In Memory of Memory [Paperback]

A brilliant evocation of the last years of the Soviet Union, extending deep into the past....A remarkable work of the imagination. Stepanovas finely crafted debut follows a womans lifelong efforts to better understand her ancestors, Russian Jews whose stories fascinated her as a child growing up in the Soviet Union...[an] admirable cross-genre project will intrigue fans of erudite autofiction. A daring combination of family history and roving cultural analysis...a kaleidoscopic, time-shuffling look at one family of Russian Jews throughout a fiercely eventful century. A book to plunge into. 'Everyone else's ancestors had taken part in history' writes Stepanova; building itself via accumulation, these chapters become an important testimony to the cultural and political lives of the people held beneath the surface of the tides of history. A luminous, rigorous, and mesmerizing interrogation of the relationship between personal history, family history, and capital-H History. I couldn't put it down; it felt sort of like watching a hypnotic YouTube unboxing-video of the gift-and-burden that is the twentieth century. Dazzling erudition and deep empathy come together in Maria Stepanovas profound engagement with the power and potential of memory, the mother of all muses. An exploration of the vast field between reminiscence and remembrance,? There is simply no book in contemporary Russian literature like Stepanova has given new life to the?skaz?technique of telling a story through the scrambled speech of an unreliable narrator, using manic wordplay and what one critic called a carnival of images. Stepanovas fraught relationship with the tempting glut of the past takes this hybrid, unforgettable work far beyond the paradigm of the family memoirjust like memory itself, it exists in a state of limbo between the historical and the fantastical. Russias greatest living poet.... Stepanova lays bare the fallibility of memory, mocking, as she does in her poetry, the idea lc