In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova, Sasha Dugdale Narrated by Inger Tuder

Overview

Winner of the 2023 Berman Literature Prize
Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize
Longlisted for the National Book Awards: Translated Literature
Longlisted for the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize
Longlisted for the 2022 Dublin Literary Award

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 Dipping into various forms-essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents-Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities, offering an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.

Editorial Reviews

Rain Taxi - Edward Stephens

"In Memory of Memory is a meditation on the nothing that remains after catastrophe, the residual oblivion."

Los Angeles Review of Books

"Stepanova has given new life to the skaz technique of telling a story through the scrambled speech of an unreliable narrator, using manic wordplay and what one critic called ‘a carnival of images.’"

Best Books of 2021 - Bookforum - Audrey Wollen

"Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses and Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory are both trying to pin down echoes and build from dust."

The New York Times - John Williams

"A daring combination of family history and roving cultural analysis...a kaleidoscopic, time-shuffling look at one family of Russian Jews throughout a fiercely eventful century."

Best Books of 2021 - Lit Hub - Snigdha Koirala

"Grappling with the heaviness of details, and then holding them up to the light, Stepanova examines just how relentlessly the past shines through—how it haunts and follows us around, even when—especially when—we think we’ve closed the door on it."

Harper's - Sophie Pinkham

"As it delves into the story of Stepanova’s Russian-Jewish family, branching out into broader questions about the nature of memory, the book exhibits many of the qualities that have made her a beloved writer in her native country: exquisite imagery and metaphor, an affectionate sense of Russian literary tradition, and a gentle, melancholy approach to the region’s violent history. Above all it asks, What merits remembrance, and what is better forgotten?"

Andrew McMillan

"A book to plunge into. 'Everyone else's ancestors had taken part in history' writes Stepanova; building itself via accumulation, these chapters become an important testimony to the cultural and political lives of the people held beneath the surface of the tides of history."

Elif Batuman

"A luminous, rigorous, and mesmerizing interrogation of the relationship between personal history, family history, and capital-H History. I couldn't put it down; it felt sort of like watching a hypnotic YouTube unboxing-video of the gift-and-burden that is the twentieth century. In Memory of Memory has that trick of feeling both completely original and already classic, and I confidently expect this translation to bring Maria Stepanova a rabid American fan base on the order of the one she already enjoys in Russia."

BOMB - Ali Hassani

"Stepanova’s fraught relationship with the tempting glut of the past takes this hybrid, unforgettable work far beyond the paradigm of the family memoir—just like memory itself, it exists in a state of limbo between the historical and the fantastical. In Memory of Memory is a stunning and ambitious reckoning with the fragility of memory, the Jewish imperative to remember, and the unbridgeable chasm separating us from our ancestors."

Poetry Foundation - Jennifer Wilson

"Russia’s greatest living poet.... Stepanova lays bare the fallibility of memory, mocking, as she does in her poetry, the idea that anything certain can be built atop a vision of the past."

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

"In Memory of Memory is a multi-faceted essay rooted in doubt on the nature of remembering."

Esther Kinsky

"Dazzling erudition and deep empathy come together in Maria Stepanova’s profound engagement with the power and potential of memory, the mother of all muses. An exploration of the vast field between reminiscence and remembrance, In Memory of Memory is a poetic appraisal of the ways the stories of others are the fabric of our history."

Ilya Kaminsky

"There is simply no book in contemporary Russian literature like In Memory of Memory. A microcosm all its own, it is an inimitable journey through a family history which, as the reader quickly realizes, becomes a much larger quest than yet another captivating family narrative. Why? Because it asks us if history can be examined at all, yes, but does so with incredible lyricism and fearlessness. Because Stepanova teaches us to find beauty where no one else sees it. Because Stepanova teaches us to show tenderness towards the tiny, awkward, missed details of our beautiful private lives. Because she shows us that in the end our hidden strangeness is what makes us human. This, I think, is what makes her a truly major European writer. I am especially grateful to Sasha Dugdale for her precise and flawless translation which makes this book such a joy to read in English. This is a voice to live with."

Best Books of 2021 - Artforum - Negar Azimi

"Aunt Galya is dead and has left a sea of bric-a-brac behind in her cave-like apartment. The objects are priceless or worthless, probably both: newspaper clippings, horoscopes, tchotchkes, postcards, photographs, diary entries…This heaping pile of life detritus, what it reveals and, maybe more crucially, what it obscures, is the point of departure for Maria Stepanova’s breathtaking zigzag meditation on memory."

LARB - Linda Kinstler

"Oblivion is a kind of storage facility for exhausted histories. Inside its walls, Stepanova acts as collector and critic, and makes her temporary home.... As the title suggests, In Memory of Memory might be read as a eulogy for our obsession with the past, one of those rare works that narrates its own disillusionment with its subject. Stepanova embraces memory in order to eventually free herself from its suffocating embrace."

From the Publisher

‘Stepanova’s tour de force blends memoir, literary criticism, essay and fiction. Although this is a personal and intimate work using photographs, postcards and diaries, it succeeds in mining a universal theme in contemporary Russian cultural life: how does a family – or a country – process the events of the past 100 years?’ 
— Viv Groskop, Guardian

‘A brilliant evocation of the last years of the Soviet Union, extending deep into the past. In a work that crosses the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction, Russian poet and journalist Stepanova recounts the lives of her ancestors, rural Russian Jews who, on moving to Moscow, could never quite go home again…. Apart from delivering a mine of family and national history, Stepanova exercises a well-honed sense of the apposite literary allusion (“The chimneys in the view from the window resembled flowerpots, Kafka said something similar about them”). Stretching from the days before Lenin took power to the “Doctor’s Plot” and the collapse of the USSR and beyond, Stepanova’s book is lyrical and philosophical throughout…. A remarkable work of the imagination – and, yes, memory.’
— Kirkus, starred review

‘This remarkable account of the author’s Russian-Jewish family expands into a reflection on the role of art and ethics in informing memory.… Stepanova is both sensitive and rigorous.’
— New Yorker

‘A luminous, rigorous, and mesmerizing interrogation of the relationship between personal history, family history, and capital-H History. I couldn’t put it down; it felt sort of like watching a hypnotic YouTube unboxing-video of the gift-and-burden that is the twentieth century. In Memory of Memory has that trick of feeling both completely original and already classic, and I confidently expect this translation to bring Maria Stepanova a rabid fan base on the order of the one she already enjoys in Russia.’
— Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot

‘There is simply no book in contemporary Russian literature like In Memory of Memory. A microcosm all its own, it is an inimitable journey through a family history which, as the reader quickly realizes, becomes a much larger quest than yet another captivating family narrative. Why? Because it asks us if history can be examined at all, yes, but does so with incredible lyricism and fearlessness. Because Stepanova teaches us to find beauty where no one else sees it. Because Stepanova teaches us to show tenderness towards the tiny, awkward, missed details of our beautiful private lives. Because she shows us that in the end our hidden strangeness is what makes us human. This, I think, is what makes her a truly major European writer. I am especially grateful to Sasha Dugdale for her precise and flawless translation which makes this book such a joy to read in English. This is a voice to live with.’
— Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

‘Dazzling erudition and deep empathy come together in Maria Stepanova’s profound engagement with the power and potential of memory, the mother of all muses. An exploration of the vast field between reminiscence and remembrance, In Memory of Memory is a poetic appraisal of the ways the stories of others are the fabric of our history.’
— Esther Kinsky, author of Grove

‘Extraordinary – a work of haunting power, grace and originality’
— Philippe Sands, author of East West Street

‘The poet Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory, beautifully translated by Sasha Dugdale, is a deeply intelligent quest for the significance of minutiae that survive while grand narratives of history sweep over them. It makes for powerful and magical reading, reminiscent of Nabokov’s Speak Memory. Time and again the sheer richness of the task sustains us and drives us on. This is a wholly marvellous book that extends our knowledge of all that is valued and lost.’
— George Szirtes, author of The Photographer at Sixteen

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2021-01-27
A brilliant evocation of the last years of the Soviet Union, extending deep into the past.

In a work that crosses the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction, Russian poet and journalist Stepanova recounts the lives of her ancestors, rural Russian Jews who, on moving to Moscow, could never quite go home again. She opens with Galya, an aunt whose relationship with her brother, Stepanova’s father, was strained: “There was an uneasiness between the families and a history of perceived snubs.” Galya nevertheless shared with her niece a constantly renovated series of collections, just this side of hoarding, as well as her favorite chocolates; on her death, a vast archive of notebooks, diaries, newspaper clippings, and other such documents that she had assembled to record “the oval shape of her life” and that remind Stepanova of “chain-link fencing” provide clues for Stepanova’s investigations. Alone in Moscow after her parents immigrate to Germany, she attempts to make sense of her family and their stories, some of which emerge from her aunt’s records, others from her own inquiries and travels. At the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., a curator attempts to shut her down, but she will have none of it: “One of those books where the author travels around the world in search of his or her roots—there are plenty of those now,” he says dismissively of her project. She answers, “Yes....And now there will be one more.” Apart from delivering a mine of family and national history, Stepanova exercises a well-honed sense of the apposite literary allusion (“The chimneys in the view from the window resembled flowerpots, Kafka said something similar about them”). Stretching from the days before Lenin took power to the “Doctor’s Plot” and the collapse of the USSR and beyond, Stepanova’s book is lyrical and philosophical throughout, as when she writes, toward the end, “Sometimes it seems like it is only possible to love the past if you know it is definitely never going to return.”

A remarkable work of the imagination—and, yes, memory.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940191511634
Publisher:	Book*hug Press
Publication date:	03/15/2022
Series:	Literature in Translation Series
Edition description:	Unabridged

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