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In Memory of Memory
With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of an entire century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of an ordinary family that somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. The family’s pursuit of a quiet, civilized, ordinary life—during such atrocious times—is itself a strange odyssey.
In dialogue with thinkers 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 genres—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and history—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers a bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.
In dialogue with thinkers 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 genres—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and history—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers a bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.
432 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2017
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About the author
Maria Stepanova
45books140followersMaria Mikhailovna Stepanova is a Russian poet, novelist, and journalist. She is the current editor of Colta.ru, an online publication specializing in arts and culture. In 2005, she won the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize for poetry.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 400 reviews
February 23, 2021
This novel is likely to be my favorite book of 2021. It’s so richly present in the world. It’s so full of beauty and humanity. In its discursive style and its attention to lived history it reminds me of Sebald’s AUSTERLITZ but the narrative voice here is warmer. It’s the kind of writing that makes you sit up and pay attention, not only to the story, but also to this life you’re leading. To notice things in a new way. To wonder. It’s the kind of writing that makes you understand that the ordinary is, in fact, extraordinary. I’m very happy to have read this book.
July 14, 2023
Nu pot să spun că am murit de plăcere. Încă-s viu...
Am o mare problemă cu această carte. Sau, mai degrabă, cu definirea ei. Poate fi încadrată într-un gen literar precis? Editorii au prezentat-o drept roman (și foarte rău au făcut!), dar eu văd în ea un lung eseu despre memorie, despre pierderea și imposibila ei recuperare.
Cartea se prezintă ca un mozaic: scrisori, rezumate, anecdote, reflecții. Istoria unei familii evreiești din Rusia secolului 20 este întreruptă, mult prea des, în opinia mea, de considerații cu privire la istoria literaturii ruse de după revoluția bolșevică (Marina Țvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Alexei Tolstoi, Boris Pasternak etc.), cu privire la scriitorii care au încercat să refacă și să descifreze un anume trecut (W.G. Sebald, ț, Austerlitz, Inelele lui Saturn) și la (prea) multe altele. Cartea seamănă cu un tablou-colaj, unde autorul a lipit, capricios, decupaje din gazete, fotografii, acte de naștere etc.
Pentru un cititor înarmat cu suficientă răbdare, eseul Mariei Stepanova oferă - totuși, totuși - o sumă de evocări foarte interesante. Aș nota portretul fascinant al artistei (scriitor și fotograf) Francesca Woodman (1958 - 1981)), un personaj lipsit de noroc (pp.165-170), și, de asemenea, portretul pictoriței Charlotte Salomon (1917 - 1943), care a murit la Auschwitz (pp.200-2017). Deduc din cele două prezentări că hazardul (și numai hazardul) este stăpîn peste viețile noastre. Nu ascund faptul că pînă la citirea cărții Mariei Stepanova nu știam absolut nimic despre cele două personaje nefericite.
Termenul „roman� desemnează astăzi aproape orice. Dar eu aș spune că În amintirea memoriei este, mai degrabă, o colecție (foarte ambițioasă) de eseuri. Nici criticii de aiurea n-au spus altceva: �In Memory of Memory is a multifaceted essay on the nature of remembering�.
Traducătoarea acestui volum, Luana Schidu, a adăugat o serie de note foarte utile. N-ar fi fost rău să propună și o bibliografie, întrucît Maria Stepanova trimite la cîteva zeci de autori (mai vechi sau mai noi).
P. S. N-ar trebui omis faptul că acest volum a fost nominalizat la International Booker Prize pe anul 2021. Nominalizarea a stîrnit nedumeriri și discuții înverșunate. Booker Prize se acordă cărților de ficțiune. În amintirea memoriei descrie și problematizează tocmai dificultatea de a stabili un adevăr cu privire la trecut. Prin definiție, o astfel de carte nu e ficțiune...
Am o mare problemă cu această carte. Sau, mai degrabă, cu definirea ei. Poate fi încadrată într-un gen literar precis? Editorii au prezentat-o drept roman (și foarte rău au făcut!), dar eu văd în ea un lung eseu despre memorie, despre pierderea și imposibila ei recuperare.
Cartea se prezintă ca un mozaic: scrisori, rezumate, anecdote, reflecții. Istoria unei familii evreiești din Rusia secolului 20 este întreruptă, mult prea des, în opinia mea, de considerații cu privire la istoria literaturii ruse de după revoluția bolșevică (Marina Țvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Alexei Tolstoi, Boris Pasternak etc.), cu privire la scriitorii care au încercat să refacă și să descifreze un anume trecut (W.G. Sebald, ț, Austerlitz, Inelele lui Saturn) și la (prea) multe altele. Cartea seamănă cu un tablou-colaj, unde autorul a lipit, capricios, decupaje din gazete, fotografii, acte de naștere etc.
Pentru un cititor înarmat cu suficientă răbdare, eseul Mariei Stepanova oferă - totuși, totuși - o sumă de evocări foarte interesante. Aș nota portretul fascinant al artistei (scriitor și fotograf) Francesca Woodman (1958 - 1981)), un personaj lipsit de noroc (pp.165-170), și, de asemenea, portretul pictoriței Charlotte Salomon (1917 - 1943), care a murit la Auschwitz (pp.200-2017). Deduc din cele două prezentări că hazardul (și numai hazardul) este stăpîn peste viețile noastre. Nu ascund faptul că pînă la citirea cărții Mariei Stepanova nu știam absolut nimic despre cele două personaje nefericite.
Termenul „roman� desemnează astăzi aproape orice. Dar eu aș spune că În amintirea memoriei este, mai degrabă, o colecție (foarte ambițioasă) de eseuri. Nici criticii de aiurea n-au spus altceva: �In Memory of Memory is a multifaceted essay on the nature of remembering�.
Traducătoarea acestui volum, Luana Schidu, a adăugat o serie de note foarte utile. N-ar fi fost rău să propună și o bibliografie, întrucît Maria Stepanova trimite la cîteva zeci de autori (mai vechi sau mai noi).
P. S. N-ar trebui omis faptul că acest volum a fost nominalizat la International Booker Prize pe anul 2021. Nominalizarea a stîrnit nedumeriri și discuții înverșunate. Booker Prize se acordă cărților de ficțiune. În amintirea memoriei descrie și problematizează tocmai dificultatea de a stabili un adevăr cu privire la trecut. Prin definiție, o astfel de carte nu e ficțiune...
June 20, 2021
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, 2021.
I didn't look up this book before reading it. I read it solely because it was shortlisted for the International Booker. I assumed it was fiction, kept looking for a story and got increasingly frustrated. I was halfway through the book when I realised that this wasn't fiction. I knew I had done it all wrong - only, I soon realised that my reading experience was very similar to what the author was trying to accomplish through her writing. We were both trying to see order in sequentiality, we were both demanding that history provide us with a story we could grasp.
Stepanova uses vivid imagery, family artefacts and memory - unreliable though it is, to reconstruct a past that has rendered itself unreachable. Her comments on the 'selfie' culture and the morbid art of modern photography that insists on preserving our outward forms and strangely extending existence, are haunting. We actively fight the odd geometry of time and seek out coincidences so that we don't feel like our presence here is an outcome of pure chance. We constantly occupy ourselves so as to not feel the slow sedimentation that time causes and yet, we somehow always return to the twisting corridors of memory and plead to be remembered, to remain.
The postcards, like the visiting cards and the pale envelopes with their raspberry-colored paper lining, were all just waiting to be used in some way, but we couldn’t imagine how to make use of them in this very different era. So we closed up the albums again and put them back on their shelf and placed the postcards back in their boxes and the evening came to a close as all evenings do.
Through an examination of art and her own family history, Stepanova tries to understand the incongruities between memory and history, the areas where they intersect and the regions where they remain stubbornly opposed. She writes about how memory functions as a past magnifier in the consciousness of holocaust survivors so that they have to deal with another sort of ethical quandary - that the spaces they occupy must instead be accomodating the 'unfulfilled other life.' She also writes about postmemory and how we constantly sense the world as an apartment that has been abandoned. Even if could have claimed to not understand this before, now, after the past year, we all know what she's talking about.
You can shine a torch into the blackness of a half-opened mouth and try to make out what he or she is saying, but to choose � is it possible to choose?
More than memory itself, this book is about remembering, about nostalgia of nostalgia. This is, without a doubt and despite initial frustrations, one of my favorite reads of 2021. And my unending kudos to the translator, Sasha Dugdale. Even without reading the original text, I know that they have done a phenomenal job.
The past rewilds itself, oblivion springs up out of it like a forest.
I didn't look up this book before reading it. I read it solely because it was shortlisted for the International Booker. I assumed it was fiction, kept looking for a story and got increasingly frustrated. I was halfway through the book when I realised that this wasn't fiction. I knew I had done it all wrong - only, I soon realised that my reading experience was very similar to what the author was trying to accomplish through her writing. We were both trying to see order in sequentiality, we were both demanding that history provide us with a story we could grasp.
Stepanova uses vivid imagery, family artefacts and memory - unreliable though it is, to reconstruct a past that has rendered itself unreachable. Her comments on the 'selfie' culture and the morbid art of modern photography that insists on preserving our outward forms and strangely extending existence, are haunting. We actively fight the odd geometry of time and seek out coincidences so that we don't feel like our presence here is an outcome of pure chance. We constantly occupy ourselves so as to not feel the slow sedimentation that time causes and yet, we somehow always return to the twisting corridors of memory and plead to be remembered, to remain.
The postcards, like the visiting cards and the pale envelopes with their raspberry-colored paper lining, were all just waiting to be used in some way, but we couldn’t imagine how to make use of them in this very different era. So we closed up the albums again and put them back on their shelf and placed the postcards back in their boxes and the evening came to a close as all evenings do.
Through an examination of art and her own family history, Stepanova tries to understand the incongruities between memory and history, the areas where they intersect and the regions where they remain stubbornly opposed. She writes about how memory functions as a past magnifier in the consciousness of holocaust survivors so that they have to deal with another sort of ethical quandary - that the spaces they occupy must instead be accomodating the 'unfulfilled other life.' She also writes about postmemory and how we constantly sense the world as an apartment that has been abandoned. Even if could have claimed to not understand this before, now, after the past year, we all know what she's talking about.
You can shine a torch into the blackness of a half-opened mouth and try to make out what he or she is saying, but to choose � is it possible to choose?
More than memory itself, this book is about remembering, about nostalgia of nostalgia. This is, without a doubt and despite initial frustrations, one of my favorite reads of 2021. And my unending kudos to the translator, Sasha Dugdale. Even without reading the original text, I know that they have done a phenomenal job.
The past rewilds itself, oblivion springs up out of it like a forest.
Read
November 17, 2021Shortlisted for International Booker 2021 award and Warwick Women in Translation 2021.
DNF at page 150.
I tried, three time to be exact but I could not get into this novel. It felt too much work and too little reward (for me). I read Austerlitz by Sebald earlier this year in order to prepare for this novel/memoir(?) but while that was also tedious to read in the beginning it was all worth it by page 60. I could not get into a rhythm with Stepanova's tome, no matter how much I wanted to. All the beautiful writing about her ancestors and memory only succeeded to put me to sleep. Repeatedly.
DNF at page 150.
I tried, three time to be exact but I could not get into this novel. It felt too much work and too little reward (for me). I read Austerlitz by Sebald earlier this year in order to prepare for this novel/memoir(?) but while that was also tedious to read in the beginning it was all worth it by page 60. I could not get into a rhythm with Stepanova's tome, no matter how much I wanted to. All the beautiful writing about her ancestors and memory only succeeded to put me to sleep. Repeatedly.
June 21, 2021
I first learned of this book - purchased it right away - after reading an article in one of my Jewish papers.
I then listened to an interview with Maria Stepanova �
�.It was work for me to read this book � I admire much of it - yet it wasn’t easy for me understand or feel anywhere near the fascination for the uncovered ancestors stories that the author did.
When one of Maria’s aunt died -she faced an apartment of family history� through photographs, postcards, letters, souvenirs, diaries trinkets, and treasures. > okay�.I get this. It would fascinating for me too, to go through old photos, letters of my parents, grandmothers, aunts, cousins �.
but Maria was born in a country (Russia), that I have little tangible experience with (other than from books)…she was giving voices to dead relatives whom I had no experience with …and “In Memory of Memory�, a documentary novel/memoir just felt much too long for my taste.
I could only read about ‘scraps-from-the-past� about a grandmother who went to great lengths to remain invisible, inconspicuous, hiding in her dim lighted house - apart from current history � for just so long.
�
how everyone else’s ancestors had taken part in history. Maria was fascinated with the fact that her family ‘didn’t� live under German occupation or fought in battles of the century.
Maria paints a bourgeois type family�.who didn’t fight in wars, but were doctors, engineers, architects (“but not as dreamy spires and Facades, only of workaday constructions like roads and bridges�) > why Maria felt the need for the distinction I still don’t really understand.
She tells us that almost no one in her family belong to the communist party, and had they had several famous friends. (we read about them too).
I understand the intrigue to uncover the departed family members -
Much ‘was� interesting �-and important—[she made great discoveries]�.but as a pure reading experience�.truthfully it was work for me.
Oh I honestly couldn’t recommend this book to the majority of my close friends - not even my Jewish friends- who have their own history with their Holocaust surviving parents and relatives �
Honestly…my friends would kill me if I put this book in their hands.
On another note�.this book is incredible for select readers.
Maria began writing this book when she was 10 years of age, in Moscow.
“It is as if it brings some relief to share all the scraps from the past as I remember them, half-wryly, The transfers dirty and rubbed away a good twenty years even before the kitchen was re-decorated, and only now Rihanna Bemi, illuminated again —fat Little boy in a sombrero and yellow- green domino mask but with no face behind the mask, a mass of gold curlicues around his head . . . As if, like a vanished wizard, I could disappear, becoming thousand ancient, neglected, blackening objects. As if my life work was to catalog them all. As if that is what I grew up to do�.
“The second time I started to write this book without even realizing it, I was seventeen, wild, errant, in the afterglow of a love affair that sounds as if it had to find everything in my life. With the passing of years this love has dissipated and paled to such an extent that I can no longer conquer at the sensation of
‘everything beginnings� that I felt while I was in its grip. But I remember one thing with absolute clarity � when it came to clear that a relationship was over, to intents and purposes even if not in my head, I decided it was of vital important to record a sort of ‘selected impressions�: details, assemblage points, the terms our conversations took, the phrases we read. I wanted to fix them in my mind, to prepare for future writing-up. A linear narrative made no sense for this: the line itself was so shakily drawn. I simply noted down everything that seemed important not to forget�.
Maria always knew she would write a book about her family.
“When I began to think seriously about my memories I had the startling realization that I had nothing left�.
“I was left with the tongue twisters of my aunt’s names,
Sanya, Sonya, Sola, a lot of photographs of the nameless and the noteless, some ethereal and unattached anecdotes, and the familiar faces of unfamiliar people�.
This book was translated from Sasha Dugdale from Russian
Final words�.> I appreciated this book more than loved it.
I couldn’t help but think�(I’m bad)� having smart phones to document family history today is sure a lot of easier than digging through boxes of old dusty, fading, yellowing photographs�..
Maybe…not as nostalgic�.but surely much easier.
I then listened to an interview with Maria Stepanova �
�.It was work for me to read this book � I admire much of it - yet it wasn’t easy for me understand or feel anywhere near the fascination for the uncovered ancestors stories that the author did.
When one of Maria’s aunt died -she faced an apartment of family history� through photographs, postcards, letters, souvenirs, diaries trinkets, and treasures. > okay�.I get this. It would fascinating for me too, to go through old photos, letters of my parents, grandmothers, aunts, cousins �.
but Maria was born in a country (Russia), that I have little tangible experience with (other than from books)…she was giving voices to dead relatives whom I had no experience with …and “In Memory of Memory�, a documentary novel/memoir just felt much too long for my taste.
I could only read about ‘scraps-from-the-past� about a grandmother who went to great lengths to remain invisible, inconspicuous, hiding in her dim lighted house - apart from current history � for just so long.
�
how everyone else’s ancestors had taken part in history. Maria was fascinated with the fact that her family ‘didn’t� live under German occupation or fought in battles of the century.
Maria paints a bourgeois type family�.who didn’t fight in wars, but were doctors, engineers, architects (“but not as dreamy spires and Facades, only of workaday constructions like roads and bridges�) > why Maria felt the need for the distinction I still don’t really understand.
She tells us that almost no one in her family belong to the communist party, and had they had several famous friends. (we read about them too).
I understand the intrigue to uncover the departed family members -
Much ‘was� interesting �-and important—[she made great discoveries]�.but as a pure reading experience�.truthfully it was work for me.
Oh I honestly couldn’t recommend this book to the majority of my close friends - not even my Jewish friends- who have their own history with their Holocaust surviving parents and relatives �
Honestly…my friends would kill me if I put this book in their hands.
On another note�.this book is incredible for select readers.
Maria began writing this book when she was 10 years of age, in Moscow.
“It is as if it brings some relief to share all the scraps from the past as I remember them, half-wryly, The transfers dirty and rubbed away a good twenty years even before the kitchen was re-decorated, and only now Rihanna Bemi, illuminated again —fat Little boy in a sombrero and yellow- green domino mask but with no face behind the mask, a mass of gold curlicues around his head . . . As if, like a vanished wizard, I could disappear, becoming thousand ancient, neglected, blackening objects. As if my life work was to catalog them all. As if that is what I grew up to do�.
“The second time I started to write this book without even realizing it, I was seventeen, wild, errant, in the afterglow of a love affair that sounds as if it had to find everything in my life. With the passing of years this love has dissipated and paled to such an extent that I can no longer conquer at the sensation of
‘everything beginnings� that I felt while I was in its grip. But I remember one thing with absolute clarity � when it came to clear that a relationship was over, to intents and purposes even if not in my head, I decided it was of vital important to record a sort of ‘selected impressions�: details, assemblage points, the terms our conversations took, the phrases we read. I wanted to fix them in my mind, to prepare for future writing-up. A linear narrative made no sense for this: the line itself was so shakily drawn. I simply noted down everything that seemed important not to forget�.
Maria always knew she would write a book about her family.
“When I began to think seriously about my memories I had the startling realization that I had nothing left�.
“I was left with the tongue twisters of my aunt’s names,
Sanya, Sonya, Sola, a lot of photographs of the nameless and the noteless, some ethereal and unattached anecdotes, and the familiar faces of unfamiliar people�.
This book was translated from Sasha Dugdale from Russian
Final words�.> I appreciated this book more than loved it.
I couldn’t help but think�(I’m bad)� having smart phones to document family history today is sure a lot of easier than digging through boxes of old dusty, fading, yellowing photographs�..
Maybe…not as nostalgic�.but surely much easier.
May 3, 2022
Longlisted for the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker
Translation longlisted for the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize
This book about my family is not about my family at all, but something quite different: the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.
In a wonderful translation by poet Sasha Dugdale, one produced in close colloboration with the original author Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory is a dazzling hybrid of many forms and one in dialogue with authors and artists from Mandelstam, Charlotte Salomon and WG Sebald (Across what distances in time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? in Michael Hulse's translation of The Rings of Saturn) to Tove Jansson's Fillyjonk.
From personal taste, the thoughts on memory were more striking that the family history, but this is likely to be one of 2021's key books.
4.5 stars.
A fascinating blog review:
Interviews with author and translator:
Translation longlisted for the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize
This book about my family is not about my family at all, but something quite different: the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.
In a wonderful translation by poet Sasha Dugdale, one produced in close colloboration with the original author Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory is a dazzling hybrid of many forms and one in dialogue with authors and artists from Mandelstam, Charlotte Salomon and WG Sebald (Across what distances in time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? in Michael Hulse's translation of The Rings of Saturn) to Tove Jansson's Fillyjonk.
From personal taste, the thoughts on memory were more striking that the family history, but this is likely to be one of 2021's key books.
4.5 stars.
A fascinating blog review:
Interviews with author and translator:
April 19, 2021
Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2021
This is a wonderful book, but whatever else it is, it is not fiction, so I am not sure how it qualifies for the Booker International, which is supposed to be a translated fiction prize.
Stepanova's starting point were the artefacts she inherited from her Russian Jewish family, and much of the book tells their stories, but as she freely admits much of the detail was lost, and in some ways the best elements are the more philosophical ones about the nature of memory, and how other writers have coped with it. This allows her to bring in a wide range of other writers, as Paul Fulcher has noted this extends from Sebald to the Moomins.
The author's own story remains mostly hidden except where it is necessary to explain what she knows, though she does finally get a little space in the final chapter in which she talks about the time she spent in Oxford working on this English edition.
As one would expect the tragic history of the twentieth century both inside and outside the Soviet Union casts its long shadow, but in some ways the book it reminded me most of was .
This is a wonderful book, but whatever else it is, it is not fiction, so I am not sure how it qualifies for the Booker International, which is supposed to be a translated fiction prize.
Stepanova's starting point were the artefacts she inherited from her Russian Jewish family, and much of the book tells their stories, but as she freely admits much of the detail was lost, and in some ways the best elements are the more philosophical ones about the nature of memory, and how other writers have coped with it. This allows her to bring in a wide range of other writers, as Paul Fulcher has noted this extends from Sebald to the Moomins.
The author's own story remains mostly hidden except where it is necessary to explain what she knows, though she does finally get a little space in the final chapter in which she talks about the time she spent in Oxford working on this English edition.
As one would expect the tragic history of the twentieth century both inside and outside the Soviet Union casts its long shadow, but in some ways the book it reminded me most of was .
May 29, 2021
At some point in life we all wonder about our family history. Who were these ancestors whose coupling through succeeding generations has unwittingly resulted in us? What do any surviving photographs, stories and momentos say about them and can we ever obtain a meaningful understanding of these lives from the past? Maria Stepanova has been trying to construct an account of her family history for a long time and become its narrator like a documentary filmmaker: “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.� When her Aunt Galya dies she sifts through the belongings Galya left and discovers that “The meek contents of her apartment, feeling themselves to be redundant, immediately began to lose their human qualities and, in doing so, ceased to remember or to mean anything.�
Thus, Stepanova presents us with memories, anecdotes, letters, diary entries and other documents alongside her journeys to significant locations from her ancestors' lives to form a loose picture of their past. In doing so we gain access to not only her personal family history, but Russian Jewish life over the course of the 20th century. There are innumerable accounts of this period of European history, but Stepanova brings a new perspective of rigorous enquiry into how we memorialise people from the past and how their narrative has been self-consciously shaped. More than this, Stepanova rigorously questions how we interact with fragments from the past and what memory means: “This book about my family is not about my family at all, but something quite different: the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.� The result is an utterly enthralling rumination on this subject which sheds light on what the past really means to us and the responsibility tied to the act of remembering.
Read my full
Thus, Stepanova presents us with memories, anecdotes, letters, diary entries and other documents alongside her journeys to significant locations from her ancestors' lives to form a loose picture of their past. In doing so we gain access to not only her personal family history, but Russian Jewish life over the course of the 20th century. There are innumerable accounts of this period of European history, but Stepanova brings a new perspective of rigorous enquiry into how we memorialise people from the past and how their narrative has been self-consciously shaped. More than this, Stepanova rigorously questions how we interact with fragments from the past and what memory means: “This book about my family is not about my family at all, but something quite different: the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.� The result is an utterly enthralling rumination on this subject which sheds light on what the past really means to us and the responsibility tied to the act of remembering.
Read my full
February 22, 2021
”Such magic is rare, which is why I am picking through different approaches to the past, as one might pick through dried peas, in the search of one that might work.�
”This book about my family is not about my family at all, but something quite different: the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.�
This is a big book. Firstly, it is long (almost 450 pages in its English translation). And those almost 450 pages are not ones you can scan: I found myself stopping a various points and going back over a few paragraphs and I must have read a fair portion of the book twice because of this. But it’s not just long. It’s also broad in scope and deep in content meaning that you can come to feel quite small (in a good way) as you read it.
Of necessity (to remain a reasonable length), these thoughts will be fairly superficial and will miss a lot of important things about the book.
“In Memory of Memory� is Maria Stepanova’s first book to be published in English and comes to us from Fitzcarraldo Editions. It is translated by Sasha Dugdale who has created something that reads very smoothly. A book of poems and a book of essays are also planned for 2021, all books that the author says are looking for “the truth of the past�. This book is published in Fitzcarraldo’s grey cover which normally indicates non-fiction. However, here, as with some of the other books with grey covers, things aren’t quite that simple. First of all, there’s the fact that the book itself tells us what the cover should look like: as our narrator holds a small white china doll, she says “I thought about it as I carried the little china boy in my pocket along this or that strasse, stroking his invisible back with my finger and imagining how he would look on the cover of a book about memory.� and this is, in fact, the cover that is on other editions of the book. Secondly, this book draws on a multitude of different approaches including fiction alongside essays, memoirs, travel and historical documents.
In part, this is a family history carefully pulled together from letters, photographs, diaries and other documents and artefacts collected over a century of Russian life. I have to say I missed a trick at the start of the book which I will now explain as a word of advice for other readers. It would help, I think, to make a note of names and relationships as they are uncovered in the book. There are characters known by more than one name, there are multiple characters with the same name, and there are characters with very similar names (”Lyonya, who will one day marry Lyolya…�). Keeping some kind of record of these might help. I don’t think it is absolutely necessary, but I did find myself very confused about who some people were at times.
In parallel with the family history, we also see a lot of Russian history. The family was at least peripherally involved, sometimes directly involved, with some key events (the Russian Revolution, the siege of Leningrad, for example, and also one I had to look up - Stalin’s “Doctor’s Plot�).
But, as the book’s title suggests, Stepanova isn’t just concerned with family history. She is interested in memory. In how it works. In the tricks it plays. She is fascinated by the gaps in the documentation and she has a running dialogue with some major literary figures (she borrows the Aleph from Borges (the china dolls already referred to), draws heavily on Sebald and Madelstam, calls on Barthes and Sontag, just as examples). And she does as the quote I started with suggests: she explores memory from all kinds of different directions, some direct, some more indirect, searching for the truth and, in the process, giving us insights. I highlighted so many passages as I read that I rather lost count, but here are one or two.
”In place of a memory I did not have, of an event I did not witness, my memory worked over someone else’s story; it rehydrated the driest little note and made of it a pop-up cherry orchard.�
”Such fables are mostly like sprouting twigs, still to unfurl and grow to their life’s proportions, and they take the form of half-spoken phrases in the margins of the story: ‘I’ve heard he lived in...�; ‘She must have been this or that...�; ‘there’s a story about him...� It’s the sweetest part of the tale-telling, the fairy-tale element. These are the embryos of a novel, what we remember forever, over and above the boring circumstances of time and place. I want to take them and blow life into them, tell them anew, stuff them with details I have prepared myself. I remember these stories so much more easily.�
(And passage like that are where you start to appreciate that both author and translator are poets.)
”Like language, like photography, postmemory is far more than its obvious function. It doesn’t just show us the past, but changes the present, because the past is the key to everything that occurs daily in the present.�
I could go on, but you get the idea.
Sometimes, Stepanova muses directly about a subject. Sometimes, she picks up an episode of family history or Russian history and, as she explores that she works her way to some deeper thoughts about memory. So musing on today’s selfies leads to reflections on Rembrandt’s self-portraits which gradually morphs into how we view the past and how we easily come to treat our dead as exhibitions, our memories affected by the time gap between then and now. It is all masterfully handled with understated and poetic writing.
This is the kind of book that should appear on book prize lists. I guess it could be fiction or non-fiction lists, but it must make some of them, surely.
”This book about my family is not about my family at all, but something quite different: the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.�
This is a big book. Firstly, it is long (almost 450 pages in its English translation). And those almost 450 pages are not ones you can scan: I found myself stopping a various points and going back over a few paragraphs and I must have read a fair portion of the book twice because of this. But it’s not just long. It’s also broad in scope and deep in content meaning that you can come to feel quite small (in a good way) as you read it.
Of necessity (to remain a reasonable length), these thoughts will be fairly superficial and will miss a lot of important things about the book.
“In Memory of Memory� is Maria Stepanova’s first book to be published in English and comes to us from Fitzcarraldo Editions. It is translated by Sasha Dugdale who has created something that reads very smoothly. A book of poems and a book of essays are also planned for 2021, all books that the author says are looking for “the truth of the past�. This book is published in Fitzcarraldo’s grey cover which normally indicates non-fiction. However, here, as with some of the other books with grey covers, things aren’t quite that simple. First of all, there’s the fact that the book itself tells us what the cover should look like: as our narrator holds a small white china doll, she says “I thought about it as I carried the little china boy in my pocket along this or that strasse, stroking his invisible back with my finger and imagining how he would look on the cover of a book about memory.� and this is, in fact, the cover that is on other editions of the book. Secondly, this book draws on a multitude of different approaches including fiction alongside essays, memoirs, travel and historical documents.
In part, this is a family history carefully pulled together from letters, photographs, diaries and other documents and artefacts collected over a century of Russian life. I have to say I missed a trick at the start of the book which I will now explain as a word of advice for other readers. It would help, I think, to make a note of names and relationships as they are uncovered in the book. There are characters known by more than one name, there are multiple characters with the same name, and there are characters with very similar names (”Lyonya, who will one day marry Lyolya…�). Keeping some kind of record of these might help. I don’t think it is absolutely necessary, but I did find myself very confused about who some people were at times.
In parallel with the family history, we also see a lot of Russian history. The family was at least peripherally involved, sometimes directly involved, with some key events (the Russian Revolution, the siege of Leningrad, for example, and also one I had to look up - Stalin’s “Doctor’s Plot�).
But, as the book’s title suggests, Stepanova isn’t just concerned with family history. She is interested in memory. In how it works. In the tricks it plays. She is fascinated by the gaps in the documentation and she has a running dialogue with some major literary figures (she borrows the Aleph from Borges (the china dolls already referred to), draws heavily on Sebald and Madelstam, calls on Barthes and Sontag, just as examples). And she does as the quote I started with suggests: she explores memory from all kinds of different directions, some direct, some more indirect, searching for the truth and, in the process, giving us insights. I highlighted so many passages as I read that I rather lost count, but here are one or two.
”In place of a memory I did not have, of an event I did not witness, my memory worked over someone else’s story; it rehydrated the driest little note and made of it a pop-up cherry orchard.�
”Such fables are mostly like sprouting twigs, still to unfurl and grow to their life’s proportions, and they take the form of half-spoken phrases in the margins of the story: ‘I’ve heard he lived in...�; ‘She must have been this or that...�; ‘there’s a story about him...� It’s the sweetest part of the tale-telling, the fairy-tale element. These are the embryos of a novel, what we remember forever, over and above the boring circumstances of time and place. I want to take them and blow life into them, tell them anew, stuff them with details I have prepared myself. I remember these stories so much more easily.�
(And passage like that are where you start to appreciate that both author and translator are poets.)
”Like language, like photography, postmemory is far more than its obvious function. It doesn’t just show us the past, but changes the present, because the past is the key to everything that occurs daily in the present.�
I could go on, but you get the idea.
Sometimes, Stepanova muses directly about a subject. Sometimes, she picks up an episode of family history or Russian history and, as she explores that she works her way to some deeper thoughts about memory. So musing on today’s selfies leads to reflections on Rembrandt’s self-portraits which gradually morphs into how we view the past and how we easily come to treat our dead as exhibitions, our memories affected by the time gap between then and now. It is all masterfully handled with understated and poetic writing.
This is the kind of book that should appear on book prize lists. I guess it could be fiction or non-fiction lists, but it must make some of them, surely.
April 17, 2021
A luminous shrine to the past
An essential part of us comes from our family history, the invisible links that exist between generations even without us knowing it. And that is precisely the reason why some embark in the quest of searching for their identities, while digging up deep into the past in an aim to discover who they really are. For Maria Stepanova the quest began at the tender age of ten, when the idea of writing a book about her family first erupted in her mind, as she tells us in the very last chapter of her remarkable In Memory of Memory. But even then, the writer to be is conscious of the fact that in order to write such a book, she needs to grow up and to know more.
She admits the book is about what we see when we look back; and in another chapter, states that her travels were justified: I am writing a book about my people. And thus, Stepanova takes us in a fabulous journey to the past. Triggered by the death of her aunt Galya, her father’s sister, who left behind an apartment full of memories, she enters into a world of objects scattered in what seems to be a museum and tries to find meaning to each one of them. The woven fabric of language decomposes instantly, she writes, knowing or sensing that in order to look back, she must do it differently.
In Memory of Memory is a hybrid book, not exactly a memoire and maybe not even a diary; it is not a novel, although one cannot avoid feeling the inner pulse of her prose and the vivacity and warmth of her narrative when she tells the story of her family. There are, however, important chapters that are profound essays on the meaning of memory; these seem to strengthen the novelesque sections, offering a vast array of ideas from authors such as Sontag, Sebald, Barthes, Hirsch, Todorov, Nabokov, Salomon, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Goldchain, just to name a few, because the list would turn out to be rather long. Stepanova is not content just quoting them, she confronts them, analyzes their words, interacts with them, and then suggests new ideas that would eventually merge, thus making a solid fabric so intricately woven that quite often, our eyes have to stop reading: those memorable moments of synergy when writer and reader become one.
Pochinky, a rural town in Novgorod, not far from Pushkin’s estate at Boldino, is where it all began. The little town of no interest to anyone, became the first dark eternity in the collective memory of our family, she writes, after quoting Nabokov: "existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness�. Covering a span of about one hundred years, the book follows the family members before the October revolution, up to the hard years of the Soviet regime and its inevitable fall. When the Soviet Union disappeared, our accumulated and preserved past became once again what it was to begin with: a museum of cultured life at the beginning of the twentieth century.
She explains that the task of committing everything to memory, is an integral part of what she is. It is her duty to show what can’t be seen, what lies beneath the visible. Then explains that the book is really not about her family but about how memory works and what memory wants from her.
Completely absorbed as I was in the reading of this book, at night, when I put it down, I went back to reading the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva: her words were not only the perfect counterpart but a confirmation of Stepanova’s immense task. It is almost impossible not to see a connection between both authors. And it is with her that I choose to finish this review, since I find that Tsvetaeva describes Stepanova’s project (and the spirit of her book) better than I ever could:
I thirst at once for every road!
I want it all: with a gypsy’s heart
To go to pilfer to the tune of a song,
To suffer for all to the sound of an organ
To rush into battle like an Amazon;
To tell fortunes in a black tower by the stars,
To lead children onward through the shadows...
So yesterday would become a legend,
So every day would be a mad spree!
__
An essential part of us comes from our family history, the invisible links that exist between generations even without us knowing it. And that is precisely the reason why some embark in the quest of searching for their identities, while digging up deep into the past in an aim to discover who they really are. For Maria Stepanova the quest began at the tender age of ten, when the idea of writing a book about her family first erupted in her mind, as she tells us in the very last chapter of her remarkable In Memory of Memory. But even then, the writer to be is conscious of the fact that in order to write such a book, she needs to grow up and to know more.
She admits the book is about what we see when we look back; and in another chapter, states that her travels were justified: I am writing a book about my people. And thus, Stepanova takes us in a fabulous journey to the past. Triggered by the death of her aunt Galya, her father’s sister, who left behind an apartment full of memories, she enters into a world of objects scattered in what seems to be a museum and tries to find meaning to each one of them. The woven fabric of language decomposes instantly, she writes, knowing or sensing that in order to look back, she must do it differently.
In Memory of Memory is a hybrid book, not exactly a memoire and maybe not even a diary; it is not a novel, although one cannot avoid feeling the inner pulse of her prose and the vivacity and warmth of her narrative when she tells the story of her family. There are, however, important chapters that are profound essays on the meaning of memory; these seem to strengthen the novelesque sections, offering a vast array of ideas from authors such as Sontag, Sebald, Barthes, Hirsch, Todorov, Nabokov, Salomon, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Goldchain, just to name a few, because the list would turn out to be rather long. Stepanova is not content just quoting them, she confronts them, analyzes their words, interacts with them, and then suggests new ideas that would eventually merge, thus making a solid fabric so intricately woven that quite often, our eyes have to stop reading: those memorable moments of synergy when writer and reader become one.
Pochinky, a rural town in Novgorod, not far from Pushkin’s estate at Boldino, is where it all began. The little town of no interest to anyone, became the first dark eternity in the collective memory of our family, she writes, after quoting Nabokov: "existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness�. Covering a span of about one hundred years, the book follows the family members before the October revolution, up to the hard years of the Soviet regime and its inevitable fall. When the Soviet Union disappeared, our accumulated and preserved past became once again what it was to begin with: a museum of cultured life at the beginning of the twentieth century.
She explains that the task of committing everything to memory, is an integral part of what she is. It is her duty to show what can’t be seen, what lies beneath the visible. Then explains that the book is really not about her family but about how memory works and what memory wants from her.
Completely absorbed as I was in the reading of this book, at night, when I put it down, I went back to reading the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva: her words were not only the perfect counterpart but a confirmation of Stepanova’s immense task. It is almost impossible not to see a connection between both authors. And it is with her that I choose to finish this review, since I find that Tsvetaeva describes Stepanova’s project (and the spirit of her book) better than I ever could:
I thirst at once for every road!
I want it all: with a gypsy’s heart
To go to pilfer to the tune of a song,
To suffer for all to the sound of an organ
To rush into battle like an Amazon;
To tell fortunes in a black tower by the stars,
To lead children onward through the shadows...
So yesterday would become a legend,
So every day would be a mad spree!
__
November 8, 2022
122nd book of 2022.
4.5. Brilliant: a wonderful walk through history, both personal and not, with a poet's touch. I see Stepanova as the place between W.G. Sebald and Olivia Laing (particularly as Henry Darger gets a flying mention). I read fairly recently that a certain literary lineage can be tracked through from Proust, to Nabokov, to Sebald. In some ways I imagine Stepanova being the next inevitable step in this particular line of writers. Regarding Proust and Sebald alone, Stepanova has something of the melancholy and loneliness. There's a lot of silence in her book: describing photographs, old films, pan-European landscapes... I recently said to someone that this book feels as if it should be dense and elitist but it just isn't; Stepanova has somehow nailed this perfect tone of personal, impersonal, human, humble, light. As Laing did in The Lonely City so much of the feelings in this book is derived from talking about artists and their work. There are long digressions. At many points I forgot this was a book about her family: in some ways it's not. It's a book about memory, art, what we owe the dead and how we can talk about them/remember them. Obviously other novelists and artists help Stepanova (in times of need who doesn't turn to art?) process her thoughts and emotions. Naturally, with how the book reads, Sebald and Nabokov get many name-drops. Proust less than I imagined but he's here too. Considering it is such a mix of travelogue, criticism, art exploration, history, etc., like a Sebald novel, I devoured it page after page because of Stepanova's prose. Highly recommended. You may ask why it isn't a 5-star, then; this is a good question and one I can't answer. I just didn't quite get swept with that 5-star feeling even though I have almost nothing bad to say about the book and would readily recommend it. Reading is a mysterious thing.
4.5. Brilliant: a wonderful walk through history, both personal and not, with a poet's touch. I see Stepanova as the place between W.G. Sebald and Olivia Laing (particularly as Henry Darger gets a flying mention). I read fairly recently that a certain literary lineage can be tracked through from Proust, to Nabokov, to Sebald. In some ways I imagine Stepanova being the next inevitable step in this particular line of writers. Regarding Proust and Sebald alone, Stepanova has something of the melancholy and loneliness. There's a lot of silence in her book: describing photographs, old films, pan-European landscapes... I recently said to someone that this book feels as if it should be dense and elitist but it just isn't; Stepanova has somehow nailed this perfect tone of personal, impersonal, human, humble, light. As Laing did in The Lonely City so much of the feelings in this book is derived from talking about artists and their work. There are long digressions. At many points I forgot this was a book about her family: in some ways it's not. It's a book about memory, art, what we owe the dead and how we can talk about them/remember them. Obviously other novelists and artists help Stepanova (in times of need who doesn't turn to art?) process her thoughts and emotions. Naturally, with how the book reads, Sebald and Nabokov get many name-drops. Proust less than I imagined but he's here too. Considering it is such a mix of travelogue, criticism, art exploration, history, etc., like a Sebald novel, I devoured it page after page because of Stepanova's prose. Highly recommended. You may ask why it isn't a 5-star, then; this is a good question and one I can't answer. I just didn't quite get swept with that 5-star feeling even though I have almost nothing bad to say about the book and would readily recommend it. Reading is a mysterious thing.
April 22, 2021
Mama, ce carte! Alambicata, dificila pe alocuri din cauza multitudinii de personaje,unele purtand acelasi nume sau nume asemanatoare: Leolea vs Leonea, este totusi o lectura pe care n-o poti lasa din mana. Parte biografie,memorialistica,eseu parte fictiune si jurnal de calatorii , atat spatiale cat ,mai mult,si temporale, carte de istorie a Rusiei , a URSS-ului, a Europei, eseu cultural, despre infinite subiecte, dialog despre memorie cu personalitati de talia lui Borges,Susan Sontag,Mandelstam,Sebald (trebuie neaparat sa-l citesc),Charlotte Solomon,Barthes, Tvetaieva, memorial al iudaismului . Naucitor carusel al ideilor.
May 3, 2021
Commento lungo, ma se un libro è un capolavoro è ammissibile un‘impressione di lettura breve?
«Se dovessi spiegare cos’ho contro le immagini, direi che soffrono di una malattia comune, l’amnesia euforica: non ricordano il proprio significato, da dove sono sbucate, chi sono i loro parenti, ma nonostante tutto godono di ottima salute».
Uno degli interlocutori di Marija Stepanova [Mosca, 1972, poetessa e saggista] la scoraggia a scrivere l’ennesimo libro in cui una persona erudita gira per il mondo mediante borse di studio alla ricerca delle proprie radici, “ce ne sono tanti di libri così oggigiorno�, di famiglie ebraiche travolte dalla shoah, da rivoluzioni d’ottobre, disgregazioni dell’URSS. Questo lo sa e sa anche che i suoi antenati non si sono distinti in atti eroici, né vili, né memorabili, i documenti in suo possesso non hanno coinvolgenti segreti da rivelare, scriverà quindi sul «meccanismo della memoria e su ciò che vuole da me».
Lo pubblicherà a 45 anni, nel 2017.
“Memoria della memoria�, tradotto nel 2020 in molti paesi (con stupore dell’editore russo che aveva previsto solo 3000 copie nel 2017) è finalista all’International Booker Prize inglese, non può non vincerlo, ci sono libri che sai che non possono non vincere, anche se non conosci gli altri finalisti.
Fin dall’adolescenza Marija Stepanova ha annotato su biglietti cose che non dovevano perdersi, il primo amore, una frase, una promessa, un palazzo, ma poi questi biglietti si sono persi e ripersi nei traslochi, le è accaduto con recensioni, con i ritratti, con i ricordi. Confessa di aver visitato la casa di un suo bisnonno a Saratov, una città che non aveva mai visto - un amico riesce a ritrovare attraverso Google l’indirizzo del palazzo dove il suo bisnonno ha abitato all’inizio del Novecento -, entra in quel cortile, ne visita la casa, ritrova le suggestioni che aveva in mente leggendo antichi documenti e lettere, salvo poi rendersi conto che ha sbagliato civico.
Tutto questo frullare è diventato un capolavoro - posso sbagliare confondendo libri gne gne con libri ben fatti, ma un capolavoro credo di riconoscerlo -; inserendo di tutto, lettere di antenati senza spiegarle, libri letti, palazzi, oggetti, recensioni di documentari, incursioni nell’opera di Charlotte Salomon, illustrazioni delle scatole meravigliose di Joseph Cornell (in un capitolo perfetto) riferimenti a Sebald, Calasso, il senso del passato in Osip Mandel'štam, Marina Cvetaeva, Pasternak, i ritratti di Rembrandt, Anne Carson, l’incendio nella foresta, il quadro di Piero di Cosimo che caratterizza il toccante capitolo finale...
Non foto, né disegni, solo parole attraverso una prosa splendida, accuratamente tradotta da Emanuela Bonacorsi.
Stepanova riesce a ottenere - per intermittenze e correlazioni - quello che un titolo apparentemente pretenzioso vorrebbe fare.
Quando si sofferma a scrivere della scatole di Joseph Cornell, artista statunitense vissuto nella metà del Novecento, che confezionava scatole sottovetro nelle quali inseriva suppellettili di mercatini, sfere, ritratti di attrici in un collage enigmatico, ricorda che nella sua infanzia i bambini seppellivano in posti segreti i loro oggetti cari, ‘i segreti�:
«Chi ha vissuto in Russia negli anni settanta può vedere nelle scatole di Cornell qualcosa di molto simile ai segreti, la passione della mia infanzia.
Non c’� nulla nell’alquanto inespressiva vita di allora che spieghi la comparsa di questo gioco. A rigor di termini, nel gioco non c’erano altro che le regole. I segreti non erano un’occupazione ma un mistero che doveva essere condiviso solo con gli amici del cuore, e tutto ciò che aveva a che fare con loro non era come gli altri nostri passatempi a scuola o in cortile. Erano letteralmente underground: venivano tenuti sottoterra come tesori o come defunti. In campagna, dove è consueto chinarsi a terra per piantare un seme o raccogliere un frutto, non ci sarebbe nulla di straordinario in questo. Ma noi eravamo bambini di città che memorizzavano la via di casa dalle crepe dell’asfalto e non avevano nessun legame speciale con la terra nera e granulosa che a primavera sprigionava l’acacia e i lillà».
Queste divagazioni nell’opera di Cornell sono contenute in un capitolo che inizia con la cupola del palazzo di Würzbug, affrescato magnificamente da Giambattista Tiepolo, con pappagalli e animali di ogni specie, “principesse, coccodrilli, pallide gambe di creature divine�, semidistrutto dai bombardamenti e riaffrescato nella sua forma originaria col rosa prevalente.
E così via con continui salti e guizzi e incursioni nel corso dei singoli capitoli e nel corso del libro tutto. Cosa sto intendendo: che questo libro è impressionante nello scartare di lato, tra una suggestione e un’altra senza mai perdersi, supera e di molto molti libri ai quali è stato accostato.
Il sottotitolo dell’edizione russa è «romance», romanza, qualcosa che ha a che fare col romanticismo, ma anche performance vocale e leggera; in un’intervista Marija Stepanova spiega che questo libro, se proprio ma proprio vogliamo incasellarlo in un genere, è un libro d’amore, d’amore per tutti coloro che non abbiamo conosciuto nella loro vita, ma che abbiamo conosciuto in altre forme, e queste altre forme premono, senza scampo, a modo loro.
«Se dovessi spiegare cos’ho contro le immagini, direi che soffrono di una malattia comune, l’amnesia euforica: non ricordano il proprio significato, da dove sono sbucate, chi sono i loro parenti, ma nonostante tutto godono di ottima salute».
Uno degli interlocutori di Marija Stepanova [Mosca, 1972, poetessa e saggista] la scoraggia a scrivere l’ennesimo libro in cui una persona erudita gira per il mondo mediante borse di studio alla ricerca delle proprie radici, “ce ne sono tanti di libri così oggigiorno�, di famiglie ebraiche travolte dalla shoah, da rivoluzioni d’ottobre, disgregazioni dell’URSS. Questo lo sa e sa anche che i suoi antenati non si sono distinti in atti eroici, né vili, né memorabili, i documenti in suo possesso non hanno coinvolgenti segreti da rivelare, scriverà quindi sul «meccanismo della memoria e su ciò che vuole da me».
Lo pubblicherà a 45 anni, nel 2017.
“Memoria della memoria�, tradotto nel 2020 in molti paesi (con stupore dell’editore russo che aveva previsto solo 3000 copie nel 2017) è finalista all’International Booker Prize inglese, non può non vincerlo, ci sono libri che sai che non possono non vincere, anche se non conosci gli altri finalisti.
Fin dall’adolescenza Marija Stepanova ha annotato su biglietti cose che non dovevano perdersi, il primo amore, una frase, una promessa, un palazzo, ma poi questi biglietti si sono persi e ripersi nei traslochi, le è accaduto con recensioni, con i ritratti, con i ricordi. Confessa di aver visitato la casa di un suo bisnonno a Saratov, una città che non aveva mai visto - un amico riesce a ritrovare attraverso Google l’indirizzo del palazzo dove il suo bisnonno ha abitato all’inizio del Novecento -, entra in quel cortile, ne visita la casa, ritrova le suggestioni che aveva in mente leggendo antichi documenti e lettere, salvo poi rendersi conto che ha sbagliato civico.
Tutto questo frullare è diventato un capolavoro - posso sbagliare confondendo libri gne gne con libri ben fatti, ma un capolavoro credo di riconoscerlo -; inserendo di tutto, lettere di antenati senza spiegarle, libri letti, palazzi, oggetti, recensioni di documentari, incursioni nell’opera di Charlotte Salomon, illustrazioni delle scatole meravigliose di Joseph Cornell (in un capitolo perfetto) riferimenti a Sebald, Calasso, il senso del passato in Osip Mandel'štam, Marina Cvetaeva, Pasternak, i ritratti di Rembrandt, Anne Carson, l’incendio nella foresta, il quadro di Piero di Cosimo che caratterizza il toccante capitolo finale...
Non foto, né disegni, solo parole attraverso una prosa splendida, accuratamente tradotta da Emanuela Bonacorsi.
Stepanova riesce a ottenere - per intermittenze e correlazioni - quello che un titolo apparentemente pretenzioso vorrebbe fare.
Quando si sofferma a scrivere della scatole di Joseph Cornell, artista statunitense vissuto nella metà del Novecento, che confezionava scatole sottovetro nelle quali inseriva suppellettili di mercatini, sfere, ritratti di attrici in un collage enigmatico, ricorda che nella sua infanzia i bambini seppellivano in posti segreti i loro oggetti cari, ‘i segreti�:
«Chi ha vissuto in Russia negli anni settanta può vedere nelle scatole di Cornell qualcosa di molto simile ai segreti, la passione della mia infanzia.
Non c’� nulla nell’alquanto inespressiva vita di allora che spieghi la comparsa di questo gioco. A rigor di termini, nel gioco non c’erano altro che le regole. I segreti non erano un’occupazione ma un mistero che doveva essere condiviso solo con gli amici del cuore, e tutto ciò che aveva a che fare con loro non era come gli altri nostri passatempi a scuola o in cortile. Erano letteralmente underground: venivano tenuti sottoterra come tesori o come defunti. In campagna, dove è consueto chinarsi a terra per piantare un seme o raccogliere un frutto, non ci sarebbe nulla di straordinario in questo. Ma noi eravamo bambini di città che memorizzavano la via di casa dalle crepe dell’asfalto e non avevano nessun legame speciale con la terra nera e granulosa che a primavera sprigionava l’acacia e i lillà».
Queste divagazioni nell’opera di Cornell sono contenute in un capitolo che inizia con la cupola del palazzo di Würzbug, affrescato magnificamente da Giambattista Tiepolo, con pappagalli e animali di ogni specie, “principesse, coccodrilli, pallide gambe di creature divine�, semidistrutto dai bombardamenti e riaffrescato nella sua forma originaria col rosa prevalente.
E così via con continui salti e guizzi e incursioni nel corso dei singoli capitoli e nel corso del libro tutto. Cosa sto intendendo: che questo libro è impressionante nello scartare di lato, tra una suggestione e un’altra senza mai perdersi, supera e di molto molti libri ai quali è stato accostato.
Il sottotitolo dell’edizione russa è «romance», romanza, qualcosa che ha a che fare col romanticismo, ma anche performance vocale e leggera; in un’intervista Marija Stepanova spiega che questo libro, se proprio ma proprio vogliamo incasellarlo in un genere, è un libro d’amore, d’amore per tutti coloro che non abbiamo conosciuto nella loro vita, ma che abbiamo conosciuto in altre forme, e queste altre forme premono, senza scampo, a modo loro.
Read
March 11, 2021Оставям тази книга недочетена, просто нямам сили да понеса прашасалата и угнетяваща атмосфера, която носи. Езикът и стилът са брилянтни, личи си, че това е писане от висока класа, но просто аз не съм правилният читател, който да я оцени.
April 27, 2021
Regula mea este: dacă o carte nu mă cucerește în primul sfert din dimensiunea sa, renunț. În 100 de pagini nu am aflat decât de ce se uita X pierdut în zare în poza aia, de ce Y avea tivul desfăcut și era abătută etc. Descrieri insignifiante despre oameni care au însemnat pentru naratoare ce înseamnă pentru mine: nimic. Mă tem că nu înțeleg încercarea disperată, poate chiar bolnavă, de a căuta în trecutul atât de îndepărtat și nu simt că tabloul care se va usca până la finalul cărții va merita prețul pentru a-l privi: timpul meu și oboseala pe care mi-o provoacă acest melanj de stiluri expuse haotic. Pur și simplu, nu am răbdare să citesc două pagini despre cum arăta un carnet.
February 23, 2021
It was the title that made me want to read this. "In Memory of Memory" is, after all, a title so full of beauty and longing that just reading it summons all sorts of wistful feelings. But as beautiful a title as it is, it doesn't quite sum this book up.
"Meanderings on Memory," perhaps? "Meditations on Memory"?
Shows and books on minimalism, tiny houses and van life are the current rage. This book is essentially the opposite of all that. An anti-minimalist novel, if it even is a novel, in both form and content.
As for form, coming in at 500 pages, "In Memory of Memory" is about two or three times longer than it ought to be. As for content, the entire "premise" rests on the author rifling through the many belongings in her deceased aunt's home and basically riffing on them.
Coming from a family of serious hoarders, believe me when I tell you that Stepanova's aunt is a legendary hoarder. A "better to just burn this place down than actually have to sort through all this garbage" kind of hoarder. But one person's garbage is another person's treasure.
I often find that my head starts hurting if I'm in a particularly messy place. Intense disorganization kills me. My head hurt for a while reading this.
One thing leads to another, and the author is suddenly off on a 150-page digression over this postcard or that figurine that leads to her unearthing essentially her entire family tree —or at least, several generations of it, dating back to Czarist Russia.
I won't lie to you and say I followed it all. There are so many family names thrown around, so many anecdotes about this or that uncle, with a few literary figures tossed in for good measure. What's real and what's fiction? It's not always entirely clear, and that often seems to be exactly the point —the reliability of memory, and now, on page 103, I'm riveted, mesmerized by the beautiful language and the ruminations on the ways in which "postmemory treats the past as raw material, destined for editing" ... mmm, "postmemory" ... But then the thread is lost, and we're off again talking about the stepfather of a friend or some other distant relation.
"In Memory of Memory" dipped in and out like this, my consciousness dipping in and out with it. The writing is always beautiful, flowing easily across the page so that my eyes just followed the lines at some points —not really taking in whether we were now talking about Lyonya or Lyolya or Lyodik or some other aunt or cousin, but just drifting along with the current of words, my mind occasionally reflecting back on this or that thing as I read, awash in my own memories, until a particularly poignant paragraph or phrase would make me pause in admiration.
If there were a book club built around the theme of "reading as meditation," this would be the perfect pick. It's a pleasant diversion, exercise for the eyes, even if the words never feel like they quite build up to a cohesive whole.
And, at 500 pages, "In Memory of Memory" feels too long without really feeling too long. By which I mean that, as for content, hundreds of pages could have been lopped off without it really feeling like anything was missing, and yet despite that I was never really tempted to stop reading and put it aside.
It's a beautiful, incomprehensible thing, but only incomprehensible in the sense that it's about as interesting as going down your own family tree � full of names that feel vaguely familiar but which mean nothing to you, and stories of people that are, frankly, not particularly interesting.
That's assuming, of course, that, like me, you're not particularly interested in people who lived before you were born simply because they lived before you were born, but because they lived somewhat fascinating lives.
Writing in as roundabout a way as I am, it may not surprise you to find that I'm still trying to grasp whether or not I even liked the book. Well yes, I liked it, but how much? It read to me like something a Russian may have written � and Sebald is obviously an inspiration � except that it's far more meandering and unfocused.
Ironically, despite having finished it in this morning's smaller hours, I already find my memory of "In Memory of Memory" to be dissipating ... carried off on a breeze of Russian patronymics and musings on memories belonging not to the author, but to me.
"Meanderings on Memory," perhaps? "Meditations on Memory"?
Shows and books on minimalism, tiny houses and van life are the current rage. This book is essentially the opposite of all that. An anti-minimalist novel, if it even is a novel, in both form and content.
As for form, coming in at 500 pages, "In Memory of Memory" is about two or three times longer than it ought to be. As for content, the entire "premise" rests on the author rifling through the many belongings in her deceased aunt's home and basically riffing on them.
Coming from a family of serious hoarders, believe me when I tell you that Stepanova's aunt is a legendary hoarder. A "better to just burn this place down than actually have to sort through all this garbage" kind of hoarder. But one person's garbage is another person's treasure.
I often find that my head starts hurting if I'm in a particularly messy place. Intense disorganization kills me. My head hurt for a while reading this.
One thing leads to another, and the author is suddenly off on a 150-page digression over this postcard or that figurine that leads to her unearthing essentially her entire family tree —or at least, several generations of it, dating back to Czarist Russia.
I won't lie to you and say I followed it all. There are so many family names thrown around, so many anecdotes about this or that uncle, with a few literary figures tossed in for good measure. What's real and what's fiction? It's not always entirely clear, and that often seems to be exactly the point —the reliability of memory, and now, on page 103, I'm riveted, mesmerized by the beautiful language and the ruminations on the ways in which "postmemory treats the past as raw material, destined for editing" ... mmm, "postmemory" ... But then the thread is lost, and we're off again talking about the stepfather of a friend or some other distant relation.
"In Memory of Memory" dipped in and out like this, my consciousness dipping in and out with it. The writing is always beautiful, flowing easily across the page so that my eyes just followed the lines at some points —not really taking in whether we were now talking about Lyonya or Lyolya or Lyodik or some other aunt or cousin, but just drifting along with the current of words, my mind occasionally reflecting back on this or that thing as I read, awash in my own memories, until a particularly poignant paragraph or phrase would make me pause in admiration.
If there were a book club built around the theme of "reading as meditation," this would be the perfect pick. It's a pleasant diversion, exercise for the eyes, even if the words never feel like they quite build up to a cohesive whole.
And, at 500 pages, "In Memory of Memory" feels too long without really feeling too long. By which I mean that, as for content, hundreds of pages could have been lopped off without it really feeling like anything was missing, and yet despite that I was never really tempted to stop reading and put it aside.
It's a beautiful, incomprehensible thing, but only incomprehensible in the sense that it's about as interesting as going down your own family tree � full of names that feel vaguely familiar but which mean nothing to you, and stories of people that are, frankly, not particularly interesting.
That's assuming, of course, that, like me, you're not particularly interested in people who lived before you were born simply because they lived before you were born, but because they lived somewhat fascinating lives.
Writing in as roundabout a way as I am, it may not surprise you to find that I'm still trying to grasp whether or not I even liked the book. Well yes, I liked it, but how much? It read to me like something a Russian may have written � and Sebald is obviously an inspiration � except that it's far more meandering and unfocused.
Ironically, despite having finished it in this morning's smaller hours, I already find my memory of "In Memory of Memory" to be dissipating ... carried off on a breeze of Russian patronymics and musings on memories belonging not to the author, but to me.
April 4, 2020
Засега споделям само някои пасажи и цитати, по-нататък ще си събера впечатленията. (направих го и забравих да споделя тук - отзивът ми е ).
***
"Раят за изчезващите неща и обичайните занимания явно се състои именно в споменаването им."
"Случи се около една любовна история, която тогава ми изглеждаше страшно важна, предопределяща всичко на света; с годините тя така избледня и изветря, че сега вече не бих могла да възстановя онова чувство за всеначалие, с което я изживях."
"Любима ми беше една малка серия картички с нощни градове � сумрачни паркове, трамвай, светещ остър завой, празнта въртележка, нечие изгубено дете стои край цветна леха, стиснало в ръце ненужен обръч за серсо, високи къщи и непоносимо рижави, сякаш начервосани прозорци, зад които тече още онзи, старинният живот. Всичко това, тъмносиньо и със светлинки, излъчваше чистото вещество на тъгата � и беше двойно и тройно недостижимо."
"Знаех, че истинският алеф на това повествование вече е в дожоба ми. Тов� беше дребна, около три сантиметра фигурка от бял порцелан � много условно изваяно къдрокосо голо момченце, което можеше да мине за амурче, ако не бяха дългите му чорапи. Бях го купил от московски антикварен битак, където твърде рано бяха осъзнали, че миналото струва скъпо. …] Тези евтини ��игурки се произвеждали в един германски град в продължение на половин век, каза тя, от края на осемдесетте гозини на деветнайсти век. Продавали ги къде ли не, в бакалници и магазини за домашни потреби, но най-важната им работа била друга: евтини и непретениозни, те били ползвани като насипен амортизатор при превозване на товари � за да не се драскат един друг скъпите тежки предмети при сблъскване в тъмното. Тоесто момченцата се произвеждали с предварителното очакване да бъдат осакатени, а после, преди войната, заводът бил затнорен. Складовете, натъпкани с порцеланова продукция, стояри заключени, докато не били бомбандирани � и след още някое време, когато отворили сандъците, се оказало, че в тях всичко е натрошено.
И тогава аз купих своето момченце …] То казваше всичко наведнъж. И че нито една история не стига до нас цяла, без отчупени стъпала и разсечени лица. И че лакуните и зевовете са неизменен спътник на оцеляването, негов скрит двигател, механизъм за по-нататъшно ускоряване. И че само травмата прави от масовия продукт недвусмислените, единствени на света нас. И разбира се, че самата аз съм такова момченце, ширпотреба, производно от колективната катастрофа на отминалия век, негов survivor и неволев бенефициент, по чудо останал жив и на светло."
"Миналото подивява, обраства с безпаметство като с гора."
"Пластилиновата податливост на паметта я прави лесен заместител на вярата � упование, загледано назад. Нейната субективност и избирателност дават възможност да избереш кой да е историческият отрязък, който отдавна няма нищо общо с историята: за някого и трийсетте години на двайсети век могат да станат изгубен рай на невинността и постоянството. Особено във време на тъжен страх пред неведомото. В сравнение с бъдещето, където не ти се ходи, вече случилото се някак се одомашнява и дори изглежда поносимо."
"понякога ми се струваше, че в определени случаи самият живот влиза и гаси лампите, за да не смущава оставащите."
"Секуларното общество премахва от уравнението идеята за спасението � и конструкцията моментално губи равновесие. Без спасяващата инстанция съ-хранението губи приставката си и се оказа нещо като много достолерен склад: музей, библиотека, онзи събирач, който осигурява формата на условното, ограниено безсмъртие � трайно удължен ден, единствена версия на вечния живот, достъпен в режим на еманципация."
"Безсмъртието, каквото го познаваме, е разбирано като фокус: пълното и окончателно изчезване на всекиго от нас може да се прикрие с бленди, даващи илюзията за присъствие. И колкото повече са блендите � съхранени мигове, реплики, снимки, � толкова по-поносимо изглежда своето и чуждото битие. Визуалният и словесният боклук на повседневността внезапно е излязъл на светло; вече не го измитат –пазя� го за черни дни."
"Лекотата, с която мъртвине се съгласяват с всичко, което правим с тях, провокира живите да си позволяват все повече. Индустрията на паметта има сенчест близнак � индустрията на припомнянето (и приблизителното разбиране), която използва чуждата реалност като суровина, годна за преработка."
“Д� запазиш достойнството на миналото, а на точното знание � неговите права, първото от които е имунитет към готовите концепции и рамки, привнесени отвън. Но именно от тях днес мира няма; тревожното търсене на свързаност е в самия въздух, който диша обществото във времена на разпад, липса на обща перспектива и еднозначни отговори.
Когато елементите на собствената повседневност започнат да се клатят, отхвърляйки всеки опит за системно тълкуване, човек започва да търси перила и да се радва на всеки намек за структура. Нещо повече, започва да вижда структура във всяка последователност, като привества случайността и се доверява на съвпаденията като на признаци за вътрешно родство.�
"Жан Кокто казва, че киното е единственото изкуство, което снима работата на смъртта. Автопортретите на Рембранд, които не правят нищо друго, от само себе си се подреждат в нещо като протокино � а километрите селфита, засвети от човечеството и изложени за комунален достъп, ми изглеждат като реверс, обратна страна: като хроника на смъртта, случваща се пред очите на всички и отдавна вече неитересна на никого."
“Так� както удавник изпод черна вода, миналото се промушва в съвременността.�
“Повтарям � моята памет не е любовна, а враждебна и тя работи не за възпроизвеждане, а за отстраняването на миналото.�
"В писмата на Льодик постоянно се споменава дете: все още безименно и незнайно от какъв пол, дали вече се е родило, или всеки момент ще се роди. Тази една родира се, но вече важна за него рожба на Льоля и Льоня е била моята майка, Наташа Гуревич. Тя ми е разказвала за Льодик, когато бях малка; от дете е избрала него за свой герой- направила го е център на своя малък свят - и не го забрави до края на живота си."
"Най-интересното в собствената ти история е онова, което не знаеш; в чуждите- магнетизмът на избирателното родство, който те кара безпогрешно да вадиш от стотина други именно тази."
"Тя седеше на дивана от Салтиково във вилата, облечена в някакво пъстро пеньоарче, много дребничка, изсъхнала до огризка, и под бледата жасминова светлина изглеждаше почти прозрачна, но гледаше напред с болдива, насекомна втренченост, така че беше ясно: на наближаващото няма да му е лесно да я сдъвче. [...] и сега, разронена, изгубила всякаква тежест и обем, тя все още оставаше паметник на напусналата я сила."
“Ням� да забравя това. С неочаквано висок тенор дядо Коля запя внезапно, затворил очи и леко поклащайки се, сякаш с тяло си пробиваше път към тъмен и изглежда бездънен кладенец. Мен вече изобщо не ме виждаше, сякаш това не ставаше по моя поръчка. Простата следникава мелодия, която пееше, не приличаше на нищо познато; нето разпаленост, нито романтика, само изплискващ се ужас � сякаш нещо много старо се пръкна под светлината и потреперващо остана насред стаята. Песента беше от “жалните� � за прокудено от родното място момче и неговото самотно гробче, за което се говореше ласкаво, като за близко същество � но нито в думите, нито в гласа на изпълнителя имаше нещо човешко, сякаш той се бе озовал изведнъж от обратната страна на житейските грижи, където се маха с ръка еднакво и на всички. Облъхна ме смъртен студ.�
***
"Раят за изчезващите неща и обичайните занимания явно се състои именно в споменаването им."
"Случи се около една любовна история, която тогава ми изглеждаше страшно важна, предопределяща всичко на света; с годините тя така избледня и изветря, че сега вече не бих могла да възстановя онова чувство за всеначалие, с което я изживях."
"Любима ми беше една малка серия картички с нощни градове � сумрачни паркове, трамвай, светещ остър завой, празнта въртележка, нечие изгубено дете стои край цветна леха, стиснало в ръце ненужен обръч за серсо, високи къщи и непоносимо рижави, сякаш начервосани прозорци, зад които тече още онзи, старинният живот. Всичко това, тъмносиньо и със светлинки, излъчваше чистото вещество на тъгата � и беше двойно и тройно недостижимо."
"Знаех, че истинският алеф на това повествование вече е в дожоба ми. Тов� беше дребна, около три сантиметра фигурка от бял порцелан � много условно изваяно къдрокосо голо момченце, което можеше да мине за амурче, ако не бяха дългите му чорапи. Бях го купил от московски антикварен битак, където твърде рано бяха осъзнали, че миналото струва скъпо. …] Тези евтини ��игурки се произвеждали в един германски град в продължение на половин век, каза тя, от края на осемдесетте гозини на деветнайсти век. Продавали ги къде ли не, в бакалници и магазини за домашни потреби, но най-важната им работа била друга: евтини и непретениозни, те били ползвани като насипен амортизатор при превозване на товари � за да не се драскат един друг скъпите тежки предмети при сблъскване в тъмното. Тоесто момченцата се произвеждали с предварителното очакване да бъдат осакатени, а после, преди войната, заводът бил затнорен. Складовете, натъпкани с порцеланова продукция, стояри заключени, докато не били бомбандирани � и след още някое време, когато отворили сандъците, се оказало, че в тях всичко е натрошено.
И тогава аз купих своето момченце …] То казваше всичко наведнъж. И че нито една история не стига до нас цяла, без отчупени стъпала и разсечени лица. И че лакуните и зевовете са неизменен спътник на оцеляването, негов скрит двигател, механизъм за по-нататъшно ускоряване. И че само травмата прави от масовия продукт недвусмислените, единствени на света нас. И разбира се, че самата аз съм такова момченце, ширпотреба, производно от колективната катастрофа на отминалия век, негов survivor и неволев бенефициент, по чудо останал жив и на светло."
"Миналото подивява, обраства с безпаметство като с гора."
"Пластилиновата податливост на паметта я прави лесен заместител на вярата � упование, загледано назад. Нейната субективност и избирателност дават възможност да избереш кой да е историческият отрязък, който отдавна няма нищо общо с историята: за някого и трийсетте години на двайсети век могат да станат изгубен рай на невинността и постоянството. Особено във време на тъжен страх пред неведомото. В сравнение с бъдещето, където не ти се ходи, вече случилото се някак се одомашнява и дори изглежда поносимо."
"понякога ми се струваше, че в определени случаи самият живот влиза и гаси лампите, за да не смущава оставащите."
"Секуларното общество премахва от уравнението идеята за спасението � и конструкцията моментално губи равновесие. Без спасяващата инстанция съ-хранението губи приставката си и се оказа нещо като много достолерен склад: музей, библиотека, онзи събирач, който осигурява формата на условното, ограниено безсмъртие � трайно удължен ден, единствена версия на вечния живот, достъпен в режим на еманципация."
"Безсмъртието, каквото го познаваме, е разбирано като фокус: пълното и окончателно изчезване на всекиго от нас може да се прикрие с бленди, даващи илюзията за присъствие. И колкото повече са блендите � съхранени мигове, реплики, снимки, � толкова по-поносимо изглежда своето и чуждото битие. Визуалният и словесният боклук на повседневността внезапно е излязъл на светло; вече не го измитат –пазя� го за черни дни."
"Лекотата, с която мъртвине се съгласяват с всичко, което правим с тях, провокира живите да си позволяват все повече. Индустрията на паметта има сенчест близнак � индустрията на припомнянето (и приблизителното разбиране), която използва чуждата реалност като суровина, годна за преработка."
“Д� запазиш достойнството на миналото, а на точното знание � неговите права, първото от които е имунитет към готовите концепции и рамки, привнесени отвън. Но именно от тях днес мира няма; тревожното търсене на свързаност е в самия въздух, който диша обществото във времена на разпад, липса на обща перспектива и еднозначни отговори.
Когато елементите на собствената повседневност започнат да се клатят, отхвърляйки всеки опит за системно тълкуване, човек започва да търси перила и да се радва на всеки намек за структура. Нещо повече, започва да вижда структура във всяка последователност, като привества случайността и се доверява на съвпаденията като на признаци за вътрешно родство.�
"Жан Кокто казва, че киното е единственото изкуство, което снима работата на смъртта. Автопортретите на Рембранд, които не правят нищо друго, от само себе си се подреждат в нещо като протокино � а километрите селфита, засвети от човечеството и изложени за комунален достъп, ми изглеждат като реверс, обратна страна: като хроника на смъртта, случваща се пред очите на всички и отдавна вече неитересна на никого."
“Так� както удавник изпод черна вода, миналото се промушва в съвременността.�
“Повтарям � моята памет не е любовна, а враждебна и тя работи не за възпроизвеждане, а за отстраняването на миналото.�
"В писмата на Льодик постоянно се споменава дете: все още безименно и незнайно от какъв пол, дали вече се е родило, или всеки момент ще се роди. Тази една родира се, но вече важна за него рожба на Льоля и Льоня е била моята майка, Наташа Гуревич. Тя ми е разказвала за Льодик, когато бях малка; от дете е избрала него за свой герой- направила го е център на своя малък свят - и не го забрави до края на живота си."
"Най-интересното в собствената ти история е онова, което не знаеш; в чуждите- магнетизмът на избирателното родство, който те кара безпогрешно да вадиш от стотина други именно тази."
"Тя седеше на дивана от Салтиково във вилата, облечена в някакво пъстро пеньоарче, много дребничка, изсъхнала до огризка, и под бледата жасминова светлина изглеждаше почти прозрачна, но гледаше напред с болдива, насекомна втренченост, така че беше ясно: на наближаващото няма да му е лесно да я сдъвче. [...] и сега, разронена, изгубила всякаква тежест и обем, тя все още оставаше паметник на напусналата я сила."
“Ням� да забравя това. С неочаквано висок тенор дядо Коля запя внезапно, затворил очи и леко поклащайки се, сякаш с тяло си пробиваше път към тъмен и изглежда бездънен кладенец. Мен вече изобщо не ме виждаше, сякаш това не ставаше по моя поръчка. Простата следникава мелодия, която пееше, не приличаше на нищо познато; нето разпаленост, нито романтика, само изплискващ се ужас � сякаш нещо много старо се пръкна под светлината и потреперващо остана насред стаята. Песента беше от “жалните� � за прокудено от родното място момче и неговото самотно гробче, за което се говореше ласкаво, като за близко същество � но нито в думите, нито в гласа на изпълнителя имаше нещо човешко, сякаш той се бе озовал изведнъж от обратната страна на житейските грижи, където се маха с ръка еднакво и на всички. Облъхна ме смъртен студ.�
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July 14, 2019Имаше един момент към средата на книгата, когато я оставих за дълго, може би за седмица. В сложния за определяне жанр между есета и мемоар се дразнех, че авторката увърта, защото според мен не разбира, че иска да пише за себе си. Имах смътно усещане, че не е напълно искрена със себе си, и заради това усещах, че не е искрена с мен и ми беше трудно да й съчувствам. В някакъв смисъл имах усещането, че върша повече работа от нея. Някои от есетата ми харесваха много и точно те ме караха да продължавам, но в други подчертавах повторенията й и злостно наум й препоръчвах следващия път да си наеме редактор. Даже казах на глас мнението, че в началото на книгата си е поставила за цел да напише не по-малко от 600 страници.
После се върнах към нея и прочетох последните 300 страници почти наведнъж - понеже ми се стори, че авторката вече напълно искрено се потапя в собствената си история, семейство, памет, травми, болка. И в объркването на това да не разбираш защо и как мъртвите са духове, с които живееш, и откъде накъде тяхната болка ти тежи и на твоите кости. Историята на семейството е обичайна за Русия от миналия и по-миналия век - в нея има война, глад и трупове в Ленинград, опресия, несбъднати мечти, куп изпочупени чаши за чай, сватби, бебета, писма, болести. Необичайното е събирането и разказването на историята след режим, който се е опитал да заличи паметта и да промени историята. Степанова идва от дълга традиция на фамилно пазене на веществените доказателства за паметта, но тук тя прави нещо друго с това наследство - дава нов живот на тези преди нея, като работи с историята им, все едно тя е жив материал за моделиране, строеж и промяна. В този материал тя смесва всичко друго, което й е любопитно - от идеи на сина й до пътувания из различни държави, в които търси нишките на миналото. Така историята се превръща от прашен тъмен куфар в къща, в която можеш да влезеш и да дишаш. И в един момент това става така очевидно, че книгата придобива невероятна и неочаквана мощ, която расте до самия край. А пътуването от първоначалното объркване и търсене в книгата дава повече плът на първоначалното изживяване.
Между другото, когато прекъснах книгата по средата, прочетох Призраците от миналото на Джеймс Холис, психоаналитик, който пише за това как травмите - без значение дали наши или в минали поколения - продължават да ни терзаят и променят животите и изборите ни години по-късно. Книга като тази веднага след Холис показа, че могат да направят и друго - да ти дадат заряд и ен��ргия, с която не само да излекуваш себе си (не се съмнявам, че книгата е била автотерапевтична за Степанова, макар че вероятно по болезнен начин), но и да лекуваш другите.
После се върнах към нея и прочетох последните 300 страници почти наведнъж - понеже ми се стори, че авторката вече напълно искрено се потапя в собствената си история, семейство, памет, травми, болка. И в объркването на това да не разбираш защо и как мъртвите са духове, с които живееш, и откъде накъде тяхната болка ти тежи и на твоите кости. Историята на семейството е обичайна за Русия от миналия и по-миналия век - в нея има война, глад и трупове в Ленинград, опресия, несбъднати мечти, куп изпочупени чаши за чай, сватби, бебета, писма, болести. Необичайното е събирането и разказването на историята след режим, който се е опитал да заличи паметта и да промени историята. Степанова идва от дълга традиция на фамилно пазене на веществените доказателства за паметта, но тук тя прави нещо друго с това наследство - дава нов живот на тези преди нея, като работи с историята им, все едно тя е жив материал за моделиране, строеж и промяна. В този материал тя смесва всичко друго, което й е любопитно - от идеи на сина й до пътувания из различни държави, в които търси нишките на миналото. Така историята се превръща от прашен тъмен куфар в къща, в която можеш да влезеш и да дишаш. И в един момент това става така очевидно, че книгата придобива невероятна и неочаквана мощ, която расте до самия край. А пътуването от първоначалното объркване и търсене в книгата дава повече плът на първоначалното изживяване.
Между другото, когато прекъснах книгата по средата, прочетох Призраците от миналото на Джеймс Холис, психоаналитик, който пише за това как травмите - без значение дали наши или в минали поколения - продължават да ни терзаят и променят животите и изборите ни години по-късно. Книга като тази веднага след Холис показа, че могат да направят и друго - да ти дадат заряд и ен��ргия, с която не само да излекуваш себе си (не се съмнявам, че книгата е била автотерапевтична за Степанова, макар че вероятно по болезнен начин), но и да лекуваш другите.
May 21, 2021
The best book from International booker list I have read so far. It's a solid 5 star work if taken as non-fictional essay (and its mostly non-fiction) but a 4 star work as a novel (novels have more duties to their themes than essays do). Despite what summary here suggests, the author spends most of time not thinking of her own family history directly but working on finding an approach toward memory itself. Her method for doing so includes thinking of what some great artists have done; WG Selad, Anna Akhmatova etc as well as several other intresting histories - that of frozen Charlottes for example.
May 17, 2021
Memory is quite an interesting topic. The author Kazuo Ishiguro has spent his whole literary career explaining that it is capable of playing tricks on one and can double as a form of escapism via nostalgia. Julian Barnes Booker winning The Sense of an Ending is all about the fallibility of the past. Unreliable narrators populate novels and then there is even a complete genre based on memory, the memoir or autobiography (which does not exclude the unreliable narrator either, mind you) To a certain extent Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory could be a memoir of sorts.
When Maria Stepanova’s aunt dies, she has a look through her apartment and discovers a series of letters, notebooks and photographs. As Stepanova looks through this ephemera, she begins to unravel her family’s history, which is intricately tied up with Russia’s history. Dating from the 1800’s to present day. As one can imagine all the historical figures and events are mentioned : Stalin, fall of communism, both world wars, but Maria Stepanova goes one step further.
In the grand tradition of W.S. Sebald, Stepanova goes off on tangents, plying the reader with a lot of interesting trivia and yet they are linked with the main narrative. What does Art Spiegelman, Charlotte Saloman and Rembrandt have to do with a Russian family saga? Trust me they all have their part in the book.
As this is a white Fitzcarraldo cover ( Fitzcarraldo white are memoirs and essays while the blue covers are fiction, although this line blurs now and then) In Memory of Memory also functions as an essay and Maria Steponova goes in detail about the function of memory, especially in paintings and pictures. At one point she divides memory into three categories: Memory of what is lost, memory of what has been received and memory of what has never been. Throughout the book she constantly delves into these three categories.
In Memory of Memory is an interesting book. I will guarantee at the reader will become smarter after reading it. There is a lot of information crammed in these pages and the flowing translation makes it easier for the information to stick with you. However, at least for me, I was only able to fully appreciate it in small chunks. By that method I was able to gain much more out of it. It is not a daunting read but it does require patience. Obviously there is nothing wrong with this but do not expect a breezy read. Do expect an enriching one and as someone who has a shaky knowledge of Russian history, this was a good starting ground.
When Maria Stepanova’s aunt dies, she has a look through her apartment and discovers a series of letters, notebooks and photographs. As Stepanova looks through this ephemera, she begins to unravel her family’s history, which is intricately tied up with Russia’s history. Dating from the 1800’s to present day. As one can imagine all the historical figures and events are mentioned : Stalin, fall of communism, both world wars, but Maria Stepanova goes one step further.
In the grand tradition of W.S. Sebald, Stepanova goes off on tangents, plying the reader with a lot of interesting trivia and yet they are linked with the main narrative. What does Art Spiegelman, Charlotte Saloman and Rembrandt have to do with a Russian family saga? Trust me they all have their part in the book.
As this is a white Fitzcarraldo cover ( Fitzcarraldo white are memoirs and essays while the blue covers are fiction, although this line blurs now and then) In Memory of Memory also functions as an essay and Maria Steponova goes in detail about the function of memory, especially in paintings and pictures. At one point she divides memory into three categories: Memory of what is lost, memory of what has been received and memory of what has never been. Throughout the book she constantly delves into these three categories.
In Memory of Memory is an interesting book. I will guarantee at the reader will become smarter after reading it. There is a lot of information crammed in these pages and the flowing translation makes it easier for the information to stick with you. However, at least for me, I was only able to fully appreciate it in small chunks. By that method I was able to gain much more out of it. It is not a daunting read but it does require patience. Obviously there is nothing wrong with this but do not expect a breezy read. Do expect an enriching one and as someone who has a shaky knowledge of Russian history, this was a good starting ground.
December 8, 2020
“The past lays before us like an enormous world ready to be colonized.�
Thus far, I have read only a small amount of books that are loaded with such a heavy intellectual weight, and at the same time written in lucid and poetic fashion. The narrator here finds herself in a deceased relative's apartment surrounded by old letters, photographs, journals that reveal a past distant and unknown to her. In an attempt to reconstruct, connect and render the event and figures from such a little known world, she creates this immense philosophical, part memoir, essay on memory. Wether it is personal or collective, Stepanova investigates the way we perceive, collect and store information. Along with her personal discovery about her family past, Stepanova has created a vast palimpsest of cultural references to evoke and underline the different ways memory speaks to us. Ideas of thought visionaries like Barthes, Susan Sontag, Nabokov, W.G. Sebald —to name a few, constantly emerge throughout the narrative. Stepanova reflections on art and photography are also superb.
There is no short way to this book, neither a few sentences are enough to be described. I believe its values will echo on the pages of literary periodicals, but most importantly will kick the readers out of their passive perception and hopefully allow them to acquire a deeper understanding of the tricky way the memory functions.
Thus far, I have read only a small amount of books that are loaded with such a heavy intellectual weight, and at the same time written in lucid and poetic fashion. The narrator here finds herself in a deceased relative's apartment surrounded by old letters, photographs, journals that reveal a past distant and unknown to her. In an attempt to reconstruct, connect and render the event and figures from such a little known world, she creates this immense philosophical, part memoir, essay on memory. Wether it is personal or collective, Stepanova investigates the way we perceive, collect and store information. Along with her personal discovery about her family past, Stepanova has created a vast palimpsest of cultural references to evoke and underline the different ways memory speaks to us. Ideas of thought visionaries like Barthes, Susan Sontag, Nabokov, W.G. Sebald —to name a few, constantly emerge throughout the narrative. Stepanova reflections on art and photography are also superb.
There is no short way to this book, neither a few sentences are enough to be described. I believe its values will echo on the pages of literary periodicals, but most importantly will kick the readers out of their passive perception and hopefully allow them to acquire a deeper understanding of the tricky way the memory functions.
May 15, 2021
«il libro sulla mia famiglia alla fine non è affatto sulla famiglia, ma su qualcos'altro. In realtà è sul meccanismo della memoria e su ciò che vuole da me.»
Memoria della memoria è un'opera sorprendente tra saggio e romanzo in cui, in una sovrapposizione di piani narrativi, letterario e meta-letterario finiscono per trarre linfa uno dall'altro. Stepanova riprende i fili di un tema che attraversa la letteratura europea e russa dal dopoguerra ad oggi, che sviluppa in maniera personale corredando i suoi pensieri con un intertesto ricchissimo.
I ricordi personali, quelli della scrittrice e della sua famiglia, diventano il pretesto per sviluppare una riflessione ad ampio raggio che parte dai materiali della memoria (oggetti, fotografie, lettere�) per affrontare il canone della memoria in senso lato. Stepanova individua i trabocchetti di cui è costellato il percorso, dai falsi ricordi ai rischi della post-memoria e si confronta con punti di vista diversi: quello di Mandel'štam di "seppellire il tempo passato in una bara di pino", quello di Charlotte Salomon di affrancarsi dal passato descrivendolo, quello di Joseph Cornell di salvare attraverso le sue scatole la memoria del passato e quello di Sebald � il più vicino alla scrittrice russa � che intende il tempo "come una caverna porosa, simile a certi monasteri scavati nella roccia, nelle cui celle ciascuno svolge il proprio lavoro parallelo".
In questo libro l'autrice lavora su due livelli, familiare e nazionale. Su quello familiare si propone di mettere ordine nei propri ricordi nonostante la consapevolezza che si tratta di un ordine illusorio. L'impresa merita comunque di essere intrapresa perché ha il potere taumaturgico di "farla stare meglio" e anche perché raccontare il mondo dei ricordi le consente di strapparlo per un attimo dall'oblio.
Sul piano nazionale invece, prova ad affrontare e superare la fissazione del mondo letterario russo per il passato, specchio di una crisi ideologica caratterizzata dal rifiuto di confrontarsi con il presente e di pianificare una prospettiva per il domani.
Memoria della memoria è un grande libro sul bisogno e insieme sull'impossibilità della memoria.
Memoria della memoria è un'opera sorprendente tra saggio e romanzo in cui, in una sovrapposizione di piani narrativi, letterario e meta-letterario finiscono per trarre linfa uno dall'altro. Stepanova riprende i fili di un tema che attraversa la letteratura europea e russa dal dopoguerra ad oggi, che sviluppa in maniera personale corredando i suoi pensieri con un intertesto ricchissimo.
I ricordi personali, quelli della scrittrice e della sua famiglia, diventano il pretesto per sviluppare una riflessione ad ampio raggio che parte dai materiali della memoria (oggetti, fotografie, lettere�) per affrontare il canone della memoria in senso lato. Stepanova individua i trabocchetti di cui è costellato il percorso, dai falsi ricordi ai rischi della post-memoria e si confronta con punti di vista diversi: quello di Mandel'štam di "seppellire il tempo passato in una bara di pino", quello di Charlotte Salomon di affrancarsi dal passato descrivendolo, quello di Joseph Cornell di salvare attraverso le sue scatole la memoria del passato e quello di Sebald � il più vicino alla scrittrice russa � che intende il tempo "come una caverna porosa, simile a certi monasteri scavati nella roccia, nelle cui celle ciascuno svolge il proprio lavoro parallelo".
In questo libro l'autrice lavora su due livelli, familiare e nazionale. Su quello familiare si propone di mettere ordine nei propri ricordi nonostante la consapevolezza che si tratta di un ordine illusorio. L'impresa merita comunque di essere intrapresa perché ha il potere taumaturgico di "farla stare meglio" e anche perché raccontare il mondo dei ricordi le consente di strapparlo per un attimo dall'oblio.
Sul piano nazionale invece, prova ad affrontare e superare la fissazione del mondo letterario russo per il passato, specchio di una crisi ideologica caratterizzata dal rifiuto di confrontarsi con il presente e di pianificare una prospettiva per il domani.
Memoria della memoria è un grande libro sul bisogno e insieme sull'impossibilità della memoria.
Sapevo che il vero aleph di questa narrazione l’avevo già in tasca. Era una statuina minuta, circa tre centimetri di lunghezza, di porcellana bianca e fattura piuttosto convenzionale, un putto nudo e riccioluto che sarebbe potuto passare per un cupido, se non fosse stato per i calzini. L’ho comprato su una bancarella di antiquariato a Mosca, dove si sono resi conto tardi che gli oggetti del passato sono costosi. Ma non mancavano quisquilie da due soldi, e infatti in una vaschetta colma di ogni genere di bigiotteria intravidi una scatola che conteneva un mucchietto di cosini bianchi. Stupiva che non ce ne fosse almeno uno tutt’intero, bene o male ostentavano tutti qualche mutilazione: chi niente braccia, chi niente testa, e tutti quanti senza eccezione scheggiati e ammaccati. Li rigirai a lungo tra le dita in cerca di uno un po� più grazioso, finché non trovai il più bello. Era quasi intero ed emanava un luccichio da regalo. Ricci e fossette al loro posto, e anche i calzini lavorati a maglia, e né la macchia scura sulla schiena né l’assenza delle braccia impedivano di deliziarsene. Naturalmente chiesi alla signora della bancarella se per caso ne avesse uno ancora più integro, e in risposta mi raccontò la storia che decisi di approfondire. Queste statuine da due soldi sono state prodotte in una città tedesca per mezzo secolo, mi disse la signora, dalla fine degli anni ottanta del XIX secolo. Le vendevano un po� dappertutto, nelle drogherie e nei negozi di casalinghi, ma la loro funzione principale era un’altra: semplici ed economiche, venivano usate nel trasporto delle merci come paracolpi friabili, affinché le cose pesanti non si sbeccassero urtandosi nel buio. In pratica queste statuine venivano prodotte apposta per essere mutilate; ma poi, prima della guerra, la fabbrica chiuse. I magazzini, pieni di queste piccole porcellane, rimasero dismessi finché non finirono sotto un bombardamento, e parecchio tempo dopo, quando le casse vennero aperte, dentro non rimanevano che pezzi monchi. Così comprai il mio putto senza prendere nota del nome della fabbrica o del telefono della signora della bancarella, sapendo però che probabilmente mi portavo in tasca il finale del mio libro: la soluzione del problema che si ha l’abitudine di cercare nelle ultime pagine. Diceva già tutto. E che non esiste storia che arrivi integra fino a noi, senza piedi malconci e teste penzoloni. E che lacune e strappi sono l’immancabile compagno di viaggio dello stare al mondo, il motore recondito, il meccanismo della futura accelerazione. E che solo il trauma ci trasforma da prodotti di massa in un noi inequivocabile, un noi al dettaglio. E che naturalmente anch’io sono una di quelle statuine, un oggetto di larga produzione, frutto della catastrofe collettiva del secolo andato, suo survivor e involontario beneficiario, al mondo per miracolo e tra i vivi.
…]
Una sera piovosa la statuina mi cadde di tasca e si ruppe sul pavimento di piastrelle della vecchia casa, come l’uovo d’oro nella favola della gallina pezzata. Si ruppe in tre pezzi, la gamba nella calzina volò sotto la pancia della vasca da bagno, il corpo da una parte, la testa dall’altra. Ciò che illustrava alla meno peggio l’integrità della storia propria e famigliare d’un tratto divenne allegoria: dell’impossibilità di raccontarla e dell’impossibilità di conservare almeno qualcosa, e della mia totale incapacità di rimettere insieme me stessa dai frantumi di un passato altrui o almeno appropriarmene in modo convincente.
February 25, 2021
Мария Степанова е паяк (не се плашете), аз също, подозирам и вие.
В момента чета есетата на Бродски и съм много податлив да го взаимствам, да се възползвам от неговите така точни попадения и проникновения, за да кажа нещо за "В памет на паметта". И ако вече не сте получили частична амнезия вследствие първото изречение, може да продължите. Фразата, която ме хвана е тази: „Ст� години самота� си е Томас Улф. Първата ми реакция беше нещо такова "стига бе, как така?!", после се замислих, че проекцията на Томас Улф е във всички книги за паметта. Колко общо, нали? Паметта - може да се пише до безкрай и няма да е достатъчно, такава е и "В памет на паметта". Мария Степанова дефинира "край" на своята книга, но той е по-скоро начин да разбере читателят, че срещата трябва да приключи. Жест, нещо като "хайде, стига вече, довиждане". И макар да е само помахване, този кратък край на фона на обема на книгата, успя да събере цялата. Така както върху малкото дъно на чашата лежи цялото съдържание. Тук сигурно вече сам си говоря :) За лекота ще дам един суперлатив. Книгата е чудесна. Макар и да не е "книга" по смисъла на общата представа за това. Най-общо казано това е завръщане, пътуване, ровене, тършуване, потъване в родословието на Степанова. Паяжина (отново Томас Улф) от връзки - паяжина, която обхваща и засяга немалък обем от едно забравено или дори загърбено изкуство и автори. Сред писмата на нейните прароднини, сред стари снимки и картички, мебели и играчки (невъобразим антиквариат) се представят изключително интересни творци, чието общо с книгата е именно опитът им да опишат и задържат паметта чрез творбите си. И понеже е невъзможно трайно и абсолютно да се задържи паметта, опитването е единственото, с което разполагаме. Опит да я задържим и запаметим. Този опит, разбира се, представя само частично паметта и именно затова до нас достигат само парчета, знаци, символи. Колкото и лична да е книгата, толкова тя е всеобхватна, ако щеш пълна с любопитни факти и истории. Плетейки паяжина от спомени и настояще, неминуемо и ние връзваме своите нишки - става лично и за нас. Така например си спомних картичките от Либия на дядо ми, който както много други бяха отишли да изкрват пари (разбирай валута), защото това беше един от малкото начини за непривилегированите по онова време. Опаяжиха се и много други спомени. Само още един ще споделя. Действието е безвъзвратно минало. Бях отишъл при едната ми баба, за да занеса някакви покупки и я заварих как разглежда албум със стари снимки. Пред нея беше снимка на нея и сестра ѝ като млади момичета. В този момент звънна телефонът, помоли ме аз да го вдигна, и познайте кой беше от другата страна? Да, нейната сестра, моята леля. И ето, те бяха едновременно и баби и момичета. И така паяжината свързваше всички ни по странен начин през времето и пространството. Няма повече.
Книгата се чете все едно си на лекция в голяма полупразна аудитория, лятото, през прозорците топли слънцето, полусънно чуваш разказа на Мария Степанова.
Чете се все едно си в уютно кафене. Пиете заедно кафе и тя продължава да ти говори.
Пътувате с влак в едно купе и тя ти говори. Разхождате се в парка и тя ти говори.
Все различни места може да си представяте на фона на безкрайния (изкуших се да употребя "безконечен", предвид "паяжината") говор.
Да, свършва. И там, в края, се срещаш с нейната болка. Разбираш, защо се е стремила да заобикаля внимателно най-близките си спомени, тези за нейните родители. Болката, как често съдбата е по-рязка от гилотина и не ни дава време да чуем и преживеем същността на най-близкия. Остават само парчета от спомени.
В момента чета есетата на Бродски и съм много податлив да го взаимствам, да се възползвам от неговите така точни попадения и проникновения, за да кажа нещо за "В памет на паметта". И ако вече не сте получили частична амнезия вследствие първото изречение, може да продължите. Фразата, която ме хвана е тази: „Ст� години самота� си е Томас Улф. Първата ми реакция беше нещо такова "стига бе, как така?!", после се замислих, че проекцията на Томас Улф е във всички книги за паметта. Колко общо, нали? Паметта - може да се пише до безкрай и няма да е достатъчно, такава е и "В памет на паметта". Мария Степанова дефинира "край" на своята книга, но той е по-скоро начин да разбере читателят, че срещата трябва да приключи. Жест, нещо като "хайде, стига вече, довиждане". И макар да е само помахване, този кратък край на фона на обема на книгата, успя да събере цялата. Така както върху малкото дъно на чашата лежи цялото съдържание. Тук сигурно вече сам си говоря :) За лекота ще дам един суперлатив. Книгата е чудесна. Макар и да не е "книга" по смисъла на общата представа за това. Най-общо казано това е завръщане, пътуване, ровене, тършуване, потъване в родословието на Степанова. Паяжина (отново Томас Улф) от връзки - паяжина, която обхваща и засяга немалък обем от едно забравено или дори загърбено изкуство и автори. Сред писмата на нейните прароднини, сред стари снимки и картички, мебели и играчки (невъобразим антиквариат) се представят изключително интересни творци, чието общо с книгата е именно опитът им да опишат и задържат паметта чрез творбите си. И понеже е невъзможно трайно и абсолютно да се задържи паметта, опитването е единственото, с което разполагаме. Опит да я задържим и запаметим. Този опит, разбира се, представя само частично паметта и именно затова до нас достигат само парчета, знаци, символи. Колкото и лична да е книгата, толкова тя е всеобхватна, ако щеш пълна с любопитни факти и истории. Плетейки паяжина от спомени и настояще, неминуемо и ние връзваме своите нишки - става лично и за нас. Така например си спомних картичките от Либия на дядо ми, който както много други бяха отишли да изкрват пари (разбирай валута), защото това беше един от малкото начини за непривилегированите по онова време. Опаяжиха се и много други спомени. Само още един ще споделя. Действието е безвъзвратно минало. Бях отишъл при едната ми баба, за да занеса някакви покупки и я заварих как разглежда албум със стари снимки. Пред нея беше снимка на нея и сестра ѝ като млади момичета. В този момент звънна телефонът, помоли ме аз да го вдигна, и познайте кой беше от другата страна? Да, нейната сестра, моята леля. И ето, те бяха едновременно и баби и момичета. И така паяжината свързваше всички ни по странен начин през времето и пространството. Няма повече.
Книгата се чете все едно си на лекция в голяма полупразна аудитория, лятото, през прозорците топли слънцето, полусънно чуваш разказа на Мария Степанова.
Чете се все едно си в уютно кафене. Пиете заедно кафе и тя продължава да ти говори.
Пътувате с влак в едно купе и тя ти говори. Разхождате се в парка и тя ти говори.
Все различни места може да си представяте на фона на безкрайния (изкуших се да употребя "безконечен", предвид "паяжината") говор.
Да, свършва. И там, в края, се срещаш с нейната болка. Разбираш, защо се е стремила да заобикаля внимателно най-близките си спомени, тези за нейните родители. Болката, как често съдбата е по-рязка от гилотина и не ни дава време да чуем и преживеем същността на най-близкия. Остават само парчета от спомени.
January 11, 2019
Хорошо и приметливо написанная кроссжанровая псеводомемуарная публицистика (я б даже не побоялся слова «мастеровитая»), которую также можно назвать «обывательской». В жизни таких незаметных семейств (хотя семейство под рассмотрением не так уж и незаметно, как нам доказывает автор всем своим текстом, пытаясь вписать его в канву аутсайдерского искусства почему-то: мини-очерки о художниках, хоть и имеют несомненный смысл, и интересны, но выглядят вставными зубами, и между ними она бродит причудливыми и капризными тропками; но никто и не гарантировал связности в таком тексте, с другой стороны) во все времена, особенно, конечно, семейств, переживших советскую власть, много общего. Много и у нас � в семействах автора и этого конкретного читателя, хотя бэкграунды совершенно разные (мое семейство было гораздо незаметнее, судя по всему), но благодаря таким же осколкам жизни, о которых пишет Степанова, видимо, все, кто выжили, и выжили.
Берясь за эту книгу (чтоб быть вместе со своим народом в очередной раз, но не только), я рассчитывал, честно говоря, на какое-то развитие темы исторической памяти у Гэсса, но оказалось, что это действительно ближе к экзорсисам о памяти частной и да, обывательской, и больше всего похоже на первую книгу Пола Остера.
Но вот интересно: одному ли мне показалось, что Степанова как-то оправдывает (уже нем, что объясняет) нынешнюю «вакханалию воспоминания (не пожелать и врагу)», что разворачивается в общественном и мифо-идеологическом пространстве этой страны и оборачивается совкодрочерством?
Берясь за эту книгу (чтоб быть вместе со своим народом в очередной раз, но не только), я рассчитывал, честно говоря, на какое-то развитие темы исторической памяти у Гэсса, но оказалось, что это действительно ближе к экзорсисам о памяти частной и да, обывательской, и больше всего похоже на первую книгу Пола Остера.
Но вот интересно: одному ли мне показалось, что Степанова как-то оправдывает (уже нем, что объясняет) нынешнюю «вакханалию воспоминания (не пожелать и врагу)», что разворачивается в общественном и мифо-идеологическом пространстве этой страны и оборачивается совкодрочерством?
April 15, 2021
Cartea aceasta imi pare a fi echivalentul unei picturi cu un milion de amanunte, cautate cu migala, invartite, poleite pana te ia cu ameteala urmaritul lor. Nu e o carte pentru oricine- in primul rand trebuie sa fii odihnit cand o citesti, ca sa nu te pierzi prin meandrele (in)concretului, in al doilea rand trebuie sa ai disponibilitatea de a asimila nume, obiecte si amintiri care par neinteresante, de multe ori, daca nu faci parte din familia respectiva. Scriitura e foarte frumoasa, ceea ce ajuta mult, dar nu tot timpul. Cred ca pot sa compar “In amintirea memoriei � cu o singura carte, “Muzeul inocentei� a lui Pamuk, ce are aceeasi tema a conservarii bolnavicioase a trecutului si a obiectelor, dar am rezonat mai bine cu Pamuk sau mi-am pierdut intre timp apetitul pentru astfel de istorisiri.
April 21, 2024
Apparentemente sembra una ricerca di storia di famiglia, in realtà è un libro su come funziona il meccanismo della memoria. Colto, profondo, a volte un po� difficile da seguire, ma comunque pieno di spunti e di riflessioni
February 20, 2022
The book is labelled as “fiction,� but maybe this is what happens when your write about the past, framed by “our continuing love affair with the visual.� At the centre of it all is her family’s past, interspersed with disquisitions on various topics: the world of culture and war, artists and writers, memory and Jewishness. Some of these chapters are incredibly good! I particularly loved the ones on Francesca Woodman’s “ghost pictures,� Rembrandt’s self-portraits, and the works of W. G. Sebald.
December 10, 2020
Nie wiem, co mam napisać o tej książce, albo jak miałabym ją krótko przedstawić. Bo czy jest to historia rodzinna, esej o sztuce, reportaż, historia Rosji... To książka o tym jak pamiętamy, albo jak nie pamiętamy, jak pamięć nas zwodzi, gdzie szukać jej źródeł i jak te źródła mogą okazać się nietrwałe, niepewne czy przesadnie sentymentalne. Tyle trudnych pytań autorce zadają zdjęcia członków rodziny, obrazy, muzyka, przedmioty, a tych przedmiotów przybywa, ciągle są nowe (chociaż stare, wygrzebane gdzieś z szafy, zapomniane na strychu, nieopisane w albumach), proszą o interpretacje i czułe ich schowanie - do serca, do pamięci. Trochę w tym smutku, trochę nostalgii. Pięknie się to czytało, tłumaczka to mistrzyni, ja sobie chyba będę tę książkę otwierać na chybił trafił raz na jakiś czas, by pobyć trochę w tym świecie i nie zapomnieć tej pozycji.
Shelved as 'did-not-finish'
June 11, 2021I read half of this but it just didn't match my mood and I couldn't force myself back to it once it didn't win the Booker International.
January 16, 2021
Memory is handed down, history is written down; memory is concerned with justice, history with preciseness; memory moralizes, history tallies up and corrects; memory is personal, history dreams of objectivity; memory is based not on knowledge, but on experience: compassion with, sympathy for a desperate pain demanding immediate involvement. At the same time the landscape of memory is strewn with projections, fantasies and misrepresentations � the ghosts of today, with their faces turned to the past.
Maria Stepanova had always been fascinated by family artefacts � the photos, diaries, letters, and postcards that recorded the lives of this family of Russian Jews who, for the most part, traversed the twentieth century unscathed � and from a very young age, she always knew that when she was old enough, when she had enough life experience and context, she would write about these people known only through sepia-toned images and faded fountain-penned lines. When her aunt passed away, removing one more source of family knowledge, Stepanova � by now a celebrated poet, essayist, and editor � decided it was time to finally pull together everything she knew (family stories overlaid with what is recorded of the times through various art forms), and is the result. This is a fairly dense read: the stories, transcribed correspondence, Stepanova’s travels and what she relates about twentieth century art and letters is all fascinating reading, and underpinned with philosophical writing about what can actually be captured about history and memory, this is something more than memoir; certainly something more than one family’s history, and I found the whole to be an education and a starting point for deeper contemplation. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
We sat at a long wooden table in the library, which appeared to hold every book written on any matter that might be considered Jewish. I asked questions and got answers. Then the museum advisor, a historian, asked me what I was writing about and I began to explain. “Ah,� he said. “One of those books where the author travels around the world in search of his or her roots � there are plenty of those now.�
“Yes,� I answered. “And now there will be one more.�
Although the family’s Jewishness didn’t figure very prominently in the letters and diaries they left behind, it had made them targets throughout twentieth century Russia � subject to pogroms, asset confiscation under the Bolsheviks, exile and relocation, held under suspicion during “The Jewish Doctor Plot� � and antisemitism isn’t going away anytime soon. Having been raised in the want and fear of Soviet Russia, when the Berlin Wall came down, Stepanova’s parents immediately applied to emigrate to Germany, to their daughter’s surprise. Within a few years, they boarded a train from Moscow, and as Stepanova watched her parents pull away, “a man holding a can of beer glanced at me from out a train door and said: ‘Kill the yids and save Russia.� It’s all too neat, but that is how it happened.� More recently, Stepanova went to Paris, visiting the hotel where her great-grandmother stayed while studying medicine at the Sorbonne. The current Jewish owner told her, “It’s very hard for us here again. I give us at best another five years in France. After that it will be worse. Far worse.� Between untended Jewish cemeteries, family names that disappear from official records, and knowing that her own direct line had been lucky to avoid the worst disasters of their times, there is a sense of urgency to preserve this family’s story.
Putting my family on general view, even if I do it with as much love as I can muster and with the best words in the best order, is, after all, something of a Ham’s deed, exposing the vulnerable and naked body of the family, its dark armpits, its pale belly. And most likely I would learn nothing new in writing it, and just knowing this made the act of writing even more fraught. Yes, free of scandalous revelation, far from the hell of Péter Esterházy, who found out that his beloved father had worked for the secret police, but also far from the bliss of having always known everything about your people, and bearing this knowledge with pride. Neither of these outcomes were mine. This book about my family is not about my family at all, but something quite different: the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.
In this way, In Memory of Memory is about so much more than this one family; it’s also an examination of what can really be known about what we accept as “history� after everyone who lived through it is gone. To that end, Stepanova examines historical work that is not just intertextual, but interdisciplinary. She connects Shirley Jackson’s horror novels with Francesca Woodman’s photography and Joseph Cornell’s art boxes with Salvador Dalí’s painting (just two examples of many such connections), mixing in the essays of Susan Sontag, the poetry of the exiled Osip Mandelstam, referencing music, film, and memoir; leading to countless passages like the following:
Jean Cocteau said that cinema is the only art form that records death at work. Rembrandt’s self-portraits are solely occupied with recording death, and lined up together they make a sort of protofilm � whereas the kilometers of selfies, taken and uploaded for communal access, look like the exact opposite to me: the chronicle of death as it walks amongst us, no longer of any interest to anyone.
Stepanova inserts many letters verbatim between chapters � I particularly relished the ones written by her grandfather’s cousin, Lyodik, that he wrote home to his mother while a soldier during the Siege of Leningrad � and while these certainly have the feel of “truth� about their historical moments, Stepanova also shares that her father refused her permission to include his own letters (upbeat missives written home from his far-flung work assignments), arguing, “I can’t bear to think that someone will read those letters and think that’s what I am.� Knowing that Stepanova’s father (and before him, Lyodik) put a cheerful spin on grim circumstances when writing home, it really brings into question just what can be reconstructed about the past from letters, diaries, and other so-called primary sources. Do the artists and writers do a better job of preserving the truth of the moment? And what is to be made of our own time of oversharing and manipulating every image of ourselves? Where can truth be found? History and historiography, the personal and the philosophically universal; there’s much in here to learn and think on.
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