In Memory of Memory

An exploration of life at the margins of history from one of Russia’s most exciting contemporary writers
Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize
Winner of the MLA Lois Roth Translation Award

With the death of her aunt, the narrator 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 Dipping into various forms―essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents―Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.

Poet, novelist, essayist, and journalist, Maria Stepanova is the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays. Her poetry collections Holy Winter 20/21 and War of the Beasts and the Animals were Poetry Book Society Translation Choices and winners of PEN Translates awards, and War of the Beasts and the Animals was also shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2021. Her novel In Memory of Memory won Russia's Big Book Award in 2018 and was published in English in Sasha Dugdale's translation. She was awarded the Berman Literature Prize for In Memory of Memory, and was also shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and the James Tait Black Prize for Biography.

Maria Stepanova has received several Russian and international literary awards (including the prestigious Andrey Bely Prize and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship). In 2022 she was awarded the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding 2023 for a book of poetry, Mädchen ohne Kleider (Girls Without Clothes). She founded and was editor-in-chief of the online independent crowd-sourced journal Colta.ru, which engaged with the cultural, social and political reality of contemporary Russia until the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine when all dissenting media in Russia were forced to shut down. As a prominent critic of Putin’s regime, she had to leave Russia and is now living in exile.

Sasha Dugdale is a poet and translator. Her sixth book of poetry is The Strongbox, published by Carcanet (UK) in 2024. Deformations (2020) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Derek Walcott Prizes. Her long poem "Joy" won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem of 2016. 

Dugdale's translation of Maria Stepanova’s prose work In Memory of Memory was shortlisted for the International Booker and won the MLA Lois Roth Award. She has translated two of Stepanova’s poetry collections and work by a number of Russian-language women poets, including Elena Shvarts and Marina Tsvetaeva. For many years she specialized in translating Russian-language new writing for theaters in the UK and US, including the New York Public Theater and the UK’s Royal Court Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company.