... elegantly translated ... Stepanova adopts an oblique, multifaceted approach towards her central project of assembling a family history dating from the late nineteenth century. She lodges memoir like a puzzle box within cultural commentary, historical documents from her ancestors, philosophical discourse, and literary criticism; the result is a densely textured memoir-in-fragments that is alive to the limitations of its project—the lack of historical evidence, the inaccuracies in memory, the fraught relationship between the storyteller and her subjects, and the inevitable incompleteness of the family narrative ... Stepanova’s oblique yet layered approach allows her to interrogate the relationship between her personal history, her ancestral history, and the collective cultural history of Europe and Russia ... One of the great achievements of this memoir is that it subtly describes the transformation in the narrator’s perspective towards her ancestral past and the project of writing a family history.

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.

Stepanova’s own occasional descriptions of her project in this book give an accurate sense of both her methods and her style, so she might be the best guide as to whether this daring combination of family history and roving cultural analysis is your kind of thing ... Stepanova reprints correspondence between relatives from throughout the century, which provides some of the most charming and poignant moments. If you appreciate sifting through boxes of anonymous photos at an antiques store — that spur to emotional imagination — then at least some of In Memory of Memory will scratch an itch ... Stepanova is a wonderful describer of photographs, which makes it even more frustrating that only one is included in the book ... Some of these chapters are quite good and feel on point...Others read as if lifted from germane exhibition catalogs. Still others — most notably a chapter about Rembrandt’s self-portraits and modern selfies — feel unnecessary ... Stepanova is a highly acclaimed poet in her home country. Books of prose by poets can sometimes be notably pared down and crystalline. Not this one. There are certainly efficient, lovely phrases throughout, elegantly translated by Sasha Dugdale ... But in all there is a kind of manic inclusion at play. Stepanova declines to leave any possible follow-up thought unfollowed ... One’s tolerance for discursion will be tested here. Over the course of a few pages, Stepanova alludes to Odysseus, Orpheus, Medusa, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag and Nabokov ... There is a lot to admire in this book; and there is a lot of this padded quest-reflection as well ... This book’s stubborn capaciousness ensures that it is not a ride for everyone. Yet any readers with a deep yearning to know more about the family who came before them will appreciate its fundamental curiosity and empathy. At its core, there is a powerful note, struck time and again, about the fleeting, mysterious nature of all lives.

While Stepanova’s poetry is crafted from the intangible relics and rubbish of language, In Memory of Memory curates physical remnants of the past, using them as the raw material for a family history. Here family is not only a matter of biology; it also encompasses writers and artists from the past, as well as relatively unknown historical characters such as Lyubov Shaporina, an artist who kept a Leningrad siege diary in which surprising lyrical moments appear ... The story of this influx of Russian women, many of them Jewish, into French medical schools, which began accepting women in the 1860s, is one of the book’s numerous fascinating asides ... The story of Lyodik...killed outside Leningrad...is one of the most moving in the book, as Stepanova uses other sources to piece together what Lyodik must have been experiencing on the front, and the horrors taking place in the besieged Leningrad for which he died ... By insisting on the value of idiosyncratic family remembrance, Stepanova refuses the dissolution of self that characterizes militarism and nationalism. For her, private commemoration, along with the contemplation of art, is a way of developing the kind of self-reflective, generous-minded citizenship necessary for a functional democracy. For American readers, Stepanova’s work is not a glimpse into an alien culture but a reminder that we have more in common with Russia than we’d like to admit.

Stepanova’s family history is a dazzling reflection on forms of remembering ... She is brilliant on the excesses of digital photography ... But her book also shows that the compulsive wish to remember and be remembered is in no way peculiar to the digital age ... In Memory of Memory suggests that people are always, unwittingly or not, engaged ‘in the production of perfect casts and taxidermy’. Of all Stepanova’s stories and images— marvellously rendered in this English translation by Sasha Dugdale—the most striking is a description of sekretiki, a game played by Moscow schoolchildren in the 1970s. They would drop to the ground and bury a little collection of cherished things—feathers, beads, the photograph of a celebrity cut from a newspaper—then cover them with a piece of glass and hide them with soil. In classic Soviet posters, young pioneers gaze out of the frame towards the shining future. Here the children are face down in the earth, to preserve a familiar object and turn it into something that will last.

It uses its patchwork of documentary and impressionistic essays to give the reader a unified personality, like Montaigne’s essays in their wide-ranging and inward-looking sensibility ... it is the process and workings of remembering, and the loss of memories and the meaning of memory, that dominate, that draw the reader into and through Stepanova’s argument and interpretations from beginning to end ... Ultimately, for the Russian poet, memory is 'beyond repair,' but nonetheless valuable in its disjointedness. And the memory of memory In Memory of Memory proves equally valuable in the connections it forges.

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? ... we see into the heart of this textual cabinet of curiosities. Stepanova has written a book about her family that is not about her family, but about the urge to remember, to memorialise, and the dangers that lie that way.

Some of these experiments are more successful than others. The book is at its best when the narrator situates her Russian-Jewish genealogy in a broader historical context ... Another highlight of the book is Stepanova’s art criticism, which ranges from the photography of Francesca Woodman to the gouache paintings of Charlotte Salomon. One standout chapter looks at the American sculptor Joseph Cornell ... Yet Stepanova missteps when venturing into the present-day topics of social media, digital photography, and Internet archives. In chapters that diagnose the nature of twenty-first century life, the narrative loses its thread, becomes meandering, and even veers into hyperbole ... Sections of the book that lack context, such as the chapter 'A Handful of Photographs,' which merely describes a list of pictures, feel less innovative than underbaked. In Memory of Memory might have succeeded formally as a collection of essays. But a novel, even a genre-bending one, promises its readers a story—and on this promise, In Memory of Memory doesn’t quite deliver.

Stepanova’s writing presents itself as more clearly of a learned or scholarly character: it engages explicitly with Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, W. G. Sebald, and other writers interested in photography and history ... when remembering memory, besides contemplating the lives of family members, Stepanova is also making an existentialist statement on the brink of an abyss wherein history disappears. Sebald is the closest comparison in this regard ... this great book is a highly urgent theological treatise on memory and saving.

... [a] remarkable English translation ... a singular opportunity to become familiar with a major Russian poet and thinker ... Stepanova’s companionable prose balances high seriousness with self-ironizing deadpan humour. Without pretension, she erects her house of memory in the neighbourhood of Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov and Sebald.

Generations of Stepanova’s family...made it through the Siege of Leningrad and the Russian Civil War ... Simply the breadth of time and the scope of variation in their lives through that period makes for some fascinating, unforgettable anecdotes of life during revolution and the Soviet era ... These stories are relayed to us as they were relayed to [Stepanova], vividly and mysteriously, with a few contradictions and the inevitable loose ends of someone who cannot afford dalliance in the past. If life is, as Stepanova quotes Nabokov, 'but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness,' then the concentration of this light is blinding, the force at which everything happens overwhelming—and the beginning and end of these flashes never discrete, as the interlocking generations prove so well.

The raging sea that is this book is forcefully unsentimental, yet overflowing with compassion ... In Memory of Memory is openly and carefully working in a specific tradition of many greats who have previously bushwhacked through these dense groves. She knows she is writing in a place that 'began with Proust,' then 'continued with Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and ended with Sebald’s prose.' In Memory of Memory is a book whose light is not consumed by those great shadows ... The pulsing heart of the first two thirds of the book are in what the author playfully terms her 'Not-a-chapters,' where she steps out of the way to let her ancestors speak directly through their correspondence with each other. The thing about letters is that most of their meaning is contained in what’s not written. Stepanova can set context...but what she cannot do is fill in the gaps of the argument the sender and recipient had in the months preceding, and why forgiveness is being begged ... She is driven, as we all are, to follow trails. To dig up small secrets. To piece them together not to tell a story of what was, but what is. Make of it what you will.

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 ... 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 ... 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 ... She can’t let even the smallest perception go ... 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.

Of the many other odd things Stepanova does not explain, the oddest is why, having established that 'telling these histories' is both impossible and objectionable, she tells us her family history anyway. It is fragmentary and ambivalent, the lives of her assorted relatives are (as she keeps insisting) perfectly ordinary, the chapters devoted to them are called 'not-chapters,' and there are no detailed portraits or developed stories, but history it is, nevertheless—in narrative form and in chronological order, with a clear cast of characters and multiple layers of background ... She is perfectly capable of reconstructing the past—with a vivid imagination and in seamless prose—but she believes she is not supposed to, so she keeps interrupting herself, apologizing for an occasional plot line and assuring her reader, against clear evidence to the contrary, that 'nothing can be made out now' ... Sentence by beautiful sentence, Stepanova seems to have written herself into a corner. She wants to memorialize the dead but cannot reach them because memory is faulty and no longer exists, having been replaced by postmemory ... Stepanova is an accomplished stylist and subtle essayist. She could have gone against fashion to make sure a little part of the past “didn’t simply dissipate into the air, unremembered and unremarked upon.” Instead, she produced an assortment of glass boxes with some of her 'indistinct relatives' inside and added a series of elaborate reflections about why that was not a good idea. Rather than painting portraits, she snapped some photographs, many of them beautiful, most of them selfies.

The most sustained and powerful narrative element in the book arrives toward the end of part two, carried largely by a series of letters written by a cousin of Stepanova’s maternal grandfather ... Stepanova is an important voice among the first generation of post-Soviet Muscovite writers. In Memory of Memory functions something like a master key to 20-century Russia. It covers a vast historical and cultural territory and traces the connections.

... sweeping ... superbly translated ... More than just a family and cultural history, Stepanova’s meditations on the nature of memory place themselves on a continuum of Proust, Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1951) and the work of WG Sebald ... Stepanova harbours no illusions about the feasibility of preserving the past.

Beautifully translated by the poet Sasha Dugdale, the book teems with oblivion ... 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 ... On the final page, she ends her love affair with memory and secures her release. Her reader is left behind, caught in the crosshairs of memory, wondering if the oblivion to which Stepanova has steered is curse or gift, heaven or hell.

The hybrid book that Ms. Stepanova has finally produced presents gleanings from her family archives alongside the labyrinthine narrative of her 'search for the past,' which she concedes is incomplete and in many ways unsuccessful. And amidst the personal artifacts are essay-like meditations on the tensions that inhere within any act of remembrance. The result is a rich, digressive, deeply introspective work ... 'There is too much past, and everyone knows it,' she writes at a moment of sharpened despair. The surplus means that memories are necessarily invidious and sorted into two sets, 'the interesting and the less interesting,' those 'fit for retelling and those . . . only fit for oblivion.' A fanatical, itemizing approach to history can help overcome prejudice, but even the most straightforward documentary material becomes distorted across time ... You can sense the decades of contemplation Ms. Stepanova has dedicated to these questions in the sparkle and density of her prose, which Sasha Dugdale has carried into English so naturally that it’s possible to forget you are reading a translation. This is 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.

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 ... tretching 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.

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 ... 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 ... 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.