In memory of memory
Interview conducted by Manuel Carcassonne, Managing Director of Les Editions Stock
Born in Moscow in 1972, Maria Stepanova is a poet, essayist and journalist as well as one of the most visible figures of contemporary literary life in Russia. She is the editor-in-chief of the online newspaper colta.ru. Her work Памяти памяти ( In Memory of Memory : A Romance, New Directions, 2017 / En mémoire de la mémoire, Stock 2022 ) was awarded, among many other distinctions, the Bolshaya Kniga Award ( 2018 ) and the Prix du Meilleur livre étranger ( 2023 ). For her most recent volume of poetry, Girls Without Clothes ( 2022 ), Stepanova received the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding 2023. In 2023-24 she will be a
residential fellow at the Columbia Institute of Ideas and Imagination ( Paris ). In Memory of Memory is a family scrapbook that tells the story of a turbulent century of Russian life. The narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs. Carefully reassembled with 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.