In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale

An exciting contemporary Russian writer explores terra incognita: the still-living margins of history.

Following the death of her aunt, the narrator of In Memory of Memory 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 Dipping into various forms—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents—Maria Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities, offering an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.

Praise for In Memory of Memory

“A luminous, rigorous, and mesmerizing interrogation of the relationship between personal history, family history, and capital-H History. I couldn’t put it down; it felt sort of like watching a hypnotic YouTube unboxing-video of the gift-and-burden that is the twentieth century. In Memory of Memory has that trick of feeling both completely original and already classic, and I confidently expect this translation to bring Maria Stepanova a rabid American fan base on the order of the one she already enjoys in Russia.” —Elif Batuman, Pulitzer Prize–nominated author of The Idiot and Either/Or

“There is simply no book in contemporary Russian literature like In Memory of Memory. A microcosm all its own, it is an inimitable journey through a family history which, as the reader quickly realizes, becomes a much larger quest than yet another captivating family narrative. Why? Because it asks us if history can be examined at all, yes, but does so with incredible lyricism and fearlessness. Because Stepanova teaches us to find beauty where no one else sees it. Because Stepanova teaches us to show tenderness towards the tiny, awkward, missed details of our beautiful private lives. Because she shows us that in the end our hidden strangeness is what makes us human. This, I think, is what makes her a truly major European writer. I am especially grateful to Sasha Dugdale for her precise and flawless translation which makes this book such a joy to read in English. This is a voice to live with.” —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

“Extraordinary—a work of haunting power, grace and originality.” —Philippe Sands, author of East West Street

“A book to plunge into. ‘Everyone else’s ancestors had taken part in history’ writes Stepanova; building itself via accumulation, these chapters become an important testimony to the cultural and political lives of the people held beneath the surface of the tides of history” —Andrew McMillan, author of Playtime

“Dazzling erudition and deep empathy come together in Maria Stepanova’s profound engagement with the power and potential of memory, the mother of all muses. An exploration of the vast field between reminiscence and remembrance, In Memory of Memory is a poetic appraisal of the ways the stories of others are the fabric of our history.” —Esther Kinsky, author of Grove

“Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory, beautifully translated by Sasha Dugdale, is a deeply intelligent quest for the significance of minutiae that survive while grand narratives of history sweep over them. It makes for powerful and magical reading, reminiscent of Nabokov’s Speak Memory. Time and again the sheer richness of the task sustains us and drives us on. This is a wholly marvelous book that extends our knowledge of all that is valued and lost.” —George Szirtes, author of The Photographer at Sixteen

2021 International Booker Prize Jury Citation

“An unclassifiable, sui generis book that begins with what you think is going to be a family history, then opens up, in slow degrees, to allow seemingly the whole world to enter. In its seamless fusion of history, memory, essay, meditation, literary criticism it creates its own indelible form, a new shape in the air. An act of truth-telling like no other.”

Press Coverage

‘Someone Else’s Diary’: Read an excerpt from In Memory of Memory —Paris Review

“An astounding collision of personal and cultural history.” —Guardian

“A daring combination of family history and roving cultural analysis. . . . A kaleidoscopic, time-shuffling look at one family of Russian Jews throughout a fiercely eventful century.” —New York Times

“This remarkable account of the author’s Russian-Jewish family expands into a reflection on the role of art and ethics in informing memory.” —New Yorker

“A remarkable work of the imagination—and, yes, memory.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred 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.” —Publishers Weekly

“A rich, digressive, deeply introspective work… An erudite, challenging book, but also fundamentally a humble one, as it recognizes that a force works on even the most cherished family possessions that no amount of devotion can gainsay.” —Wall Street Journal

“In Memory of Memory is a stunning and ambitious reckoning with the fragility of memory, the Jewish imperative to remember, and the unbridgeable chasm separating us from our ancestors.” —BOMB Magazine

Five Noteworthy New Books in Translation —All Lit Up

“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.” —Guardian

Read an excerpt from In Memory of Memory —Toronto Star

The Booker Prize Interview: Maria Stepanova and Sasha Dugdale interview on In Memory of Memory —The Booker Prizes blog

Poet Maria Stepanova on Memory and Russia’s “Schizoid Present” —Los Angeles Review of Books

The 2021 International Booker Prize shortlist —The Booker Prize blog

In Conversation with Maria Stepanova: In Memory of Memory —CBC Radio’s Saskatchewan Weekend

“Some books are like museums. They offer an architecture but let you wander. Chapters, like gallery rooms, are adjacent and suggestive of order, but they read like a series of collections. In Memory of Memory is such a book, a repository of cultural artefacts, curated so that you will ask: how does memory inhabit these objects?” —New Statesman

“Stepanova marks Russian literature’s return home.” —Spectator

How a Jewish family survived the persecutions of a chaotic century of Russian history: An Interview with Maria Stepanova and Sasha Dugdale —BBC Sounds

Shake it out: How Maria Stepanova arranges fragments so the dead can live —Times Literary Supplement

Ghosts of Borodino: A Poet’s Battle Against Russian Nationalism —Harper’s Magazine

“Each chapter of In Memory of Memory carves a unique vantage point out of the stagnant cultural narratives of memory, offering unique situations that shake up the common assumptions about memory. Specifically, how stagnant it is, or as Aristotle suggested, its role as the scribe of our souls.” —White Wall Review

Six recommendations to mark Women in Translation Month —Globe and Mail

“Stepanova’s family history is a dazzling reflection on forms of remembering.” —London Review of Books

The Globe 100: The Books We Loved in 2021 —Globe and Mail

“Stepanova draws on a vast knowledge of writing, art, and historical events to create a book whose form mimics memory itself. It is the embodiment of memory as artifact—evoking memory’s non-linear malleability, its gaps, truths and untruths, its knowing and unknowing.” —Herizons

World Literature Today’s 75—Make That 100—Notable Translations of 2021 —World Literature Today

MARIA STEPANOVA is an award-winning poet, novelist, essayist, and journalist, and the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays. Her poetry books Holy Winter 20/21 and War of the Beasts and the Animals, both translated by Sasha Dugdale, were Poetry Book Society Translation Choices and English PEN Translates winners. War of the Beasts and the Animals was also shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Her novel In Memory of Memory won Russia’s Big Book Award in 2018. In 2021, it was published in English, translated by Sasha Dugdale, and nominated for many prizes, including the International Booker Prize, the Dublin Literary Award, the National Book Award for Translated Literature, and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. In 2023, Stepanova was awarded the Berman Literature Prize for In Memory of Memory. She has also received many other international literary awards, including the prestigious Andrey Bely Prize and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship, and the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding 2023 for the poetry collection Mädchen ohne Kleider (Girls Without Clothes). Stepanova founded and was Editor-in-Chief of the online independent crowd-sourced journal Colta.ru, which engaged with the cultural, social, and political reality of contemporary Russia until the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, when all dissenting media in Russia were forced to shut down. As a prominent critic of Putin’s regime, she had to leave Russia and is now living in exile in Germany.

SASHA DUGDALE is a poet and translator. Her sixth book of poetry, The Strongbox, was published by Carcanet in 2024. Deformations (2020) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Derek Walcott Prizes. Her long poem “Joy” won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem of 2016. Dugdale’s translation of Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory was a finalist for the International Booker Prize and won the MLA Lois Roth Award. She has translated two of Stepanova’s poetry collections, including Holy Winter 20/21 and War of the Beasts and the Animals, as well as work by several other Russian-language women poets, including Elena Shvarts and Marina Tsvetaeva. For many years, Dugdale specialized in translating Russian-language new writing for theatres in the UK and the US, including the New York Public Theatre and the UK’s Royal Court Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company.