In Memory of Memory – Maria Stepanova (2017)

Translated from Russian by Sasha Dugdale

In Memory of Memory is a book that has been reviewed brilliantly by so many other bloggers, that if I am honest, I haven’t really been looking forward to trying to write about it. It is a book that is difficult to categorise, I have generally seen it described as autofiction –though it was published by Fitzcarraldo with a white cover, signifying non-fiction, but shortlisted for the International Booker Prize which is for fiction. So, I was a bit confused before I even opened it. Perhaps an exact categorisation doesn’t much matter, because what ever way you categorise this book, it is a remarkable achievement. A complex work which combines, memoir, essay, fiction, history, and travel to slowly reveal the story of a family and the Europe in which they lived and died along with an exploration of culture and memory. It is a fascinating and thoroughly immersive work, not a quick or easy read but one I am glad I tackled for this year’s #Witmonth.

When the author Maria Stepanova’s aunt dies, she is left with an apartment full of ephemera to sort through. Letters, postcards, souvenirs alongside the more personal things like diaries and photographs. Together these represent a century of life in Russia – a century during which the world changed and changed again. Carefully, over time Stepanova begins to piece together the story of this fairly ordinary Jewish family, who – despite the odds, the numerous persecutions, wars, and hardships – managed to survive.

“…that’s why I love photographs that need no interlocutor and have no desire to engage with me. They are in their own way, rehearsals for non-existence, for life without us, for the time when the room is no longer ours to enter.”

I think I have a similar feeling for photographs – well old photographs at least – Instagram has rather changed our relationship with photographs now I think. In fact, Stepanova discusses this very thing – the modern cult of the Selfie as she examines Rembrandt’s self-portraits. There are many fascinating cultural, literary, and artistic references and portraits throughout this book, setting the times of her family in yet another context. All families have those piles or albums of old photographs which when got out spark a memory or a long forgotten story. Those stories weave together to make a complete and complex picture of life – and this book does something very like that.

These stories are elusive, fragmentary and Stepanova has to fill in some gaps for us – this in no way a linear biography of a family, there is much more going on here than that. In order to fill in those gaps she travels around Russia, she goes to the places her family once lived she sees and experiences these places and shares them with us. Maria Stepanova had wanted to write a book about her family since childhood, so in a sense this is a quest for herself an intelligent, loving and ever curious examination of the past. She discusses the very nature of memory, how our memory can’t always be entirely relied upon.

As readers we are left with the memory of a host of vibrant personalities. Too many to write about here – but for me, two women emerged from the shadows of the past – and their stories held me fast. The first was Charlotte Salomon an artist, who I hadn’t heard of previously. She died in Auschwitz. Though Stepanova wants us to see her as much more than another victim of horror. Salomon wasn’t a member of Stepanova’s family, she is one among many artists and writers like Sebald, Susan Sontag, Barthes and even Dickens who come find their way into the pages of this book. The Second of those women was Stepanova’s Great-grandmother Sarra Ginzburg, a doctor who had studied in Paris but returned to the Soviet Union to practise.

“The ability to skip large chunks of time might be useful in the writing of novels, but it starts to frighten me when I realize I am doing it in life, and with real living people – that is, with dead people, of course, although there isn’t really any difference. Great-grandmother Sarra’s youth before Lyolya was born feels like the beginning. Everything is ahead of her, anything could happen. After 1916 time begins folding itself up, tightening into the felt roll of collective fate. A hundred years later I began following in her footsteps, visiting her St. Petersburg addresses, buildings with rebuilt facades, missing apartments and whole missing wings, in poor areas of the city, lit by the setting sun and inhabited by flocks of Sunday soldiers. It always seemed that if I took just another turn to the right, then that would be enough, I could transform her life, restore it, make it fit to be seen again.” 

Of course, it isn’t just the women who have extraordinary stories to tell. One especially memorable one that of Leonid Gimmelfarb, Stepanova’s grandfather’s nineteen year old cousin, who was fighting in the marshes and forests near Leningrad during the siege. He wrote regularly to his mother, and his letters are poignant though often matter of fact, he asks often after the family he has left behind.

The book as I said already isn’t structured in any linear way, Stepanova organises her book around various ideas or particular people. Interspersed with these chapters are short sections called ‘not-a- chapter’ in which through letter extracts we hear from some of these people themselves. The whole becomes a wonderfully personal work, as well as a thoroughly immersive one. Stepanova’s prose is absolutely gorgeous, I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that she is a poet.

On a personal level while I enjoyed this book very much, I was probably a little less wowed by it than many others. There is a huge amount to admire in this book, the writing is glorious and I found I was learning about so many fascinating people. However, the fragmentary nature of it took me a while to settle into, and for a while I kept getting people mixed up. Overall, though it is an extraordinary piece of writing and I am very glad I have read it.