At the end of it all, In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova feels like watching a kaleidoscope of images, which sometimes come together to form a larger image and sometimes remain scattered. The colors and patterns are lovely but ever-changing. In many ways, I suppose that is the intent. As a reader, the individual images are beautiful, but I am left wanting a context and an understanding to put those images into context.

Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2021/07/in-memory-of-memory.html

Reviewed for NetGalley.

This was not an easy book to start off on. But I did find it intriguing. I will certainly by a copy so that I can pick it up again in the future.

This novel is likely to be my favorite novel of 2021. It’s so richly present in the world. It’s so full of beauty and humanity. In its discursive style and its attention to lived history it reminds me of Sebald’s AUSTERLITZ but the narrative voice here is warmer. It’s the kind of writing that makes you sit up and pay attention, not only to the story, but also to this life you’re leading. To notice things in a new way. To wonder. It’s the kind of writing that makes you understand that the ordinary is, in fact, extraordinary. I’m very happy to have read this book.

In Memory Of Memory is very complex and when I finished, I could not stop thinking about the topics presented. It was very interesting! I found I could not connect to the book fully, I didn't feel any emotions toward what was happening. I think If there had been a better connection with the narrator to immerse myself in the book it would overall make me enjoy the book more.

Maria Stepanova had always been fascinated by family artefacts — the photos, diaries, letters, and postcards that recorded the lives of this family of Russian Jews who, for the most part, traversed the perilous twentieth century unscathed — and from a very young age, she always knew that when she was old enough, when she had enough life experience and context, she would write about these people known only through sepia-toned images and faded fountain-penned lines. When her aunt passed away, removing one more source of family knowledge, Stepanova — by now a celebrated poet, essayist, and editor in her native Russia — decided it was time to finally pull together everything she knew (family stories overlaid with what is recorded of the times through various art forms), and In Memory of Memory is the result. This is a fairly dense read: the stories, transcribed correspondence, Stepanova’s travels and what she relates about twentieth century art and letters is all fascinating reading, and underpinned with philosophical writing about what can actually be captured about history and memory, this is something more than memoir; certainly something more than one family’s history, and I found the whole to be an education and a starting point for deeper contemplation.

When my dad passed away in 2019, my sister, my mother, and I spent hours going through family photographs. We scanned a lot of them to share online with relatives. Others—the best ones, the ones that really captured who my dad was—were put on a memory board for the memorial service. The year before, in 2018, when my last surviving grandparent died, my mother and I traveled to Wisconsin to do something similar with the Latsch family photos. Both times, I quizzed my mother endlessly about who all these people were, what they were doing, what else she remembered about them. Sometimes she could answer and I got great stories about how my uncle annoyed my mother by playing “Cat Scratch Fever” on a loop or about driving the family Cadillac out onto the frozen lake or how my parents managed to meet each other in Rome, of all places. I’m still saddened by the loss of all the stories that went with my dad and my grandmother that we never managed to record. Maria Stepanova has some of the same feelings and questions as she goes through her sprawling family’s archive and belongings, recounted in In Memory of Memory (solidly translated by Sasha Dugdale), but Stepanova is far more intellectual than I’ve been in my thinking about family memories and trying to recreate lost pasts.

I think I would have appreciated In Memory of Memory a lot more if I had been better able to follow Stepanova’s jumble of thoughts. Like her aunt’s apartment in Moscow, everything reminds Stepanova of something else. Thinking about a family meal sends her off to think about Proust, which sends her to thinking about her male forbears’ experiences during World War II. Thinking about faded photographs leads Stepanova to think about high photographic art, which turns into a Salvador Dalí anecdote. There are many chapters that I just skimmed because I couldn’t make myself interested in meandering streams of consciousness about how we memorialize the dead or who owns the past.

The parts of this book that I enjoyed best are the parts where Stepanova actually talks about her family and when she shares what she’s learned about the past to recreate their milieux. Although she claims that her family is very uninteresting, I would rebut that my Latsch relatives are far more boring because they weren’t at least adjacent to big events in history the way the Stepanova’s ancestors were. Her family might not have experienced the lowest lows or highest highs of twentieth century Russian and Soviet history, but at least she had a great-grandmother who was arrested for distributing socialist leaflets in the first Bolshevik rebellions and a great-great-grandfather who lost his factory to the Communists only to have his name later given to a de-Soviet-ified street in Odessa. My ancestors from Germany sat out the Civil War in Canada, then came down to Wisconsin to farm. The episodes Stepanova relates and the letters she shares in In Memory of Memory are among the most detailed, most real expressions of actual life in the Soviet Union that I’ve ever read, even if they are fragmentary.

Readers who can appreciate Stepanova’s references to and musings about literature and art are probably the mostly likely to enjoy all of this book. Readers who want a big family history should look elsewhere for a less frustrating, more focused read. I was definitely in the latter group and, although I hate to fault a book for not being what I wanted it to be, I really wish that Stepanova would have realized that her prose would have been more effective by letting her actual journey through the family archive and her family tell their story. By intellectualizing so much, any subtext that I might have worked out for myself was obliterated by all the thousands of things Stepanova wanted to think about instead.

Definitely the best read of 2020. This book is going onto my favorites shelf and I'm looking forward to finding more books by this author that have been translated to English.

We have here a definitive exploration of memory. Stepanova uses the research, artifacts, and stories of four generations of her own family history as the lattice on which to assemble a narrative on what memory is, the purpose memories of past people, past events serve to those of us still living. The exploration is both broadly cultural and narrowly individual. Overall In Memory of Memory reads very much like a historiography. There are close readings of poems, detailed descriptions of photos, even of short films, essayistic reflections on books. All of these mediums serve not only the consumers at the time the artist originated the work, they remain for us generation after generation, a sort of cultural memory, but also personal and meaningful. All of this examination is done in gorgeous prose, the beauty the result of Stepanova herself and a brilliantly able translator in Sasha Dugdale.

Part of the strength of this book is the result of the author's own place in history. She is part of the generation of those of us who experienced an analog childhood and digital adulthood. Likewise, her childhood passed in Soviet Russia and the cold war of east-west relations while her adulthood commenced at the dissolution of the USSR. The perspective makes this examination of memory, of how we memorialize, of how the dead are remembered, of how the present is recorded and immediately becomes the past particularly compelling.

I was not familiar with Joseph Cornell's shadow boxes prior to reading this book. From Stepanova's descriptions, I would say In Memory of Memory is a literary collection of the objects of memory, preserved for us not under a glass pane for our thoughtful consideration, but instead preserved between two bookboards (or on an e-reader.) I read this as an ARC electronically and look forward to purchasing a physical copy for my shelves.