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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | FICTION STEPANOVA | 31330009011879 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Carlisle - Gleason Public Library | F STEPANOVA/PB | 32117002061715 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Chelmsford Public Library | FIC/STEPANOVA | 31480011532386 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Hamilton-Wenham Public Library | FIC STEPANOVA | 30470001890846 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Ipswich Public Library | FIC STEPANOVA, MARIA | 32122002833717 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Lowell - Pollard Memorial Library | FIC STEPANOVA | 31481005564872 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Newburyport Public Library | FIC STEPANOVA M | 32128003900363 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
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 Dipping into various forms--essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents--Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. The unnamed narrator enters archives, travels to the cities where her great-grandparents and grandparents lived, and scrutinizes their personal possessions. Family letters, postcards, and government documents are quoted throughout, and Stepanova seamlessly references the work of prominent Russian cultural figures--such as poet Osip Mandlestam--to fill in gaps in the narrative on the anti-Semitism she assumes her family faced. Impressively, the book also serves as a critical examination of the narrator's attempt to construct a personal and cultural history, providing the reader a window into the narrator's worries over doing justice to her family's story: "Whether you like it or not, you are simply more visible than those who came before you," Stepanova writes. Over the course of her research, the narrator comes to terms with the fact that her efforts won't reveal the past to any great degree. While some of the critical digressions can feel gratuitous, such as a theoretically informed discussion of selfie photos, there are plenty of vivid anecdotes--like a great-grandmother who became a political prisoner in 1907. Stepanova's admirable cross-genre project will intrigue fans of erudite autofiction. (Feb.)
Guardian Review
Russian poet Maria Stepanova, born in 1972, came of age amid all the upheaval of the post-Soviet 90s, and the accompanying new challenges for writing. She has won important Russian and international literary awards, is editor-in-chief of online arts journal Colta.ru, and is now being published in English for the first time (she was in a Zephyr anthology in 2013). Bloodaxe has brought out a selection of poems, War of the Beasts and the Animals, translated by Sasha Dugdale. It will take a while for readers in the UK to learn how to take in these poems, crowded as they are with different voices and types, dense with allusions to Russian life and culture past and present, as well as to wider European literature and history. At first encounter they seem sensuous, haunted, significant, ambitious. Meanwhile Fitzcarraldo has published her prose memoir In Memory of Memory, which probably gives us as good a guide as any to the shapes and motifs of Stepanova's thought. She tells us that she's been trying to write this book of her family history for years, in some sense ever since she was an only child, growing up with parents and grandparents and, for a while, a great-grandmother, too, in an apartment in Moscow crowded with the leftover possessions of past generations: their books, teacups, newspapers, clothes, postcards, toys, photographs, as well as fragments of family anecdote. It's the same apartment where she begins typing the memoir we are reading. That child was smitten with a sense of responsibility in relation to all this memorabilia, and when she grows up it's as if, until she's written about it, she can't get beyond it into her adult present. There may be something particularly Russian in this anxiety: as though its 20th-century dead demand their reckoning with a special urgency, because the question of their lives had to be postponed, in all the surreal chaos of revolution and state violence and war. Not that the story of Stepanova's family encompasses the worst horrors. That's the surprise of it, and in a way the knot she needs to unpick: that these Jewish bourgeois doctors and engineers and intellectuals - perfectly positioned, you might think, for disaster - got away with a few near escapes, they were survivors. "Earlier in my life this gave me cause for some embarrassment, although the reason for this is hard to put into words and shameful to admit ¿ I felt bound to notice that my ancestors had made hardly any attempt to make themselves interesting ¿ None of them had fought or been repressed or executed." There's just one son of a great-great-aunt, who died in the siege of Leningrad and leaves behind his letters to his mother, poignant in their resolute cheerfulness. How are you though, Mother? How have you been? I beg you not to worry about me, there's nothing I need and I am doing well. I feel completely healthy. Partly, what Stepanova wants to do is to rescue the story of the lives of her family from a catastrophist narrative of Russian 20th-century history, and convey the ordinary daily continuity of their experience, their tangled, opaque whole lives. Her method is like a scrapbook, building family portraits tentatively from what fragments she has, filling in around them everything else that feels like part of their world and history - or absorbs her omnivorous interest, or crops up in her reading, or prompts her meditation. Although the book moves more or less chronologically through the family's story, punctuated by extracts from their letters, it isn't meant to offer conventional detective-satisfactions, uncovering hidden secrets and clarifying what had been obscure. Stepanova is more drawn to how the past resists being uncovered. Travelling to Saratov where her great-grandfather once lived, she works up a deep imaginative affinity with the "crooked walls" of his house, the strong smells of "plants and greenery", the "high windows", only to find out afterwards that it was the wrong house. In Pochinsky, where her great-grandmother Sarra grew up - a "shrunken husk" of a 19th-century town, three hours' drive from the nearest station - she can't find any trace of the family, nor even a Jewish cemetery. Sarra is the most colourful figure in her story, imprisoned in tsarist times, trained as a doctor in Paris, then treating Soviet children; yet Stepanova doesn't work at conjuring her actual presence, or bringing her to life like a character in a novel. Rescuing her family from the totalising narrative of history, she doesn't mean to reassure us of the past's solidity, or its continuity with ourselves. History pretends to make sense of the past in the present. What she wants to recover is rather the strangeness of what's past, and its lostness - to recover ordinary anguish at ordinary death, and at time's ordinary disappearing act. "The memory of what is lost, inconsolable, melancholy, keeping tally of those losses while knowing that nothing can be returned." Of course she can't ignore catastrophe, and it broods over the book, in meditations on the Leningrad siege, or passing references to famine, or to the purges (which came so close to her grandfather Nikolai, who had earned pitchfork scars in his youth, collecting taxes from the peasants to pay for the revolution). Or in fascinating pages on the quarrel between poets Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva - or on Walter Benjamin, or outsider artist Charlotte Salomon, all destroyed in the murderous convulsions of the mid-century. And the past is smeared, too, with its casual omnipresent antisemitism (shockingly, poet Aleksandr Blok on Mandelstam: "You gradually get used to him, the jewboy hides from view and you can see the artist"). The present too. When in 1995 Stepanova says farewell in a Moscow station to her parents emigrating to Germany, a man shouts at her: "Kill the yids and save Russia." "It's all too neat," she says, "but that's how it happened." Her book is not a protest exactly. Mere righteous indignation feels inadequate to the sheer scale of the wrong assembled here. Intentionally the memoir is meandering, digressive, cumulative, compendious - a mind moving around its wide world. Dugdale's translation appears heroic, to this reader with no Russian, in its sustained careful attentiveness. One section, for instance, is composed of descriptions of a succession of photographs, where only some of the subjects are identified; in another section Stepanova discusses at length the self-portraits of Rembrandt, in another Alexei Tolstoy's interest in the language of 17th-century confessions extracted under torture. I was becalmed sometimes in the sheer surplus of rumination and piling up of detail, and among so many different family members who remain foggily just out of imaginative reach. To my taste, at 500 pages the book is quite a lot too long. Prose has its hidden inward logic of limitation, just as poetry does; she says too much, too many times, there's too much clever explication, there are too many words. On Rembrandt for instance: "The portrait with its fist of meanings, an embodied demand for attention, a place in the sun, tries to break open your head like a door, to enter in and make itself at home. It has the intensity of a message in a bottle, a voicemail - a letter which will sooner or later become the very last letter." Half as much would have had twice the energy. She can't let even the smallest perception go: like her aunt Galya hoarding notebooks and diaries, thermal vests and leggings, brooches, a complete set of Chekhov. But in the end the excess is less important than the fact that so much of what Stepanova has saved for us is remarkable and rich with meaning.
Kirkus Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.