrote that Russians are fearful of a dystopian future, and I'm going to quote you again.
We are prepared to consider our imperfect, present state, acceptable as long as things don't get worse.
And that's a very strange condition to live under, no?
And psychically, what does it do?
I mean, how does it mean that one flees to the past as a refuge, or do Russians in your everyday experience of your fellow citizens?
Do they actually have an active relationship to the past? And is it an imaginary one?
I guess so. And yes, it is an imaginary one, because as you know, the whole educational system, humanitarian, humanitarian, educational system is almost demolished.
So when people are...
What do you mean by that?
How they are reducing funds, they are changing professors, they are taking experts.
I have this notion that, in fact, as well as I think that the demolition of the Russian media field is a voluntary conscious process that was performed well enough,
that was lasting for 15 years, and what it led to sufficiently was a total replacement, a media service by a brand of propaganda.
And what I feel is, it is maybe a moral discreet, but it is the same thing happening in the humanities field.
They are trying to replace the whole concept of expert knowledge by a number of unreliable sources.
It is very obvious when you are watching the state TV, and they are debating on some serious measures on what is going on in Ukraine, whatever.
And the experts that are sitting around table are different types of freaks, some footurologists, conspirologists, astrologists, whatever.
And with a huge tech expert written, and that is the idea, there is no exact expertise.
Nothing is real.
Is that because they have abandoned the order of facts or historiography as establishing the matters of facts, and getting the facts correct, and that there is an active demolition of a factual historiography in order to replace it maybe with a mythological history, or some propagandist version of the past?
I think that what they are really after is not creating something more efficient or more presentable version of history.
Not the replacement of facts with the other facts, but a kind of factual entropy, constant dispersing of any kind of facts.
It is very visible when you are looking at media, when you are going for some articular, and relational piece, and they are using the terms like the inner immigrants that is dating from the 19th century.
And what is funny, you know that it was invited by the film The Jarodong for naming a special range of French aristocrats who had a soft spot for the Russians.
It is interesting, now in the immigrants are the Russians who have a soft spot for western type of thinking.
But when they are using the terms, inner immigrants, fascists, banderas, whatever, for intentions, any term has its own history, it means something.
But for them they are devoid of any meaning, it is just a way of using pejorative.
It is, you know, you are simply saying someone is a bad person, he is a fascist, he is an inner immigrant, whatever.
And that complete lack of interest to the history of a term says something about the way their reality is constructed.
But there is no inside, only the outside, there is no inner meaning that are constituted about a special kind of emptiness.
But listening to you, I got the sense that this is a very different kind of phenomenon than was the case in the heyday of Soviet communism where there was a very aggressive but well ordered takeover of the narrative of the past and a rewriting of it in terms of the ideology of the communist ideology.
But that here it doesn't have the same coherence and that it is selective about which facts it wants to choose to present and that it sounds like it is all conspiring to distract the attention of the citizen and make it impossible for the citizen actually to think coherently,
and clearly about any matters of facts.
And that this disorientation of the thought process and this radio show which has been going on for a decade now, you know, it is primary vocation is really about thinking and we spend a lot of time thinking about thinking.
And it sounds like anything that can be done under this present regime to discombobulate the process of thought is desirable.
What I think is they are of course, yes, the process of thought is something that automatically makes you suspect and it makes you a little bit too noticeable.
And so they are spending millions to make to build a crowd around you, a crowd that is imitating the process of thought.
So it would not be as visible as horrible because the thought is a very age-user sharp thing, it could be dangerous, yes.
It is interesting that I think you mentioned about the certain kind of integrity of the Soviet regime in comparison with what is going on right now, because yes, of course the Soviet Union has its own very distant style of behavior, maybe because of the presence of that inner meaning.
They knew what they are doing and it was constructing a style in movement and now the only kind of movement we are having is this dispensation.
And that is why a patchwork I guess is the best metaphor for describing what is going on.
Which you also called the Skitzoid present, yes. Your vocation as a poet but also as a public intellectual and journalist above all with Colton and other venues is it to provide a forum in which this clear and distinct thinking that is answerable to matters of fact takes place.
I think so or I could put it in different words, the words of my dear friend and a wonderful poet and a wonderful thing, Karagri Gudidashevsky, who is I suppose relatively unknown here at the US but he is a wonderful poet.
And what he was saying once he was translating Renee Jerer, I just wanted to mention it, he was the one to introduce Rartho, the Russian thinking audience to the Russian intellectuals.
And what he was talking of poetry and what he was saying is the aim of poetry is to make invisible things visible.
And I guess you could extend it on all the field of intellectual work. You are making things visible and that's what we are trying to do with Colton.
And as a poet yourself, is your vocation the same as that or similar that you are trying through your poetry to maintain this focus that will make visible if only the sheer absurdity of things sometimes?
Sometimes yes, in terms of direct reaction on some specific subject. For instance, I just couldn't help it. I wrote a big, there is the Russian term, "piama". I guess in English it is what is called the longest poem.
It is not directly about the war on Ukraine but it is called the War of Beasts and Animals. And it is dealing with different, with the continuity of war and after war, efforts in Russian society.
But it is a way of directly responding on what is happening.
It is something that causes you pain and you strike back or you refuse to strike back.
But what I am trying to do with poetry and what I guess poetry is really doing is to extend the room for the future because poetry is a matter of language.
And every very political practice is kind of reinventing the language, in a language of its own. And thus it is extending the possibilities of language.
To the further decades, that is why I guess good poetry is never too warmly praised by the contemporaries because it is destined to be read by the next generations.
Where in the language would come in terms of what the poetry was knowing beforehand?
I have been reading some of your poems in English translation which I don't know. I have no idea how to evaluate the quality of the translations.
But it seems that one enters a world where there is a defamiliarization in the experience of the present or whatever reality.
And that is taking of a distance that is very palpable as a reader that I have to take a wide distance in order.
And perhaps is that providing a perspective that also opens up a horizon to the future in terms of poetic technique?
No? Yes, in terms of poetic technique and also in terms of treating the reality because of course the poem is kind of a mirror.
But not really a mirror because of course it doesn't follow you. It has its own temporality.
And in terms of technique, in terms of how it is working, I would better compare it to the rest of the Russian world, Givka.
But I am sure you know the English equivalent. Give moving picture a cobe.
I think that is constantly repeating itself and what a poem does with you. It is placing you inside of this moving thing and you are able to rewind it and rewind it.
And it is lasting as long as you are agreeing for it to last.
Right. So you said it is not a mirror because there is also in my perception that there is a deliberate technique of distortion.
Yeah. No? Yeah.
In other words in terms of the plot but in terms of wording.
Of wording, yes. And that this distortion I have to assume has some relation to the distortions that we were talking about earlier in terms of the experts who are providing a
facts that are actually distorting the matters of facts and that there is so much of this skitsoid present is about living in a society where so much of the past is being distorted.
Maybe by the regime or that the...
But in any case, this kind of redistortion that you get in the poem might serve as a means of providing a reorientation in the right direction.
I would love it to be that or at least maybe a source of explanation of making some subtle comments to the distorted reality.
Maria, would you be willing to read a poem of yours for our audience that will give them a sense of how you operate in the poetic medium?
I'll try to an epic poem that is somehow reflecting on that multiliterate structure of the Russian society and its time present.
And it has also a funny title, the title is "The Ladies Dressing Room of the Planet Fitness Sports Club."
I'll be reading it in Russian of course so you would get the feeling.
But what it is about is that strangest personal experience you're getting when you're becoming collective body of female swimming unity,
which somehow starts to remind you of the distant and not so distant past.
And you're starting to see the shadows of the Nazi Germany with the douche rooms that are occurring to be something completely different.
And you feel there is no difference in the shower rooms.
The shower rooms and the shower rooms and there is no difference between life and death, between the past and the present, between being feminine and being mortal, etc.
So it goes like that.
And it is a very important place to be able to see the most of the world's lives in the world.
So it is a very important place to see the world.
And it is a very important place to see the world's lives in the world.
With damp delight and covered with the mouth closed up with sleep, clotted blood tears, children and sulfur surrounding.
The essence or a stranger's flesh.
With my own nine I dropped by and sit down to strip, stood to be a bit and I set off to float.
Rosie and yellow plump as infants bear, naked in a towel down to the ears.
The flock of tree maidens sliced through the floor.
Each goes into the shower, languidly drooping its trunk.
It needs like types of wine and breeds of partridges.
Either a classifica or just curiosi.
There's a collarbone layers.
They are the shoulder blade sails.
Each lift of the soul must be logged in the register.
Soon there will be no more such.
Soon they will find a second shift.
Here they will stretch velvet across.
There they will rebuild a stage for the collocation of bone, skin and black plates.
The guests will marvel not hiding their tears.
Benefit for the young handsome or the ugly good plays in the kindergarten touches your plum,
communes in the pear, collects water in its mouth.
Incoherent, whittled winter will inherit the animal reason will recognize its brother.
This watery column can turn to ice, reason to infection, and the air to gas.
Lovey dovies in a close-ranked wall will start to march through the sheds,
and the door that used to open on the swimming gob will open a wee bit like a zipper on the hip.
And will step out of slippers, crowns and watches, out of our complicated rags, nails and voices.
And once they have torn off the lock, a crowd of souls will pour into our nostrils, mouths and ears, like a steamed puff from a teapot.
But, like in forest school, the excess of creams, mouth and hair, muscles and underarms keep rustling.
Shame and the auto tan, just like a Vixen's lair, regard the body's surface with lenses of pores.
But, like in a cattle car where cramped with profundity, quadrants of steam and the long whale wander, untraspassing, the sky becomes a brother, and someone in the shower room sings.
In pioneer camps, in the indigo shorts of July, first dipping, then lifting the flag, the first eye, brown-headed, like a bullet, takes the initial step.
And squinting the landscape, the way a fist crumples paper, I regard him almost like the skies.
And I'll lie down like that ball lightning on the fields with one turn of the wheel.
Well, there you go. I don't know if that's what you would call a gift.
That's a huge amount of water.
So, I have to tell, you know, or listen, it's the first time I've read this poem.
It's right here, you know, reading it aloud.
And, like a lot of readers, I have to sit and live with a poem.
You know, before I feel, I have a competency to comment on it.
So, I'm not going to presume to offer some kind of hermeneutic intervention on that.
One can clearly get a sense from this anority of it, even in English, that just going into this planet fitness center is a real trip.
I wonder if one of, you know, it's a favorite sport, you know, giving different definitions to the things they are doing.
And maybe one more metaphor was, could be for me, the length of the run.
You're starting with something very real and very simplistic and very, you know, posh for Russia's introduced to the whole culture of sports clubs.
Jim clubs.
Yes.
Loses, medicines, etc.
For two decades only, so it is still something new and a source of a hedonistic experience for the majority of Russian citizens.
And what is interesting for me is the length of the journey.
How far away you can take yourself and the reader from the starting point.
And sometimes it is, the distances are amazing.
Going back now to the question of the Russian society in the present day, where there's a strange relationship to the past, largely imaginary invented or misquoted, a skitsoid present,
and this inability to envision a future and trying to hold on to a present as long as it doesn't get worse.
And I'm just wondering in light of what you said about how it's only a couple of decades old that you have things like planet fitness and gym centers and glamour magazines.
It is their way that that kind of fills takes the place of what would be a more coherent, meaningful idea of time and the future.
That it's a form of a different form of dispersion.
What is so effective about the contemporary Russian sensibility is that in all its cruelty it is very inclusive.
They do not notice any kind of contradictions between this and that.
So they can easily include a system of hidden meanings and miscortations, misunderstanding, different truths into the system that denies the whole concept of truth.
It can easily embrace some more spots and bits of the outer world, but of course what it is more willing to embrace is the glossy world of consumerism.
It is also part of contemporary Russian ideology if it existed.
And a poetly, for Ben Stain, was speaking once on the glumour of the Russian fashion scene as a new official ideology, as a language of the new official meanings.
But now it's a little bit different and we're turning from glossy to military, but the affinity still stays the same.
But he has a poet in Russia still has the charisma and authority that has been the case throughout much of the 20th century, where poetry was one way of, and one of the major ways of engaging in a certain form of resistance through the word against ideology and where the word is still taken very seriously.
Well, poetry is always a major of resistance.
Firstly, and basically it resists death.
And only then other forms of natural sociological, cultural, political pressure are resistance.
It goes with the matter, in a way of being.
In Russia, for I guess the last two or maybe three decades, poetry was very much like to what it is in the Western world.
It was something that will be private, comparatively uninteresting for the general public.
But no, I was considering it to be a good thing.
Much along the Brodsky's line, he was insisting on poetry being a very private thing, it was a private person.
And I still love the idea.
But of course, privacy, when Brodsky was championing it was a political act of resistance.
Absolutely, yes, yes, and a very effective one.
But what is going on now is something very different, and reminding me maybe of the times of 19th and 20th when poetry was still something important.
And the crowds were gathering to listen to the poems.
You could remind me about the Soviet 60s, about the times of Hifto-Shranco, his Nisians, Gendak-Madulina, where poetry readings were gathering stadiums.
But it is different.
I mean they were existing in a country without popular culture, without movies, without rock concerts, without yellow press.
And poetry and other classical ways of treating, of existing in culture were replacing.
And only way of getting distracted from the ugly reality people could get.
So it is different. And I wonder what would become of blocks, poetic audience, if the movies were more popular in blocks times.
But do the poets of this so-called Silver Age still have a lot of resonance for Russians today?
I think so, yes. And also because of that closeness to the past,
we are still discussing some lines of Montilchtam with the same intensity.
They were discussed in the 60s, or maybe even more intensely, along of course with Leonardo, Michael Palmer, or Dona Joy, or whatever.
And this kind of coexisting in culture is very well-infect.
And it is contradictory to what I was talking of.
It is very fruitful for a poet, for an intellectual, for a cultural or a culture being.
Because when you still have the same distance to the Silver Age, to see a cellul, and to the latest Hollywood production,
this picture of the world is much more intense and much more multicolored.
And that is the specifics of the Russian cultural process, because in the 90s all the doors were suddenly opened.
Huge flow of absolutely unknown different brands of culture from Ernest Cottou to Zebo to was entering.
And you could decide, and you couldn't decide which path to take.
And I guess it is kind of mirroring that feeling a Russian has, that it is very closed distance to the 1940s.
But sometimes it is fruitful and sometimes it is quite dramatic.
Dramatic and dramatic, dramatic both.
But now the poor drug is getting much, much wider.
And maybe it is what is happening in times of big historical shifts when people are expecting a poetry to give them some kind of an answer or maybe a question.
Well, I have to say, Maria, that all the cultural, political, social work that you are doing is extremely important with Colpa and earlier with Open Space and this political journalism.
But I also have to believe that continuing to write poetry of this sort is just as pertinent and an act of form of resistance and perhaps poetry will always have that power to repatriate.
The one who is out wandering in a wilderness and looking for some kind of orientation and kind of provide some kind of direction about where is our true homeland, spiritually speaking.
And that homeland must have also a strong foundation in the future otherwise there is no belonging.
If you do not feel like you can belong to a future then very hard to feel that you can belong to a past, a little longer present.
So continue on and it has been an honor and pleasure to have you here at Stanford with Maria Stepanova that we have been talking to for entitled opinions.
Enjoy the rest of your time in California and we will look forward to having you back on entitled opinions your next time around.
Thank you so much.
Bye bye.
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