Although Russian history is one of the most divided among Europeans (and this is certainly true of the past century), somehow it always produced the best writers who could show direction with their works. In the 19th century, there were Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, in the 20th, Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn, and among the contemporaries, along with Viktor Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin, who are also popular in Hungary, we also include Marija Stepanova, who we haven’t really heard of in this country.
The writer, born in 1972, has indisputably reached the top in recent years, as she recently won the Leipzig Book Prize with her collected poems, the Russian Great Book Prize with the volume on which this review is based, and was also shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
It is worth stating right from the start that it is In memory of my memories a real monster (more than half a thousand, large and densely typed pages), which is guaranteed to make its readers work, but can give a lot in return.
The plot of the book is quite simple: upon the death of an elderly relative, the writer inherits a lot of old objects and a few diaries, which she takes in hand and tries to imagine what the life of this old woman might have been like, with whom she had only had minimal contact in the past decades. Much cannot be ascertained from the objects (there may be millions and millions of them all over Russia), and the diaries were written in an amazingly strange style, because despite the fact that there are dozens of them, nothing is recorded in them apart from the most mundane tasks (shopping, washing, cleaning, etc.), and they reveal nothing about the life of their author. Most people would be devastated by this discovery, but not Stepanova, since she realized a long time ago that despite the fact that her country participated in two world wars, despite the fact that there was a bloody revolution and the subsequent mass-murdering dictatorship, it was as if nothing had happened to her family, somehow everything they got away. But still, what was their life like?
“The bottom line is that I couldn’t point to any grandfather who had been through the war: according to the family chronicles, my grandfather had the role of a piece of wood drifting in the vortex, and this did not fit in the chorus of reports proclaiming war and victory. In general, I could say that in Russian history, in which other people’s relatives were present as subjects, mine could only be co-tenants.”
Why scientific work?
The book is about this and many other things. Stepanova did an amazing amount of research, so she not only reconstructed the last century and a half of her family, but also immersed herself in specialist and fiction literature related to the exploration of the past and the functioning of memory (she often refers to perhaps the most important writer of the turn of the millennium, many forgotten events of the 20th century documenter WG Sebald and Susan Sontag, who is also a great writer in the field of essays), and is equally at home in the fields of historical and archival works, poetry, psychology or even philosophy. These many evoked areas created an interesting literary combination in the pages of the book. And because of this, it is In memory of my memories it often resembles a giant essay more than an essay novel.
In addition, since it is such a big monster, the pace is not too fast either, so the first 150 pages practically serve as a kind of introduction, in which Stepanova mostly tries to convince her readers how little history (be it individual or communal) can be known in its entirety. actually. An excellent illustration of this is the small anecdote in which the writer accepted an invitation only because she knew that an ancestor of hers lived in that city, whom she could not have otherwise known. However, since he knew a lot of partial information about him (including his address at the time), he was able to visit the former family nest in perfect condition, where the memories came despite the fact that he had ever been there. A fine example of the spirit of the place and the collective memory, he thought until he found out: he had lost the address, so he hadn’t been to his former ancestor’s house.
The entire volume is full of such events, so anyone who expects a family novel to slowly come together will be disappointed, since
the family stories based on various documents, primarily letters, wedged between long and numerous essays discussing numerous topics, for a long time do not publish almost anything, they merely remain as inclusions, as small, scattered pieces of several lives.
Stepanova also uses many interesting features, since unlike her great predecessor and role model Sebald, she practically does not insert a single document or a single image into the text, and we get these in the form of descriptions over long, long pages.
However, the amount of information he conveys during his essays that go back and forth is quite breathtaking. In this way, we can read in abundance about the distortions of memory, the role of photographs as reminders, the life of Jews (most of their ancestors are of Jewish origin) in Russia, the construction of contemporary cities, the differences between the Western and Eastern worlds, the state of medicine at the beginning of the 20th century, the psychology of communism, and I could list more. The author connects one topic to another with playful ease, so we never know where we’ll end up next.
And why fiction?
However, Stepanova would not be a full-blooded professional, and her book would not be such a hit with the public, if the final hundred and fifty pages did not also favor fans of fiction, so that her great-grandparents, great-grandparents, and parents would more or less come together from the crumbs (letters, semi-information) that had been scattered so far also his life story, which mostly lacks violent death, prison or exile, but which still amply engages the reader. From these destinies, we can learn how the intelligentsia experienced the events of the past century in Russia, such as
- a great-grandmother who graduated from the Sorbonne and was one of the first female doctors in Russia;
- a wealthy factory great-grandfather who lost everything during the nationalizations;
- or one of the grandfathers, who turns from a penniless orphan into a devout communist.
I think there’s a good chance it is In memory of my memories it will be one of the big hits of the year, as knowledge material of this size and scope is quite rare in a single volume, but it will be appreciated primarily by those who are not looking for a bloody novel, but rather a scientific work grafted into fiction.
Marija Stepanova: In memory of my memories
Translated by Sámuel Gábor
Park Book Publishing, 2024, HUF 5999
