The Belly of the Beast: An Emigrant's Testimony -
Claude.ai - A Research Essay Inspired by a Fragment of Maria Stepanova's Text "Focus"
I. The Topography of Shelter: Space as an Ontological Condition
The fragment begins with a description that at first glance seems mundane: a woman writer in a foreign city knows which platform to go to. Track five – northbound, track one – southbound. But it is precisely in this precision, in this knowledge of the route, that the entire existential weight of the text is concentrated. The ability to navigate space becomes a metaphor for what Stepanova calls "a place in a new life." The physical place and the ontological place become indistinguishable here: the emigrant verifies their existence through the ability to move correctly, not to get lost, to occupy a position.
This spatial thinking is deeply rooted in the Russian literary tradition. One need only recall Raskolnikov, measuring Petersburg streets with the steps of his idea, or Mandelstam's "I have forgotten the word I wanted to say" – the loss of a word as the loss of a reference point. For Stepanova, orientation is the opposite gesture: the word is found, the direction is known, but it is precisely for this reason that it is unsettling. Knowing the route too precisely suggests that the route was learned out of necessity, not inherited.
II. A Multitude of Places as a Form of Homelessness
The paradox of the emigrant existence of the writer M. is that she has "a multitude of places" – and it is precisely this that makes her homeless. Each place is an audience that wants not books, but explanations. Literary testimony is displaced by political testimony: first they ask about books, "and then, with far greater interest" – about the country. The writer is transformed into a representative, an ambassador, or even an accused.
Here Stepanova identifies a phenomenon that could be called the instrumentalization of emigrant experience. Western liberal discourse, sincerely wanting to understand what is happening, inadvertently reduces the complexity of a living witness to a function: to explain the beast. The writer M. is needed not as a subject, but as a translator from the language of violence. And in this lies a particular form of symbolic violence.
Hannah Arendt wrote about stateless persons as people deprived of the right to have rights. Stepanova describes a more subtle situation: the writer has rights, has a voice, has an audience – but this voice is immediately appropriated and directed to serve the questions of others. A multitude of places turns into a multitude of interrogations.
III. The Beast as a Political Science Category
The central metaphor of the fragment – the beast – operates on several levels simultaneously, and it cannot be reduced to any single one.
In the political science dimension, the beast is what theory calls an authoritarian regime. But Stepanova fundamentally avoids political science precision, and this avoidance is meaningful. The beast is not the state in the Weberian sense – a monopolist on violence, a rational bureaucratic apparatus. The beast is a biological entity, irrational, breathing. It "devours," not "governs." This is an anthropological, not a political, image.
Stepanova's key political science observation – the beast is not in front of you and not behind you, it is around you. This is a description of what political science calls totalitarianism in its phenomenological dimension: a regime that does not oppose society but permeates it, becomes the air one breathes. Arendt, Orwell, Günther Anders – all described this all-encompassing nature in different ways. But Stepanova offers a refinement that makes her description unique: "I lived inside the beast, and maybe I was even born in it."
Being born inside is neither collaboration nor victimhood. It is a third, significantly darker ontological position for which there is no ready-made word in political language. A person born inside a totalitarian system cannot be its judge from the outside – they are made of the same substance. This makes their testimony simultaneously the most valuable (they know from within) and the least trusted (they are part of what they are talking about).
IV. Pinocchio and Jonah: The Archetypal Dimension
Stepanova introduces two powerful archetypes into the text through one fairy-tale reference – to Pinocchio (the wooden boy) and, implicitly, to the biblical Jonah. The old man and the wooden boy in the belly of a sea monster by a candle stub – this is an image that works on several cultural registers simultaneously.
Jonah was swallowed by the whale as punishment for fleeing his prophetic mission. His sojourn in the belly is simultaneously punishment, purification, and a transitional period. Cast ashore, he emerges ready to fulfill what he fled from. In the Christian tradition, the story of Jonah is read as a prefiguration of death and resurrection. In Stepanova's work, this archetype is reinterpreted: there is no sin of flight, no prophetic mission, no Nineveh. There is simply the fact of being inside – and the impossibility of understanding it from within.
Pinocchio adds another layer of meaning. The wooden boy is an artificial creature striving to become real. His swallowing by the Shark (in Collodi's original) is a trial, after which his woodenness is overcome. But Stepanova's emphasis is different: she speaks not of transformation, but of the scale of disproportion. A person inside a beast cannot cause it significant harm not because they are weak in spirit, but because they are physically small. This removes the moral accusation of passivity – and it is precisely here that the text becomes most ethically charged.
V. The Historiosophical Impasse: The Time of the Beast and the Time of Man
When interlocutors hint to M. that "she and the people she knew should have taken timely measures long before he grew up," they are thinking in the logic of linear historical time: there was a point at which one could have intervened; missing it means being guilty.
But Stepanova describes a different time – a time in which the beast was already big when you were only born. Historical consciousness is formed within already established structures, and this means that "timeliness" is a category accessible only to a view from the outside and from the future. From inside the time of the beast, there is no point from which its entire length is visible.
This is the historiosophical problem that Tolstoy grappled with in War and Peace and Herzen in My Past and Thoughts. Tolstoy denied the possibility of a historical actor seeing the meaning of events – meaning is revealed only retrospectively. Herzen agonized over how to live in a historical moment without knowing its outcomes. Stepanova inherits this tradition but adds a new dimension: the problem is not only that the direction of history is invisible from within it, but that from inside the beast, the beast itself is invisible.
VI. The Poetics of Testimony: The Epistemological Wound
"This makes my experience flawed, and my story – untrustworthy."
This self-indictment is of unprecedented honesty. Stepanova does not merely acknowledge the limitation of her position – she inscribes this limitation into the very structure of testimony. Primo Levi, in The Drowned and the Saved, wrote that the true witnesses of the Holocaust are the perished, and the survivors always testify imperfectly, always on behalf of someone else. Stepanova makes a similar gesture, but applied to a different situation: a witness born inside the system is always partly a part of what they testify about.
This is an epistemological wound that cannot be closed, only acknowledged. And it is precisely this acknowledgment – "I am ready to give an account of the internal furnishing of the creature" – that becomes the basis for a special kind of trust, different from the trust given to a disinterested observer. This is trust in a witness who knows their own impurity and yet speaks.
VII. The Spiritual Dimension: Exodus and the Impossibility of Return
"You find yourself outside and for the first time can clearly see that the room you spent so many years in was actually a belly."
This is a description of the moment that in spiritual traditions is called awakening or conversion. But in Stepanova, there is neither the elation of enlightenment nor the relief of salvation. Exiting the beast is primarily a renaming: what seemed like a room turns out to be a belly. The metamorphosis is not in the subject, but in their understanding of the space they occupied.
In a spiritual-psychological sense, this describes what the Jungian tradition calls the encounter with the Shadow – that part of the psyche we do not acknowledge as our own. For an entire people, for a culture – this is an encounter with the collective Shadow, with what was repressed, denied, called alien. Stepanova describes a person who has gone through this encounter and now lives with the impossibility of returning to their former ignorance.
Cast ashore, like Jonah, the protagonist cannot re-enter the whale. But she also cannot fully become part of the shore. This intermediate state is neither tragedy nor triumph, but a particular kind of existence requiring a particular language. This is the language Stepanova is seeking.
Conclusion: Furnishing as Ethics
The final image – "the internal furnishing of the creature" – is unexpectedly cozy and terrifying at the same time. Furnishing implies making a place habitable, comfort, habit. The belly of the beast was furnished as living space – and this is not a metaphor for collaboration, but a description of an anthropological universal: humans make any space they find themselves in habitable, because otherwise they cannot survive.
The willingness to give "an account of the internal furnishing" is the ethical program proposed by Stepanova. Not accusation, not justification, not confession. An account. A precise, detailed, responsible description of how it was arranged from the inside. In conditions where the external view demands simple explanations about the "beast," and internal experience is too compromised by complicity, only such a story – clear-eyed, self-critical, detailed – can lay claim to authenticity.
This is what literature does in a moment of historical catastrophe: it does not explain the beast or kill it, but describes what it was like to live inside, by candlelight, not knowing that outside was the sea.
Claude.ai - inspired by a fragment of Maria Stepanova's text "Focus"
"For the writer M., who had lived in this city not so long ago, the precision of movements and knowledge of her future trajectory (down, underground, to track five if heading north, and to track one if heading south) now held a special importance and seemed to assure her that she had a place both on the approaching train, and on the path towards it, and in the new life she had not yet quite had time to adjust to.
However, judging by the number of times she had had to leave somewhere to work as a writer in other cities and countries, and then return from there, removing a light suitcase from the shelf in one motion, she actually did have a place in this life – and even a multitude of places, in each of which people wanted to question her about the books she had written sometime, and then, with far greater interest, finally ask questions about the country she came from. This country was now waging war with another, neighboring one, ■■■■■■ ■■ ■■■■■■■ ■■■■■■■■■■■■■ ■■■■■■■, ■■■■■ ■ ■■■■, ■■■■■■■■■■■■ ■■■■■■, ■ ■■■ ■■■■■ ■■ ■■■■■ ■■ ■■■■■■■■, ■■ ■■■■■■■■■■■ ■ ■■■, ■■■ ■■ ■■ ■■■■ ■■■■ ■■■■■■. ■■■■■■, ■■■■■■■■ ■■■■■, ■■■ ■■■■■■■■ ■■■■■ ■ ■■■ ■■■■, ■■■■■ ■■■■■■■ ■ ■■■■■■■■■■■ ■■■■■■■, ■■■■■■■, ■■■■■■, ■■■■■■■■ ■■ ■■ ■■■■■■■■■■■■ ■■■■■■■■ – ■■■■■■■■■■■■■, ■■■■■■■■, ■■■■■■■■■■■■ ■■ ■■■■■ ■ ■■■. The foreign city where M. now lived was full of people who had fled from both warring countries – and those who had been attacked by her compatriots looked at their former neighbors with horror and suspicion, as if the previous, pre-war life, whatever it had been, had ceased to mean anything and only masked your kinship with the beast that continued to devour.
Many of the locals wanted, of course, to learn more about the beast, and not only to protect themselves from its disgusting maw, but also because large predators always interest us herbivores, who find it difficult to explain to ourselves where violence comes from and how it works. They questioned the writer M. about its habits with intense sympathy, as if she too had been bitten and even partially gnawed, and only by chance remained lying on the grass relatively intact. Some wanted to understand how it happened that the beast had not yet been killed or devoured itself in its insatiable greed, and hinted that M. and the people she knew in her country should have taken timely measures long before he grew up and started eating everyone indiscriminately.
M. completely agreed with this, but it took some effort to explain to her interlocutors that the very nature of the beast made hunting it or fighting it difficult. The beast, you see, was not in front of me and not behind me, she might have said, he was always around me – to such an extent that it took me years to recognize that I lived inside the beast, and maybe was even born in it. Do you remember the fairy tale, she continued silently, where an old man and a wooden boy sit by a stub of a tallow candle inside a sea monster? They might have been able to cause him some discomfort – for example, jumping up and down in his stomach or even starting a fire in there. But the fact is that the disparity in size prevents you from doing the beast any significant harm, let alone finishing him off; all you can hope for is that someday he will start to vomit and you, without understanding how, will find yourself outside and for the first time be able to see clearly that the room you spent so many years in was actually a belly. And I myself, it turns out, was part of the beast, even if swallowed by chance or grown by mistake – and I understand very well that this makes my experience flawed, and my story – untrustworthy. But if it is needed, I am ready to give an account of the internal furnishing of the creature I recently emerged from onto dry land."
