... 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 She lodges memoir like a puzzle box within cultural commentary, historical documents from her ancestors, philosophical discourse, and literary criticism; the result is a densely textured memoir-in-fragments that is alive to the limitations of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.
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.
