In Memory of Memory
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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 Dipping into various forms—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities, offering an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.
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.
