In Memory of Memory
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
An exploration of life at the margins of history from one of Russia’s most exciting contemporary writers
Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize
Winner of the MLA Lois Roth Translation Award
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 Dipping into various forms—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Russian poet Maria Stepanova’s wildly creative novel is an artful tribute to humankind’s complicated relationship with the past. Stepanova draws on her own family’s history, starting with the death of her aunt Galya, which leads the narrator to comb through a treasure trove of records and artifacts. Dipping into historical fiction, art criticism, and sociopolitical essay, Stepanova lets her writing take whatever form best serves her purposes at a given moment. And all of the stories and anecdotes are incredible, like the details about her great-grandmother Sarra, who was both a doctor and a convict. Stepanova takes extra care with her family’s Jewish history and injects heartbreaking beauty at every turn. In Memory of Memory takes something personal and makes it feel universal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stepanova's finely crafted debut follows a woman's lifelong efforts to better understand her ancestors, Russian Jews whose stories fascinated her as a child growing up in the Soviet Union. The unnamed narrator enters archives, travels to the cities where her great-grandparents and grandparents lived, and scrutinizes their personal possessions. Family letters, postcards, and government documents are quoted throughout, and Stepanova seamlessly references the work of prominent Russian cultural figures such as poet Osip Mandlestam to fill in gaps in the narrative on the anti-Semitism she assumes her family faced. Impressively, the book also serves as a critical examination of the narrator's attempt to construct a personal and cultural history, providing the reader a window into the narrator's worries over doing justice to her family's story: "Whether you like it or not, you are simply more visible than those who came before you," Stepanova writes. Over the course of her research, the narrator comes to terms with the fact that her efforts won't reveal the past to any great degree. While some of the critical digressions can feel gratuitous, such as a theoretically informed discussion of selfie photos, there are plenty of vivid anecdotes like a great-grandmother who became a political prisoner in 1907. Stepanova's admirable cross-genre project will intrigue fans of erudite autofiction.
