The great Russian literature is also contemporary. It happens like good Brazilian football, which is written more outside of Russia than inside, after the disbandment of intellectuals who have gone to live in other countries. Among them, the name of María Stepánova (Moscow, 1972) stands out, a resident of Berlin (like Liudmila Ulítskaya or Svetlana Alexievich), who has just published In Memory of Memory (Cliff), a captivating immersion in the history of her family, Jews of humble origin who went through all the persecutions of the 20th century. Stepánova puts on her detective hat, travels, reviews files, letters, photographs, interviews many people and gradually composes a mosaic of crossed stories that make up a kind of non-fiction novel, a family saga that is at the same time an essay. on memory, art and identity or a chronicle on the research of the author herself, who attended this newspaper yesterday in a hotel in Barcelona.
Many of the places featured in the book – from Odessa to Donbas to Kharkiv – will be familiar to those who follow news of the Ukraine war. “These are places where I was happy,” he says, “it horrifies me to think that they live under occupation. I once wrote that we were living in a post-catastrophic era but I was wrong, we are fully in the catastrophe”. She highlights the courage of the anti-war movement in Russia, “especially led by women, feminists who clandestinely edit Women’s Pravda, her own newspaper. Street demonstrations are a very big danger. I have a poet friend who demonstrated against the mobilization of reservists. They arrested him and in prison they gave him a mobilization order to go immediately to war! By force, it does not correspond to him, but they have sent him to the front, they are doing it with many dissidents, their objective is the pure physical elimination of those who protest, they throw them to the most dangerous places, or to environments where they could suffer accidents. And there are people in jail for making a retweet.”
Stepánova’s website, considered one of the most influential in the country, was shut down with a bang. “Censorship has always existed in Russia – she comments –, normally they warned you in writing that you had published something inappropriate. But the page was directly blocked for me, and it was closed permanently for ‘attacking the integrity of social life’. There is not a single independent media outlet left.”
Stepanova’s parents left for Germany already in the 90s. She did not want to follow them and stayed in Russia. “I was in my twenties and everything important happened then in Russia, which is also the country of my literary language.” Now she has had to leave but she plans to “come back soon, I like to think it’s just a temporary departure. I want to return as soon as possible… but it is unwise to make plans.” Today, she says, “it’s like in the 1920s, when the cream of Russian culture lived in Berlin. Literature is a form of resistance.
“The most important part of personal history is the one we don’t know about,” he says, returning to the book. “There is a part that I will never know, how could it be, I wondered at first, that there were no executioners or victims among my ancestors? Little by little, some came out.” The gallery of characters includes prison directors, businessmen, prisoners…
In the war scenes, as well as in others, the author gives her voice directly to the ghosts of her relatives, who speak throughout extensive letters. “It was important to hear her voices directly. It is curious that many of those who experience war, cold, hunger… write very optimistic letters so that their relatives do not worry”. Her father has not authorized him to reproduce his: “Never in his life had he told me no to anything, but in this case he did not recognize himself, after the dramas he has experienced, in the innocence of that boy” .
In memory of memory is the work of a life. “I started writing this book when I was 10 years old. I was always collecting stuff, then I’ve spent three years thoroughly researching it and another three writing it. It’s a love story… towards people who no longer exist.”
In some passages, he dwells on clearly anti-Semitic fragments of authors such as Marcel Proust, Boris Pasternak, Thomas Mann, George du Maurier… “It is necessary that it be known that they were anti-Semitic, but without changing our opinion of them as great writers. The history of opinions is a history of mistakes and suffering. Proust and Pasternak, furthermore, were Jews but they lived it in a very complicated way”.
In addition to the ghosts of relatives, the dibbuks appear, “a Jewish legend, they are dead who do not want to leave the world and wander looking for someone who has a great emptiness inside, they find it, they enter inside and speak with their voice” . Stepanova has written the libretto for an opera about them for the composer Leonid Desyatnikov “but, because of the war, I don’t know when it will be performed.”
Everything that is narrated in In memory of memory are real events, and in the prose there are echoes of Sebald, Sontag, Der Níster… “For me, fiction is not something that is related to reality but to the type of language; in this sense, for me this is a fiction book”.
From pen to iPhone, Stepanova looks at the different ways we’ve tried to make memories. “There is a danger that the quantity of images, and not the quality, is the way to perpetuate ourselves. How to find the significant moments in the current flood of images? In the 18th and 19th centuries, even in the early 20th, if you weren’t the king of Spain, you only had two or three important images of your life. Now, any adolescent treasures tens of thousands of images of himself, but none of them reflects his essence.
The daughter of a photographer, she has chosen not to include images. “All my work dialogues with visual images, not always in a friendly way. Here I speak of the alternatives to the image for the construction of memory”.
Stepánova’s work dialogues with the body and with art, with Louise Bourgeois, Francesca Woodman, Charlotte Salomon or Joseph Cornell, “who, one day when he was showing one of his films, with Dalí as a spectator, got up indignantly, he yelled: ‘You have plagiarized my dreams!’ and left the room”.
