In Memory of Memory
ABOUT
THE BOOK
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 Dipping into various forms – essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue and historical documents – Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.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 TRANSLATOR Sasha
Dugdale
NOMINATING LIBRARY 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