In Memory of Memory – Maria Stepanova

Fitzcarraldo Editions | Translated by Sasha Dugdale

There are books you read, and books you inhabit. Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory is firmly the latter: a slow, circling, quietly devastating meditation on family, photography, objects and the nature of remembering itself. It is one of those rare works that changes the way you look at the world after you’ve finished it.

Stepanova begins with the death of her aunt, and the task of sorting through what remains. What follows is not grief memoir in any conventional sense. Instead she sifts through the remnants of her Russian Jewish family across several generations – letters, photographs, medicine bottles, postcards, diaries – and asks a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to preserve a life in things? What are we actually doing when we keep?

The book moves associatively rather than chronologically, pulling in Sebald, Charlotte Salomon, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag. It is essayistic and novelistic at once, part family history, part cultural criticism, part elegy, part cabinet of curiosities. Stepanova is interested in the gap between what objects hold and what they cannot, the way a photograph both preserves and falsifies, the way memory is always already an act of fiction.

What makes it a Slow Pleasure read is precisely this quality of attention. Stepanova notices things. She lingers. She refuses the shortcut of easy emotion. Reading her feels like being in the company of someone who has thought deeply and carefully about what it means to be alive in time, to inherit a past you didn’t choose and carry it forward into an uncertain future.

Fitzcarraldo have published it with their characteristic restraint: a white cover, clean spare typography, the kind of physical object that earns its place on a shelf and stays there. Sasha Dugdale’s translation is quietly extraordinary, managing to render Stepanova’s Russian essayism into English prose that breathes.

This is not a book to rush. Read a chapter, put it down, look at an old photograph. Come back. Let it do what it wants to do. It rewards patience the way the best things always do: slowly, and completely.