In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova

With the death of her aunt, Maria Stepanova is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers 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 Dipping into various forms – essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue and historical documents – Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.

FIVE MINUTES WITH Maria Stepanova and Sasha Dugdale

INTERVIEW FOR PUSHKIN HOUSE BY ANDREW JACK (@AJACK)

Maria Stepanova, author

How would you describe your book?

It is a quest, a bildungsroman, in which the protagonist tries to achieve something although maybe not much is discovered. That happens quite often with family stories. You try to find something crucial, but whether or not you do, it’s a pretext to change your life. This encounter with histories unfolding before you were even born gives you a free pass into the future.  Matters of the past are an obsession that is becoming a modern illness. They have a much greater place in our lives than those of the present or the future. When you put your finger on the exact facts, their connection with your own story becomes much more intense and immediate. That sense of loss is pushing you into the future. You need to touch the past in order to move yourself forward.

How did you go about writing it?

I always knew the time would come when I would have to collect all the stories, find all the facts and write a coherent narrative of what had happened to the people in my family. My mother raised me on stories of cousins, grandparents - figures who loomed extra large over our household and were much more interesting than any Soviet reality. I started writing when I was ten. I kept collecting the stories, writing on scraps of paper, endlessly noting things that might be used for my book. I had to spend time in the archives, go into the precise places and spaces where my relatives used to live. It was important to physically immerse myself in this space, as a way of paying homage to the people I love who are not with me anymore. I wanted their lives and loves to be noticed, to become visible. They were just ordinary people living somewhere on the outskirts of history. To make their stories interesting, I had to find a different way of telling them. 

As I dug out the facts, I understood their stories were not complete, and would not be complete, until I managed to write them into the bigger frame of the whole twentieth century. No country and no person has a solitary history. We are all threads in a bigger carpet. My great grandmother’s story is connected with Ukraine, Russia, Germany, the whole European story: medical history, women’s liberation, war, the revolutionary movement. I wanted to write about my relatives as a specific case of European not Russian history. 

Is there a particular challenge related to the Soviet past?

The efforts of the state to conceal, distort, create a different reality lasted for a good part of the twentieth century. Certain ways of thinking underwent a serious transformation not only in Russia but across the whole post-Soviet space or the wider Warsaw bloc. You always had two different narratives. There was the grand official version you had to know by heart and which changed every second minute, with stories erased, pages torn out of the textbooks, things retooled, retold, redone. You had to follow, notice all the changes, and give an account of it whenever you were asked. But there was also an undercurrent of smaller narratives kept in families, contradicting each other, co-existing. A person could during his working hours learn or teach Marxism, and yet read forbidden books in his home. After a few decades it was not even seen as a contradiction, it was just a way of living that people got used to. 

What was the reaction in Russia when your book was published in 2017?

I was quite surprised. The reception was surprisingly good. It became a bestseller, even though it is not an easy book. The primary readers I had in mind were not even alive any more. I was just writing to satisfy myself and hopefully my mother’s shadow. And then, when the book came out, unknwn people started writing to me and told their own incredible stories. They were reacting not to my writing or the stories I was telling, but the approach to storytelling which was new to them. They felt it became possible to talk about things that stayed unnoticed and uninteresting before. What interested me was the lives of the uninteresting, those who never managed to do anything grandiose, the lives that are so small and tiny. We are used to thinking of Russian history as something that is tragic, but every human life is tragic by definition even if it did not end with a shooting squad or a concentration camp. Those who survived the Soviet regime are survivors all the same. There is no life that deserves not to be told. 

Does the book help explain the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine?

Very much. We are clearly unhappy with our present times and deeply afraid to step into the future, so the past is the only real, safe space we have. Even the atrocities of the past are more comforting than possible atrocities of the future. They are our inner vocabulary. Our culture is not producing any bright visions of the future any more. Facing the future requires a certain courage. You can feel nostalgia for the past but when you face it as a reality, you recognise that things will never be resurrected and you are unable to uncover or recover everything. The search itself makes you face the facts. Putin’s nostalgia for the twentieth century is not based on something factual, but on a feeling that something huge has been lost and must be recovered. The war in Ukraine, besides being the first huge war of this century on European soil, is also a re-enactment, a way to reverse history all the way back to the 1940s. Opposing that logic, shaping a different future, even simply finding a way to wish for a reliable future, has become essential for our generation. Now my personal dream project - the hope of seeing Russia and Russian lives as a part of a bigger European picture - is being questioned again because of the war. Putin’s state is doing everything it can to demolish this idea, and the prospect of unity. I’m still a believer at least.

What are your future projects?

I was in middle of my next book. Now I have to rethink and reshape it. It deals with a British-Russian story unfolding in first third of the nineteenth century. I’m deeply involved with it, in love with the heroine. It’s a novel, but the story is real. But now in a time of war, how far back one can go? Is it worth busying yourself with something that seems so faded? But maybe I need now to work with something that is seemingly distant, completely different. There again, when Susan Sontag staged Beckett in Sarajevo, she was criticised in the west for doing something irrelevant. For those who were involved, it was excessively relevant: they had this chance to create a different, maybe better, world which sets the its own rules and lives according to them in a time when no law is respected. 

How was it to work with your translator Sasha Dugdale? 

She’s amazing. She makes miracles when it comes to poetry. With this book, I was stunned with the result. When I’m writing in Russian, it’s not very conventional. She managed to create a new English melody that was able to convey all the impracticalities of my Russian. The way she recreated it in English was so impressive: making out a completely brand new language just for the purpose.

Sasha Dugdale, translator

How do you go about translation?

I have a funny position. I’m not a professional translator in the sense of taking on book after book. I tend to translate as an extension of my own writing, to open up worlds of interest to me. I translate writers I’ve built up a relationship with and feel in conversation with. 

How did you proceed with In memory of memory?

I have been translating Masha’s poetry for the last decade. When she asked me translate her prose, I felt I couldn’t refuse although I had my heart in my mouth – it’s such a huge book and so complex. But it’s an extension in writing of many conversations we have had in her kitchen. I could hear her voice, which is so powerful and friendly. We had a sense of companionship so I never felt I was on my own. She was always incredibly encouraging and warmly open to my input. I was very careful but I didn’t have the impression she was standing over me. She speaks excellent English so she could have micromanaged it, but she gave me full rein to make of it what I would.

What were the biggest challenges?

It’s incredibly hard to translate this book, because it is highly conceptual but uses very poetic language, so you are pulled in different directions. In poetry, I look for equivalence in sound: ways of conveying rhythm and musical qualities. In translating concepts, keeping closely to the words used is very important. How to retain both was the most difficult. In some ways it’s not the arias that present the difficulty. It’s the recitative parts, when you are trying to hold a line of argument or narrative and you want it to really work in English. I was constantly adjusting for rhythm and music. A real challenge were the letters she quoted: they were not literary and in some cases they were anti-literary and not particularly well conceived. I wanted the reader to know the writer was not quite in control of their prose. But if a translation is hard, it’s inevitably going to be more rewarding.

What are you working on now?

I’m translating Holy Winter, a long poem by Masha about the pandemic; and Secrets of the Craft by Akhmatova. I’ve just finished a selection of Serhiy Zhadan and I am trying to translate as many Ukrainian voices as I can. I worked on Zhadan with the poet Oksana Maksymchuk. Oksana and I spoke on zoom a lot about the meanings of the lines – I could quickly grasp meaning and ask questions that way. Ukrainian and Russian have similar roots, but are very different languages. When I look at a poem written in Ukrainian, it is as if a veil is drawn across and I can’t quite read the poem although I can feel its outlines. I really need help to see through the veil. It’s not just the words, of course, it’s the associations, the history of the language and culture, and translating poetry is impossible without that sense of what stands behind the words.