When her elderly aunt Galia died, Maria Stepanova had to empty her little apartment in Moscow, a veritable mausoleum of clutter, dedicated to passing time and the useless. A two and a half filled to the brim with stacks of yellowed newspapers, collections of magazines and columns of press clippings, where there was only a “little slumped sofa” to sit on, under the gaze of ” desiccated carcasses” of televisions placed in the corners.
She left with real loot: a series of diaries covered with feverish notes, a sort of daily chronicle covering several years. Two large bags filled with lists of seemingly unimportant events: wake-up and bed times, TV show titles, phone calls, menus. Everything that filled his days.
And nothing else. “Not a word about what this life was like, not a word about herself and the others, only fragmented and meticulous information, which, with the precision of a chronicler, fixed the course of time. Like the second hand of a clock leaving traces.
But it was the spark she lacked, she says, to start the book around which she had been turning for 30 years without being able to write it, fascinated for a long time by family artefacts and family trees.
In memory of memory, the resulting composite book, is a kind of docufiction that mixes eras, sources and genres. Coming from a Jewish family, educated people without having been part of the intelligentsia, there are no fighters or victims of repressions, no celebrities either. Doctors, engineers and architects, simple “extras of History”.
In her own way, rummaging through cupboards and bags, making correspondence and old photographs speak, Maria Stepanova digs into what appears to her to be the very impossibility of memory. “The legacy of the century, with its wheel of changes, ruptures and other violence perpetrated against reality, ultimately came down to the reconstruction of the past, the transformation of it into a theme park on whose lawns a visitor from the future is able to stroll. This remains particularly true today in Russia, it must be said, where the relationship to the past, even recent, is still far from being healthy, even peaceful.
A sensitive and scholarly book at the same time, full of crossroads, where we see Roland Barthes, Charlotte Salomon and Susan Sontag, Vladimir Nabokov, Ossip Mandelstam and WG Sebald pass by
Born in 1972 in Moscow, Maria Stepanova, who is also a recognized poet in Russia, was a journalist, publisher, founder and editor-in-chief of an online cultural journal — Colta.ru, closed in March 2022 by the Russian authorities. She emigrated, despite herself, a few months ago to Berlin. His book, published in 2017 in Russia, today takes on new and disturbing resonances.
A sensitive and scholarly book at the same time, full of crossroads, where we see Roland Barthes, Charlotte Salomon and Susan Sontag, Vladimir Nabokov (author of a Speak, Memory), Osip Mandelstam and WG Sebald.
Like Maria Stepanova’s aunt’s apartment, In memorymemory is a dense and fascinating bric-a-brac – and sometimes also a little static – which, through the prism of its own family history, unfolds before our eyes a century of intimate and discreet Russian history.