Památce paměti - romance – Stěpanovová Marija (2021)

The prose of contemporary Russian poet and essayist Maria Stepanova, with the accounting title "In Memory of Memory," responds to today's obsession with the past. The author also turns to it to thoroughly examine and come to terms with it. In her novel, she presents the story of her own seemingly ordinary Russian, or rather Soviet, family with Jewish and Ukrainian roots, whose members seem to be merely indifferent bystanders in the turbulent history of the twentieth century – revolutions, purges, and wars that form the unavoidable backdrop of their everyday lives. Stepanova sensitively combines letters, diaries, and photographs from her family archive with her narrative about herself and her long journey into the fates of her deceased ancestors. Yet, this is not one of those many books where the author travels the world searching for her roots, even though she ironically claims this about herself in the text. The personal line intertwines with essayistic chapters about writers Osip Mandelstam and W. G. Sebald, photographers Rafael Goldchain and Francesca Woodman, visual artists Charlotte Salomon and Joseph Cornell, and many others. All are united by the author's effort to understand what memory is in the age of post-memory and how the past is present in our current reality, which is…