I read Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory: A Romance all the way through before, on returning to the publisher’s website, I remembered it is classified not as memoir but as fiction. I wasn’t sure I had my footing: what did I know after reading In Memory of Memory, and how did I know it? How might I view the book differently now under the unexpected rubric of “not strictly accurate,” or in some indeterminate ways, made up?
The German translation, referred to as a meta-novel, is called Nach dem Gedächtnis, or “After Memory,” suggestive of the way that artists draw life forms “after nature” — at least that’s one interpretation. Another would assign memory the status of a commodity that has lapsed into obsolescence, begging the question: What does it transform itself into? The original Russian title, Pamyat’, Pamyat’ — “Memory, Memory” — has to my ear a faint ring of exasperation or embarrassment at an inescapable nostalgia, an implied can’t-live-with-them-can’t-live-without-them shrug. The English title, In Memory of Memory, has the shape of a (faintly silly) epitaph, a sense of loss doubled, but the subtitle, A Romance, pokes fun at the whole endeavor, a full-frontal authorial self-critique. This territory of questions and questioning is where most of the book takes place, as the Stepanova character seeks to tell the story of her family over the past century or so, a family composed largely of Jews who, it seemed, kept their heads down and evaded the worst violence of relentless cycles of poverty, revolution, war, and repression.
Decidedly nonlinear, the book opens when the narrator’s Aunt Galya dies and she must sift through the contents of the dead woman’s Moscow apartment, eventually finding a stash of notebooks filled with exacting, quotidian descriptions of daily life — with rare exception, they obscure more than they reveal. The same may in some ways be said of the large collection of postcards she has acquired over the years: Jewishness is not once mentioned, even in passing. In a chapter tracing anti-Semitism in early 20-century literary culture, Stepanova writes of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who found himself called by contemporaries a “little Jewboy,” “some little Yankel”; critics were forever mentioning his “roots.” The poet Alexander Blok wrote in his diary about reading Mandelstam’s poetry: “You gradually get used to him, the jewboy hides from view and you can see the artist.”
In Memory of Memory is structured in three parts: In the first, the narrator introduces some of the figures of family history and charts a proliferating set of practical, ethical, and aesthetic fault lines that emerge: “The history of a family that I had at the outset learned at the speed of a straight line was now fragmenting in my head into tesserae, into notes indicating textual omissions, into hypotheses there was no one left to prove.” Is her task even doable after all? Is it her right? Is it right to interfere, essentially, in the affairs of the dead?
“Their ordinariness put them beyond the usual human interest and this seemed unfair. There was, it felt to me, an urgency in speaking about them and on their behalf, and the endeavor frightened me. To start writing was to cease to be a curious listener, an addressee, and to become instead the horizon point of the family line, the destination for the many-eyed, many-decked ship of family history. I would become a stranger, a teller of tales, a selector and a sifter, the one who decides what part of the huge volume of the unsaid must fit in the spotlight’s circle, and what part will remain outside it in the darkness.”
The narrator finds some consolation when she recognizes the frame of her family history in Marianne Hirsch’s The Generation of Postmemory, and its identification of what we now call intergenerational trauma. “Any story about myself,” she thinks, “became a story about my
ancestors. There they were behind me like an opera chorus encouraging my aria — only the music was written seventy years ago. The structures that emerged from the black waters of history fought shy of linearity, their natural state was co-presence.” Even so, the narrator interrogates her “romance” with memory time and again, sensing an ineradicable inequality, a sense of the past tasked with “feudal duties to the present, to us”:
In the first pages of Annie Ernaux’s The Years, she contemplates a loss we don’t often explicitly envision when we consider death. “All the images will disappear,” she writes. “They will all vanish at the same time, like the millions of images that lay behind the foreheads of the grandparents, dead for half a century … Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.”
In pairing the dead with the living, In Memory of Memory traces a conspicuous matrilineal line, starting with the narrator’s great-grandmother Sarra Ginzburg, “a tribe of strong, individual women standing like milestones spanning the century … a staircase leading steadily toward me, consisting entirely of women.” Sarra Ginzburg, born in 1885 to a wealthy merchant family, was arrested for distributing anti-Tsarist literature as a young woman and spent a year imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. She traveled to attend medical school in France, where she exchanged letters with admirers and would-be lovers. The narrator chases down Sarra’s memory at the former prison to find no records exist. She visits Paris, staying in the attic of the building-turned-hotel where her mother’s grandmother had lived nearly a century before, only to find herself deflated:
“If I had expected a supernatural happening (paid for in advance and online with my credit card), a dream peopled by Sarra and her student friends, a sudden nighttime revelation, an injection of understanding, no such thing happened. Instead the usual tourist morning, the light, the smell of coffee, the quiet murmur of a vacuum cleaner.”
The book’s second section departs largely from family history — but for interspersed letters and occasional visits to archives — to explore memory through the works of poets, essayists, and memoirists, painters, photographers, and other visual artists. Stepanova dives deeply into questions of how they choose to preserve, shape, commemorate, talk back to it, or seal memory away. Mandelstam’s writings belonged to the last sort: “The purpose of these strange memoirs is to nail down the pine coffin lid on lost time, drive in the aspenwood stake, and turn on one’s heel.” In The Noise of Time,published when he was 32, he wrote of hostililty emanating from his own memory:
“My memory is inimical to everything personal. If it were up to me I would only scowl when I recalled the past. I could never understand those writers, Tolstoy, Aksakov, Bagrov’s Grandson, in love with their family archives with their epics of household reminiscences. I say again that my memory is not loved by me, it is inimical to me, and it works not to reproduce the past, but to make it strange.”
In opposition to this antithetical approach were the Modernist completists like Proust and Nabokov, with their “unquestioning belief in the value of everything lost and the necessity of resurrecting it simply because it isn’t there any longer.” W. G. Sebald falls into their camp, with his fulsome and generous lists, and his “porous, interstitial structure” of time. In an examination of Rembrandt’s approximately 60 self-portraits, Stepanova finds him taken to task by early critics for a similar disdain for borders: “In his world there are no precisely drawn borderlines between figure and background, color and blackness.” She sees in the portraits “not autobiography, but autoepitaph”; “they are solely occupied with recording death.”
This section of the book has relatives in recent memoirs such as Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City and Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse, but unlike these writers Stepanova resists drawing direct parallels between her life and work and that of the artists she writes about. She is a master of juxtaposition and implied comparison but she’s not going to tie it all up for us, and with brief exceptions she remains at an expert’s distance. Whether she’s writing about American outsider artist Joseph Cornell, Petersburg artist and diarist Lyubov Shaporina, or the spooky craze for “Frozen Charlottes” — small china dolls mass-produced in 19-century Germany — her wonder is palpable and her criticism deeply grounded. At the same time, the candid self-questioning underlying her project, the ultimate source of her authority, never fades.
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, a young soldier with the 994th Rifle Regiment, garrisoned among the marshes and forests surrounding Leningrad. From the early months of 1941, 19-year-old Lyodik scarcely missed an occasion to write to his mother, assuring her, unfailingly, that he was “alive and well” — there was simply “nothing much to report,” not from the tent he shared with nine other recruits or from the cursory officer training program he was shunted into months later. From a host of memoirs, interviews, and letters, Stepanova fills in the context: relentless German air raids and tank attacks as soldiers armed only with rifles skittered across the peat bogs for shelter, starving when field kitchens were stranded in the forests; the Luftwaffe strafing the city of Leningrad, bread rationed to 200 grams per worker, the Terrible Winter when residents shivered through long nights fully clothed in their frigid apartments.
Occasionally Lyodik would turn up in the city and write his mother from there, without explanation except to apologize for not writing sooner: “I keep meaning to but just don’t get around to it. You do take things very hard, and there really isn’t any need.” Another time, he berates himself for his “terrible laziness with regard to letters.” It appears nothing could be further from the truth; he was quite assiduous in sending his reassurances, even as he deployed to the front line with his crisp new officer’s uniform, tossed into the maw of war.
In the final section of In Memory of Memory, the narrator returns to family members from the nearer past, and a consideration of how they have influenced her, including her mother, a frustrated poet, and her father, an artist and photographer. We learn that her parents emigrated to Germany after the fall of the Soviet Union, when she was still in her early twenties, but she chose Moscow, happy that she’d now be able to travel but never wanting to be parted for long from her city. Now in her late forties and a poet, essayist, and editor of the online political and cultural magazine Coulta, 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. As she observes at the outset: “Karl Kraus wrote ‘Immer passt alles zu allem’ — ‘Everything fits with everything else.’”
[Published by New Directions on February 9, 2021, 400 pages, $19.95 paperback]