In Memory of Memory

Winner of the 2023 Berman Literature Prize

Longlisted for the 2022 Dublin Literary Prize

Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize

Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Awards: Translated Literature

Longlisted for the 2021 Bailie Gifford Prize

Winner of the 2018 Bolshaya Kniga Award

Winner of the 2019 NOS Literature Prize

The Globe 100: a Globe and Mail Best Book of 2021

An exciting contemporary Russian writer explores terra incognita: the still-living margins of history.
With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century.
In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities, offering an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.