Poet, novelist, essayist, and journalist, Maria Stepanova is the
author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays. Her
poetry collections Holy Winter 20/21 and War of the Beasts and the
Animals were Poetry Book Society Translation Choices and winners of
PEN Translates awards, and War of the Beasts and the Animals was
also shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation
2021. Her novel In Memory of Memory won Russia's Big Book Award in
2018 and was published in English in Sasha Dugdale's translation.
She was awarded the Berman Literature Prize for In Memory of
Memory, and was also shortlisted for the International Booker
Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and the James
Tait Black Prize for Biography.
Maria Stepanova has received several Russian and international
literary awards (including the prestigious Andrey Bely Prize and
Joseph Brodsky Fellowship). In 2022 she was awarded the Leipzig
Book Prize for European Understanding 2023 for a book of poetry,
Mädchen ohne Kleider (Girls Without Clothes). She 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.
Sasha Dugdale is a poet and translator. Her sixth book of poetry
is The Strongbox, published by Carcanet (UK) 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 prose work In
Memory of Memory was shortlisted for the International Booker
and won the MLA Lois Roth Award. She has translated two of
Stepanova’s poetry collections and work by a number of
Russian-language women poets, including Elena Shvarts and Marina
Tsvetaeva. For many years she specialized in translating
Russian-language new writing for theaters in the UK and US,
including the New York Public Theater and the UK’s Royal Court
Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company.
"In Memory of Memory is a multi-faceted essay rooted in doubt
on the nature of remembering."
*Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung*
"A brilliant evocation of the last years of the Soviet Union,
extending deep into the past....A remarkable work of the
imagination."
*Kirkus (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...[an] admirable cross-genre project will intrigue fans of
erudite autofiction."
*Publishers Weekly*
"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."
*John Williams - The New York Times*
"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*
"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*
"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*
"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*
"Stepanova has given new life to the skaz technique of
telling a story through the scrambled speech of an unreliable
narrator, using manic wordplay and what one critic called ‘a
carnival of images.’"
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
"Stepanova’s fraught relationship with the tempting glut of the
past takes this hybrid, unforgettable work far beyond the paradigm
of the family memoir—just like memory itself, it exists in a state
of limbo between the historical and the fantastical. 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."
*Ali Hassani - BOMB*
"Russia’s greatest living poet.... Stepanova lays bare the
fallibility of memory, mocking, as she does in her poetry, the idea
that anything certain can be built atop a vision of the past."
*Jennifer Wilson - Poetry Foundation*
"Oblivion is a kind of storage facility for exhausted histories.
Inside its walls, Stepanova acts as collector and critic, and makes
her temporary home.... As the title suggests, In Memory of Memory
might be read as a eulogy for our obsession with the past, one of
those rare works that narrates its own disillusionment with its
subject. Stepanova embraces memory in order to eventually free
herself from its suffocating embrace."
*Linda Kinstler - LARB*
"As it delves into the story of Stepanova’s Russian-Jewish family,
branching out into broader questions about the nature of memory,
the book exhibits many of the qualities that have made her a
beloved writer in her native country: exquisite imagery and
metaphor, an affectionate sense of Russian literary tradition, and
a gentle, melancholy approach to the region’s violent history.
Above all it asks, What merits remembrance, and what is better
forgotten?"
*Sophie Pinkham - Harper's*
"In Memory of Memory is a meditation on the nothing that remains
after catastrophe, the residual oblivion."
*Edward Stephens - Rain Taxi*
"Aunt Galya is dead and has left a sea of bric-a-brac behind in her
cave-like apartment. The objects are priceless or worthless,
probably both: newspaper clippings, horoscopes, tchotchkes,
postcards, photographs, diary entries…This heaping pile of life
detritus, what it reveals and, maybe more crucially, what it
obscures, is the point of departure for Maria Stepanova’s
breathtaking zigzag meditation on memory."
*Negar Azimi - Artforum*
"Grappling with the heaviness of details, and then holding them up
to the light, Stepanova examines just how relentlessly the past
shines through—how it haunts and follows us around, even
when—especially when—we think we’ve closed the door on it."
*Snigdha Koirala - Lit Hub*
"Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses and Maria Stepanova’s
In Memory of Memory are both trying to pin down echoes and build
from dust."
*Audrey Wollen - Bookforum*
"More a treatise on the nature of memory than a novel, Stepanova's
work recounts a woman's life as it is lived parallel to the
tumultuous history of the Soviet Union. Inger Tudor's beautiful and
compelling narration soon draws the listener in. Tudor's capable
performance makes accessible even the most metaphysical
descriptions of memory and human cognition—attentive listeners will
find much to love here."
*AudioFile*
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