In Memory of Memory

"It’s such a simple conceit for a book, and it’s just so wonderfully executed. In terms of the writing as well, every single line is a kind of perfection. It’s translated into English from the original Russian by Sasha Dugdale, and hats off to Dugdale, because I think to translate something and make it feel so true to itself—so natural and precise, as if it were conceived in English from the outset—is an incredible feat. The story, if you like, is that Maria Stepanova’s aunt, Galya, dies, and Stepanova goes to clear her apartment. She discovers that Galya was a hoarder: there are cinema ticket stubs and fag ends and photographs, scraps of paper, shopping lists, and—crucially—notebook after notebook after notebook, observing details of a life lived. “The story of the family can never be still, it’s always evolving, rewriting itself, long after the protagonists are dead” And so Maria Stepanova decides that she wants to tell the story of her life, and through that, a family’s life. I like how she captures the vampiric act of writing about one’s family. There’s always this unease about your right to do so. Even if you have the person’s permission, as in my case. The questions Stepanova is turning over in her head all the time are: Who gets to tell this story? What makes someone interesting? Do they have to be an exception, or is it their very ordinariness that makes their story worth telling? She grappled with something that I did as well: the fact that her life, or her family’s lives didn’t really have the conventional elements readers expect, or hope for, in a Second World War story. I mean, there are tragedies and, perhaps, minor acts of heroism, but they weren’t, you know, executed by the Fascists, or didn’t risk life and limb to smuggle messages to partisans. Stepanova’s family didn’t meet the tragedy that you could have thought they might during the Second World War, because they were Jewish and bourgeois: doctors, engineers and intellectuals. They survived more or less in one piece. She writes about how, when she was younger, this used to embarrass her. She used to find it kind of shameful to admit that her ancestors—how did she put it?—made no attempt to make themselves remotely interesting. Don’t you feel that when you start thinking about your own family? You’re like, why don’t we have a conscientious objector in our family? They all just went to work and then made dinner. It’s like, well, that’s what people did. That doesn’t mean their lives had less value."

"Yes. Maria Stepanova comes from a Russian Jewish family. She grew up in an apartment in Moscow, along with her parents, one grandmother, and two great grandmothers. So in a sense she grew up alongside her family’s past. One or other of the family’s members have been touched by many of the great catastrophes of the 20th century—the Russian Revolution , the subsequent civil war, Stalin’s purges, the Holocaust . But though they felt the shockwaves of those cataclysmic events, they were never at the centre of them, happily. She writes about how interesting it is to turn your gaze away from the centre of great historical events, and see what’s happening to the people just outside of them. Her relatives escaped some of the horrors that might have befallen them, but were gradually dispersed all the same by something much quieter and more insidious. By time itself, which none of us can escape. So this capacious, thoughtful, generous book becomes a kind of meditation on mortality. It’s a book full of sorrow and regret. But it’s also very funny. Stepanova has a wonderfully humorous way of looking at the pathos of the passing of life. It’s a very unusual approach, and it’s delightful to spend so much time—it’s a long book—in the company of an author who has such a wise spirit and such a well-furnished mind. She never says an obvious thing. Her opinions are carefully thought out, and often startling. “Great books, whatever their category or genre, are always unique” It’s structured as a multitude of short pieces or vignettes. Glimpses of her family past. Essays. Little stories. She travels in time and space, following her family around Europe. She goes from Odessa to Oxford High Street. She writes about Rembrandt , about Osip Mandelstam, about what it was like to be a female foreign medical student at the Sorbonne at the beginning of the 20th century, which is what one of her great-grandmothers did. So she looks wide, then sometimes focuses in very tightly. She describes photographs, quotes the letters that a boy soldier wrote to his parents—of course, he’s lying all the time, saying ‘I’m absolutely fine!’ even though we know he was starving and freezing to death. She’s searching behind the surface for the unspoken, the elusive truth. She’s very honest about what can’t be known. There are so many books where the author sets off to explore their family’s past, but this one is unlike any other, I think. Part of that originality is Stepanova’s candour in admitting that actually you can’t bring the dead back to life. You can’t really know someone who’s gone. There’s sadness in that, but also something like relief. The other thing about this book is that it’s so beautifully written. Both Stepanova and her translator, Sasha Dugdale, are poets. Stepanova’s English is very good, and I believe they worked together closely on the translation. Their attentiveness not only to conveying the meaning of the original, but also the rhythms of the prose, makes this book hauntingly beautiful."