The focus on the Ramblings today for #ReadIndies is another of my relatively recent discoveries: Fitzcarraldo Editions, an imprint which quickly became a fast favourite and which has provided many of my top reads over the last few years. Their range encompasses fiction, published in striking blue covers, and non-fiction, which appears in white. However, intriguingly enough, I find that when I read one of their books the lines are often blurred – and I regularly find myself querying what is actually fact and what actually fiction… Today’s book may well be a case in point!

The book in question is “In Memory of Memory” by Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale; and it’s released in Fiztcarraldo’s white non-fiction covers. However, a recent and fascinating interview with the author on the Punctured Lines blog refers to the book as a documentary novel; well, whatever you want to categorise it as, “Memory…” is a stunning and unforgettable read!

This book about my family is not about my family at all, but something quite different: the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.

Stepanova is a poet, essayist and journalist, having produced ten poetry collections and three books of essays. As well as winning a number of awards, she’s also the founder and editor-in-chief of the onlne independent crowd-sourced journal, Colta.ru. Sasha Dugdale is already responsible for translating a collection of Stepanova’s poetry, “War and the Beasts and the Animals”, published by Bloodaxe Books (another great indie) and both women have appeared together at events discussing and reading Stepanova’s work.

“In Memory of Memory” opens with the death of Stepanova’s aunt; and the author finds herself left with an accumulation of old postcards and letters, faded photographs, diaries and souvenirs, gathered up over a century of history. As she begins to explore the story of her family as revealed (or partly hidden) by these fragments, she realises that not only does the history relate to her relations, but also to life in Russia during the 20th century. Stepanova’s family is Jewish, and therefore their history is peppered with persecutions and repressions, narrow escapes and tragedies, and it reflects the larger fate of the Jewish people during that period.

This is, however, no straightforward narrative, and Stepanova’s approach is fascinating and unusual. For example, she examines the family photograph through the lens of Sontag and Barthes; she considers the fate of artists like Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva; she relates her own personal journeys to visit locations from her family’s past; and she considers the wider aspect of history itself. This latter element is particularly interesting, as her meditations on what history is, how truthful or not it can be, and the changing relationship we have with the way we record our lives are deep and thought-provoking. The sections on our modern way of charting our every move, photographing everything we do and filling the world with images which may never been looked at again set me thinking deeply about our use of social media and our intense narcissism. In contrast to the way our ancestors lived their lives, it does often seem that we’ve got it very wrong…

However, the way we document our lives is not always so different from those in the past; the example of Charlotte Saloman, whose story Stepanova covers in detail, is deeply moving. Saloman chronicled her life in a frenzied artistic effort, producing 769 paintings in the two years before her murder in Auschwitz. The painterly version of our current obsession with Instagram? Maybe. Then there’s Francesca Woodman, an American photographer who would be roughly my age now, but who took her own life when young, leaving behind a body of nebulous, perplexting work which resists easy definition. And of course there are Rembrandt’s endless self-portraits – another early version of the selfie. As for Mandelstam, he’s a recurring presence in the book, each appearance so desperately moving. “Memory…” does not shy away from the dark elements of 20th century history; even an aside like her comment on the poet Valentin Stenich where she notes darkly, “It’s said that he did not conduct himself with honour at his interrogation. God forbid anyone should find out how we conduct ourselves at ours” is a reminder of just what horrors took place during the relatively recent past.

It’s not only the visual which features in the book, however; there are plenty of written records upon which Stepanova can draw. Interspersed with the main chapters are what she titles “Not-a-chapter” sections; these reproduce letters to and from her various ancestors and these are moving remembrances of her family, often from their younger years when courting or away fighting or working. These perhaps inform the sections where Stepanova queries our treatment of the dead; with our access to recorded history and the endless research resources available nowadays, we can reclaim them and remember them in ways they may never have wanted, instead of allowing them to quietly fade away into distant family memory. With the development in the 20th century of the technology for us to film and record ourselves and our dearest ones, we have given them a kind of fixed immortality which perhaps blurs the lines between past and present. Yet Stepanova queries whether we have lost the ability to recognise the past as the past and learn from its mistakes – something which is very relevant nowadays.

As you might have gathered, “In Memory of Memory” is an often startling and unique book, encompassing art, literature, history and so much more. It’s a work which operates successfully on a number of levels, weaving together personal history and History with a capital H, always informed by Stepanova’s “not obvious”, as she puts it, Jewish heritage. There are juxtapositions of beauty and horror – the stunning art of Charlotte Salomon followed by the stark relating of her fate. The chapter on the Siege of Leningrad in particular shows Stepanova’s skill; here, from a plethora of sources (eye witness accounts, diaries etc) she pieces together the story of Lyodik, her grandfather’s cousin, alongside that of scores of others caught in the siege, from Lydia Ginzburg who left behind her blockade diary to the tragic author Daniil Kharms who died of starvation during the siege. That particular section is remarkably powerful and packs a real emotional punch…

Leningrad during the Siege (Deror_avi, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

At one point in the narrative, Stepanova describes this as the book she was always going to write, regarding herself as her family’s chronicler and stating (perhaps with a nod to Lenin at the Finland Station):

I always knew I would someday write a book about my family, and there were even periods when this seemed to be my life‘s purpose (summarizing lives, collecting them into one narrative) because it was simply the case that I was the first and only person in the family who had a reason to speak facing outwards, peering out from intimate family conversations as if from under a fur cap, and addressing the railway station concourse of collective experience.

Certainly the family couldn’t have had a better writer to record their lives and fates, albeit in such an unusual and inspiring format. As I mentioned at the start of this post, although “Memory…” is published as non-fiction by Fitzcarraldo, Stepanova has herself described it as a novel, and she does indeed query the accuracy and literal truth of any history. Certainly, hindsight can blur our reactions to the past, our memories are often partial and mistaken (another theme in the book) and there are no real absolutes when we look back. We are human and fallible, but the best we can do is to explore the past and draw conclusions from it. What conclusions do I draw from “In Memory of Memory”? That it’s a remarkable, brilliantly written book which provokes all manner of thoughts, questions, ideas and memories in me as a reader as well as keeping me gripped from start to finish. The book is 500 pages long and I didn’t feel there was a word wasted. Intriguingly, translator Sasha Dugdale reveals in her note at the end of the book that the book evolved in its English version as author and translator collaborated together; a tribute to both of their work and they’re obviously another author/translator match made in heaven.

“In Memory of Memory” is an outstanding achievement; a personal history which extends to a wider History as well as an exploration of the culture and life of the 20th century, it’s unlike anything else I’ve read and it’s a book which will really stay with you. It’s full of riches (only some of which I’ve been able to touch upon here), and as you can see, my copy is riddled with sticky notes; I could do a whole post just of amazing quotes from it. However, it’s published today and I urge you to get a copy and read it if you can – a wonderful book and an unforgettable reading experience.