Borrowed Word and Violence in M. Stepanova`s Poetry

Stepanova's poetry based on six texts belonging to three stages of poetic oeuvre: the poems "Prose of Ivan Sidorov" ["Proza Ivana Sidorova"], "Spolia", "War of Beasts and Animals" ["Vojna Zverej i Zhivotnyh"], "The Body Returns" ["Telo Vozvrashchaetsya"], as well as two poems (or not-poems ["nestikhi»]) "Quote" and "None" ["Ni Odnogo"], included with the last poem in the collection "Old world. Mending life" ["Staryj Mir. Pochinka Zhizni"]. Violence is reflected in the texts not only at the level of the plot, it also serves in many ways as a "form-building" factor: for example, in the "Prose of Ivan Sidorov", an unrelieved traumatic experience determines the "instability" of the text, which is manifested, for example, in the inclusion in the text of various discourses, allusions from various areas of culture. In "Spolia" violence is directly related to the fragmentation of the text, to the inability to create a consistent narrative, and in the collection "Old world. Mending life" fundamentally – in comparison with the previous, usually rhymed and rhythmized, texts – the metre changes: all poems, except one, are written in verlibre, that is, in a metre that allows greater freedom, the possibility of "insubordination" of the content to the requirements of the form. The relationship between violence and alien word is impossible to consider in the form of linear development, of evolution: the poetic subject in Stepanova's poetry tries various ways of using alien word, its (not)recognizability, (not)evidence for the potential reader, its (not)multiplicity, but all possibilities rather problematize this relationship: there is no ideal solution suitable for all cases.