Translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale
2022 Longlist
With the death of her aunt, Maria Stepanova 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 Dipping into various forms – essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue and historical documents – Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.
About the Author/Translator
Maria Stepanova is a poet, essayist, journalist and the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays. She has received several Russian and international literary awards (including the prestigious Andrey Bely Prize and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship). In Memory of Memory won Russia’s Bolshaya Kniga Award in 2018. Stepanova is the founder and editor-in-chief of the online independent crowd-sourced journal Colta.ru.
Sasha Dugdale is a poet, translator and editor. She is currently working on translations of Maria Stepanova’s poems for Bloodaxe, and her prose for Fitzcarraldo. Sasha is former editor of Modern Poetry in Translation.
Librarian’s Comments
“This book is being translated into 15 languages. The German translation received the “”Bridges Prize”” in 2020. Berlin (German: Brücke Berlin) as the best translated book of the year.
In 2021, “”Memory of Memory”” was included in the “”short list”” of the International Booker Prize. Book by the one of Russia’s most exciting contemporary writers. The most praised by eminent critics. This international trend for “”books when the author travels around the world in search of his own roots”” Reviewers noted the novelty of this approach for Russian literature, which traditionally tends not to non-fiction, but to plot novel structures.” All Russia State Library for Foreign Literature, Russia