A book that refuses to be one thing
Maria Stepanova's In Memory of Memory appeared in Russian in 2017 under the title Pamyat' pamiati — the phrase folding back on itself, memory remembering memory. The book was published by Novy Literaturny Obozrenie, the Moscow press that has long been the principal home for serious literary and theoretical non-fiction in Russia. Sasha Dugdale's English translation was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the United Kingdom and New Directions in the United States in 2021. Dugdale's version won the Read Russia Prize that year, one of the few occasions on which a prize administered to encourage English translation of Russian literature has gone to a book that does not fit neatly inside fiction.
Categorising the book is the central problem, and Stepanova knows it. The trigger is her aunt's death and the subsequent clearing of a Moscow apartment dense with the paper residue of several generations of a Russian Jewish family: photographs, letters, documents, objects. But In Memory of Memory does not resolve into memoir. It accumulates instead: alongside the family material, Stepanova assembles extended essays on Charlotte Salomon, W. G. Sebald, Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Cornell, and Roland Barthes, among others — writers and artists whose work interrogates what it means to hold an image of someone who is gone. The book is in constant argument with its own ambitions.
What the archive actually is
Stepanova's family archive is, by the standards of the twentieth century, remarkable for its mundanity. The photographs are not of famous people; the letters are not about historical events in any direct sense. The family moved through the Soviet period — through its wars, its purges, its evacuations — and survived. That survival is itself the subject. Stepanova is precise about what has been kept and what its keeping means: the archive exists not because the family was important but because people who are not important also keep things, and those things outlast them.
This is where the book finds its critical edge. Stepanova is reading the theorists of memory and photography — she is explicit about her debts to Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes — but she is also testing their frameworks against material those frameworks were not designed to hold: a Soviet Jewish family's domestic archive, with all the specific pressures of what could and could not be saved, displayed, or named under Soviet conditions. The result is a critique of European memory culture conducted from inside it. Stepanova belongs to the tradition she is interrogating.
The book is alert to its own position in a specifically Russian literary context. The thick journal Novy Mir, which had been the site of some of the most consequential acts of literary disclosure in Soviet and post-Soviet life, had no obvious place for a book like this. Pamyat' pamiati did not arrive through the journal culture but through the theoretical non-fiction press. Its closest generic relatives are German and French — Sebald, above all, but also Nathalie Sarraute's autofiction and the documentary novel as practised outside Russia. Stepanova takes that borrowing seriously; the book is partly about what Russian literature can inherit from Western European post-war writing about catastrophe and its traces.
What Dugdale preserved and how
Translation decisions in In Memory of Memory are, from a translator's perspective, unusually exposed, because the book is itself about the gap between an original and what comes after it: between the person and the photograph, between the event and the archive, between the dead and the living reader. Dugdale has spoken in public about the difficulty of matching Stepanova's prose, which moves between registers — scholarly, lyrical, abrupt — without signalling the transitions. Where one sentence might carry the cadence of critical theory and the next the flatness of a family document, the translation has to hold both modes without letting either collapse into the other.
A passage from Part One, in which Stepanova describes opening a folder of family photographs, works in the original through a kind of inventory syntax — nouns accumulating without a governing verb until the sentence finally settles. Dugdale preserves the structural delay, which is a meaningful choice: a different translator might have broken the sequence into shorter units to ease the English reader's path. Keeping the syntactic suspension maintains the sensation of looking through photographs without knowing where to look first, which is precisely what the passage is enacting.
Elsewhere, the translation faces the problem of Stepanova's essayistic quotation. The book is threaded with references to Russian poetry — including Mandelstam and Pasternak — and to prose that carries specific resonances in Russian literary culture. Dugdale, herself a poet, handles the verse citations with a lightness that avoids turning them into set-pieces. The PEN/Heim Translation Fund, which supports literary translation into English including from Russian, has repeatedly noted in its published documentation the difficulty of translating Russian prose that is itself in conversation with Russian poetry; Dugdale's solution is to treat the verse as texture rather than exhibit.
The argument the book is making
The book's argument, pursued across its chapters, is not optimistic about what memory preserves. Stepanova does not conclude that the archive restores the dead; she concludes, more darkly, that the archive reveals the distance between the living and the dead to be unbridgeable. The photographs of her relatives are not windows; they are evidence of a surface that cannot be crossed. This is where her engagement with Barthes is most direct — his distinction in Camera Lucida between the studium (the informational content of a photograph) and the punctum (the detail that pierces the viewer personally) becomes, in Stepanova's hands, a way of understanding what a family archive does to its custodian. She cannot puncture her way through to the people in the images. She can only record that the images remain.
The book won the NOS Prize in 2018 — the prize focused on innovative prose — which is the correct institutional recognition for what it is doing formally. The Bolshaya Kniga Prize, geared toward prose fiction in the more conventional sense, was not where this book found its recognition. The NOS jury's open deliberation, which is part of that prize's format, has been reported as turning substantially on the question of whether Pamyat' pamiati constitutes literature at all in any traditionally bounded sense, and the jury's decision to award it represents a commitment to an expansive answer to that question.
Since its English publication, In Memory of Memory has been read alongside Sebald's The Rings of Saturn and Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces as part of a loose genre of archive-driven meditative prose that refuses the consolations of narrative. The comparison is accurate as far as it goes, but it papers over what is specifically Russian about Stepanova's project: the family she is describing survived the twentieth century in a way that required constant negotiation with a state that classified, surveilled, and sometimes destroyed its citizens' records. The archive she inherited is not simply what was kept. It is what was kept in those conditions, by those people, at that cost.