Ruthless research into the Russian language, analysis of Putinism: the poet Maria Stepanova receives the Leipzig Book Prize for European understanding. A meeting with a fearless artist.
Very soon in the conversation, the question arises as to whether Maria Stepanova not only has visionary but also magical abilities, whether she not only describes or anticipates future disasters with her poems, whether she might even cause them. And if this gift scares you. Stepanova, born in Moscow in 1972, does not dismiss the question at the meeting in Berlin, is not embarrassed, not indignant, not amused. Instead, she replies with that typically calm precision: “Sometimes.”