site.btaRussian Writer Maria Stepanova: Poetry and the Responsibility of Memory

Russian poet, writer and essayist Maria Stepanova attended Literary Talks 2025 and told BTA’s Asen Georgiev in an interview that collective memory can easily replace history, warning that governments and social-media echo chambers often turn it into a stream of fictional events.

“One of the biggest problems is that people with different political views are losing the ability or the desire to talk to each other,” Stepanova said. Freedom of speech, she added, remains “one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century” and must be protected.

Known to Bulgarian readers for In Memory of Memory and Focus, Stepanova has published fourteen poetry collections and three essay books. A graduate of the Maxim Gorky Moscow Literature Institute, she received the 2023 Leipzig Book Fair Prize.

Asked how memory shapes politics, Stepanova said Russia’s memory laws show how a state can impose a single narrative that others may follow. She urged individuals to keep “many narratives at once” and “never be too certain of being right.”

“Humanity’s capacity for violence is inescapable,” Stepanova said, but each person must “resist this capacity” in a private moral struggle. True security is illusory—the pandemic proved “there is no security anywhere in the world”—so people should improve what they can “here and now.” Writing, she concluded, is her own form of resistance.