In Memory of Memory

Montpellier, 1908: the photograph of a young woman by an easel or »Grandma on the barricades«, as the family calls it. Pre-Revolution portraits, postcards from Venice, Montpellier, or Nizhny Novgorod, pieces from the »library of a very different and lost visual culture«, letters, childhood souvenirs – these are the things that the author examines in astonishment. Who were these people who travelled all throughout Europe yet lived in Russia? Who did their best to remain anonymous and who made little effort to make history seem interesting?

But it is precisely the unspectacular nature of the find which turns the author’s research in the Russian context into something new: »Everyone else had a family made up of people participating in history; mine was made up only of their tenants.« Destined to become victims of persecution and repression, they all still managed to survive the 20th century. How was that possible? This is the question and point of departure for Maria Stepanova’s first great work of prose.

In dialogue with, among others, writers like Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Jacques Rancière, and Susan Sontag, imbued with a passion for thought and a wonderfully soft, poetic voice derived from sensual as well as intellectual observations, Stepanova assembles her found pieces into a panorama of an entire age. At its heart lives a large family of doctors, architects, librarians, accountants, and engineers, unheroic individuals who did not attach themselves to any great project but who in uncivilized, violent times attempted to live quiet, civilized lives.

»Russia’s next great writer« The Guardian

»In Memory of Memory is the most important Russian novel of 2017.« GQ
 

»[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.« John Williams, The New York Times

»A beautiful meditation on the birth and becoming of memory … the strength of this book [is] based on a masterfully maintained tension between concrete and abstract, word and image, past and present. An existential quest. A monument to memory.« Elena Balzamo, Le Monde des Livres

»In the way she intermingles Russian and European musings on memory, gliding seamlessly between countries and continents, Stepanova helps heal the ruptures between Russian culture and the world’s. In the 19th century, the Russian novel was an integral part of Western literature. During the USSR Russian culture gradually went into exile, eventually emigrating entirely. Life and Fate and Dr Zhivago are perhaps the last great ›European‹ Russian novels. [...] Stepanova marks Russian literature’s return home – that is, to Europe.« Peter Pomerantsev, The Spectator

»Stepanova’s companionable prose balances high seriousness with self-ironizing deadpan humour. Without pretension, she erects her house of memory in the neighbourhood of Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov and Sebald.« Rachel Polonsky, TLS

»In Memory of Memory is an astounding collision of personal and cultural history [...]. It is a remarkable work from a writer who has won Russia’s most prestigious honours (including the Big Book award for In Memory of Memory, the NOS literary prize, the Andrei Bely prize and a Joseph Brodsky fellowship); a writer who will likely be spoken about in the same breath as Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk and Belarus’s Svetlana Alexievich in years to come.« Matthew Janney, The Guardian

»Stepanova’s family history is a dazzling reflection on forms of remembering.« Miriam Dobson, London Review of Books

»This remarkable account of the author's Russian-Jewish family expands into a reflection on the role of art and ethics in informing memory.« The New Yorker

»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.‹« Los Angeles Review of Books

»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, The Guardian

»A remarkable work of the imagination – and, yes, memory.« Kirkus, Starred Review

»You can sense the decades of contemplation Ms. Stepanova has dedicated to these questions in the sparkle and density of her prose [...]. This is an erudite, challenging book, but also fundamentally a humble one, as it recognizes that a force works on even the most cherished family possessions that no amount of devotion can gainsay.« Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

»[Stepanova] resists the disinterment of past pain for our consumption. In Memory of Memory is instead a chronicle of quiet survivals of the ›common fate‹, and this too is a stand against the horrors of the age.« Stephanie Sy-Quia, Financial Times

»Maria Stepanova’s sweeping meta-memoir [...] pieces together a picture of life in Soviet Russia... More than just a family and cultural history, Stepanova’s meditations on the nature of memory place themselves on a continuum of Proust, Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1951) and the work of W.G. Sebald.« Mia Levitin, Irish Times

»A genre-bending book: partly the story of the author’s Russian, Jewish family; partly about the author’s longstanding desire to turn her family into a story. Along the way, it delves into aesthetic history to scrutinize what we in the present ask of the past.« The Globe and Mail, The Globe 100: The books we loved in 2021

»In Memory of Memory features a stunningly ornate structure and a rigorous handling of the past, making for a thoroughly unique look at a thoroughly unique family. Throughout the book, Stepanova’s own words are in dialogue with both other literary works and with her family’s history; that she pulls it off is an impressive feat.« Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders

»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.« Audrey Wollen, Bookforum

»A genre-defying masterwork of memoir and cultural criticism [...]. What begins as an exploration of the Moscow poet’s Jewish-Russian ancestry becomes a sprawling reflection on the presence of the past in modern life – a book, she explains, about ›the way memory works, and what memory wants from me‹. Whether reading family diaries, visiting cemeteries, cycling around Berlin instead of writing (très relatable) or pondering selfie sticks and porcelain, Stepanova is an erudite and fascinating guide.« Alexander Wells, Exberliner

»The book’s major achievement is that it destroys the compartmentalisation of the past into neat eras and pat narrative lessons. In the lines and voids between the visual and the aural, the documented and the imagined, lie the contradictions inherent in our present. In Memory of Memory creates a record that negates despair. If not exactly healing, this record comes with a healthy dose of hope.« Roger Pulvers, Canberra Times

»An astounding collision of personal and cultural history…« Matt Janney, The Guardian

»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… [an] admirable cross-genre project will intrigue fans of erudite autofiction.« Publishers Weekly

»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.« Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

»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. [...] 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 [...] 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

»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« Andrew McMillan, author of Playtime

»From essay to fiction, memoir to travelogue, and historical documents, Maria Stepanova deftly employs a unique patchwork of literary forms to assemble the story of one seemingly ordinary Jewish family and their survival through the last century.« All Lit Up, Canada

»Maria Stepanova is one of Russia’s most influential cultural figures« The Moscow Times, Russia

»Stepanova questions with finesse the role of memory as well as its deviations, sometimes harmless, sometimes harmful when they emerge as a cult of the past.« Laetitia Strauch-Bonart, L’Express, France

»[Stepanova’s] family story is one of commanding intelligence and breathtaking erudition.« Didier Jacob, L’Obs, France, starred review

»A true literary phenomenon, this melancholic chronicle of a century of Russian history, seen through the prism of the own family past […] [this is] magnificent literary vagrancy, in which we meet, in turn, Pushkin, Boris Pasternak, or the great Russian poet, Ossip Mandelstam, author of The Noise of Time; Maria Stepanova’s novel has the semblance of a documentary, an essay between fiction and non-fiction. It wants to follow in the footsteps of the great German writer W.G. Sebald, whose entire oeuvre oscillates between autobiography, biographies and true fiction...« Pierre de Gasquet, Les Echos Week-End, France

Discovery in Foreign Literature (rentrée littéraire) — Transfuge, France

»This review can but come close to doing justice to In Memory of Memory. The six stars [given here] seem like a measly sprinkle of light in a vast firmament.« Jyllands-Posten, Denmark, 6-star review

»With its ingenious style In Memory of Memory is a book that comes at the right time« Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Switzerland

»In Memory of Memory is a multi-faceted, doubt-based essay on the nature of remembering.« Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany

»In Memory of Memory is the invitation to accompany Maria Stepanova on her way through the land of the dead back to the present day. No more and no less.« Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany

»Profound philanthropy and an outstanding perspicaciousness shape this book, which offers greatest instruction and greatest pleasure. All the while, it is the exceedingly lively, sensuous language that keeps together the centrifugal forces of the book. The poet in Stepanova finds metaphors and symbolic objects of poetic ease and intellectual elegance. Not least of all, however, she prevents humour from falling prey to a blind cult of the past.« Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Switzerland

»In Memory of Memory is so much more than a novel: it is a poetically concentrated, unexaggeratedly formulated reflexion on the terms of the possibility, today, to affirm one’s own familial history, especially from a Russian-Jewish perspective.« NDR, Germany

»[Stepanova writes in] a fragmentary, self-critically reflective and at the same time heavily poetic language.« Berliner Zeitung, Germany

»The book is a direct and at the same time deeply moving account that reveals the author’s personal experience of having the weight of the dead and their remembrance on her shoulders in the midst of the disruptive entanglements of greater history. Oh, what a book. Read it.« Expressen, Sweden

»It seems as though Stepanova was shaking a kaleidoscope to get a coherent image, only to shake it again […]. A unique combination of earnestness, precise language and uninhibited tenderness.« Svenska Dagbladet, Sweden

»Her novel is a sequence of journeys without end or aim, I am captivated by them and sad about the fact that the book itself came to an end.« Dagens Nyheter, Sweden

»It’s been a long time since I have read such a rich, generous book. At once whirling and lucid, strict and delicate, funny and moving. In Memory of Memory is nothing less than a tender masterwork of beauty and intelligence.« Sydsvenska Dagbladet, Sweden

»In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova is far and wide the best book written in Russian in 2017. Stepanova writes in a Russian like no one else.« Afisha, Russia

»In Memory of Memory is the most important Russian novel of 2017. An extremely personal crime story in which the interpretation of the past reveals itself to be part of another, more political plot: how we can come to terms with ourselves in the present.« GQ, Russia

»Maria Stepanova has turned the dead into her co-authors. The result is a book that was unknown in Russian before – and seeks more of its kind in other languages.« Novaya Gazeta, Russia

»Not only the most important book of the year, but of recent years in general. This is true event - for all those who still know how to read.« Echo Moskvy, Russia

»A meta novel like this appears only once every ten years - a great literary reconstruction, which has created a whole new genre and sounds the relation between memory, time, and history.« Literratura, Russia

»Sometimes lucid, sometimes sought enigmatic, but always poetic and full of well-read references to international and Russian art and literature history with well-known and less well-known names such as Nabokov, Sontag, Hirsch, Celan, Borges, Barthes, Achmatova, Pasternak, Sebald, Mandelstam, Gogol and so on and so forth.« Marijke Laurense, Trouw, Netherlands

»One of the most important texts written in Russian in recent years. Stepanova's book gives grounds for claiming the triumphant return of Russian literature to the world literary scene.« Lev Oborin (Russian poet, critic and translator)