Ms Stepanova’s deepest love is for the past, in particular her own family’s, and her luminous book “In Memory of Memory” is adevoted to them. After inheriting an archive of her ancestors’ photographs, letters and ephemera, she set out to make sense of the family’s history, traipsing from Paris to Saratov on the Volga and roaming across art, literature and philosophy. Eschewing the traditional quest narrative, she blends memoir, criticism, essay, documentary and travelogue.
In other hands, such material might fall flat. Ms Stepanova’s learning and lyricism bring it to life. She hears stories about her great-grandmother Sarra that have “the laurel-leaf taste of legend”. She sees hills “the colour of dark copper, rising and falling as evenly as breath”, and blackened villages where new churches gleam “white as new crowns on old teeth”.
But from the late 1930s an “invisible curtain” divided Russian culture from the West, Ms Stepanova says, and the country became an “exporter of a kind of borderline experience”. Its literature, from Alexander Solzhenitsyn to Varlam Shalamov, came to be seen primarily as “confessional or reportorial material”. By linking writers from across that curtain, she aims to refute the idea that the Russian experience is separate and unique.
When the past is prosecuted in this way, suggests Ms Stepanova, it becomes an opportunity “for settling scores, for a kind of conversation about the present that for some reason cannot happen in real time”. This seepage across time is the underlying theme of “In Memory of Memory”, says Stanislav Lvovsky, a Russian poet and critic: “It’s not a story about history, but about how the past lives on in the present.
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