Seminar with Maria Stepanova

Raising the Beast. Russia Before and After the Full-Scale Invasion

Poet and writer Maria Stepanova, in conversation with translators Miquel Cabal and Jorge Ferrer, explores the Russian cultural tradition that fed contemporary political imagination marked by war, imperialism, and authoritarianism.

Maria Stepanova’s work focuses on memory and its many layers. She explores the tensions between official historical narratives that impose uniformity, and intimate family memories that often elude coherence. It is precisely where past and present encounter one another that her writing unfolds. As a journalist, she created Colta.ru, Russia’s first crowdfunded magazine, devoted to understanding the spirit of times through arts. In 2022, following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the magazine was shut down by the Russian Government, and Stepanova was forced into exile. Since then, she has repeatedly faced the same questions: What could have prevented it from happening? How deeply does this compromise Russian culture and society as a whole?

Together with translators and experts in Slavic literature Miquel Cabal and Jorge Ferrer, Stepanova raises questions and reflections on the relationship between Russia’s cultural tradition and the political narratives dominating the country today. To what extent is the past manipulated to sustain a culture of war? And how does this relate to a broader geopolitical context marked by the global rise of imperialism?