MARIA STEPANOVA
Inside the communal apartment in Moscow where poet, writer and journalist Maria Stepanova grew up was a myriad of letters, photographs and objects from a deep past that contrasted sharply with the Soviet present outside. As the designated chronicler of her family history, Stepanova took the archive and embarked on a ten-year voyage through layers of time. The result is In Memory of Memory (2017), a cellular-level dissection of the insistent yet ephemeral nature of remembrance in which Stepanova touches the past, loses her way and where, more than once, access is denied. In the book, shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, Stepanova lavishes such tender attention on her long-departed relatives that these long-lost strangers appear to walk into the light and speak.
Interview by Claudia Steinberg
Portrait by Andrey Natotsinsky
Claudia Steinberg You have said that fears, dreams and desires shape history more than ideas, social concepts or even economic realities. Why are they so powerful?
Maria Stepanova Dreams, desires and memories have a lasting quality. We’ll forget about economic matters, but dreams are transmitted from one generation to another, sometimes unconsciously. I’m sure that some of my dreams don’t even belong to me, but are inherited from the collective and familial subconscious. Sometimes even the unspoken was still very present – I used to have a recurring dream of pogroms. My mother never mentioned them in relation to her family, yet one branch that used to live in southern Ukraine at the turn of the 20th century lived in villages where pogroms were taking place. They surely had memories, and there must have been enormous fear. Such feelings leave almost a biological trace that shapes long-term memorial thinking.
CS You’ve written about a psychoanalyst who recorded a recurring dream among contemporary Russians of being deported on a train.
MS That psychoanalyst made a huge impression on me because I used to dream of being carried away in some train to nowhere, and now those dreams are coming back. When I recently went back home to Russia for a month after a year in Germany, it was a strange sensation. In many ways, you can’t distinguish Moscow from any other big European or American metropolis. After half a year of war, Moscow has this leisurely, expansive air of a seaside city and everyone is so beautiful. Nothing reminds you of the war. I decided to go to my dacha 60 kilometres from Moscow. It is old, and Russian dissidents used to live there in the 1970s; it has always been my safe space. Yet when I was there, I had the same dream every single night: being at an airport, unable to get to the plane, not even knowing my destination. The feeling of displacement was strong. When my immigrant friends, who are mostly from post-Soviet countries, come back to Russia, they dream that someone is tearing their passports apart so they are locked inside Russia again.
CS The German-Jewish exiles I have met in New York always told terrible stories of the seized, lost, invalidated or fake passports that decided their fates.
MS I’ve been reading books about German emigrants from the 1930s. There are many similarities to the present, as if we were following the same script. They reminded me of Thomas Mann and other writers debating whether to emigrate or stay in Germany; there’s a huge tension between those who left Russia and those who stayed.
CS Your descriptions of Odessa and Kherson in Ukraine brought these places, their history and great cultural vitality so close that I had an intense sense of loss when they came under attack.
MS All the branches of my family come from these places. I visited them by myself, just to be there. This could never happen now because not only am I Jewish but a Russian citizen and I would not feel right as a tourist in places that have been wounded by my country’s aggression. I’m quite pessimistic about the next few years but I can’t be stuck in a vision of my glorious ancestral past – that would be too close to what Russia is doing. For now, it’s all still there, but you don’t know if you can come back to your books, your archive, your furniture.
CS Most of these things now exist in your book. One important exception is your father’s letters from the war; he did not want them to be quoted.
MS Few of my relatives were alive to answer questions or to give their permission. When you’re alone with your archive you acquire a certain attitude of, not entitlement, but it’s easy to regard the stories of dead people as material that you now own. Artists and writers have done this for centuries. You think of yourself as salvaging it, but at every step, there is the possibility of contradicting the wishes of those who passed away. I’m grateful my father had the strength to forbid me to use his letters. My mother was the family storyteller and already as a kid I became a container for all that information. Everybody knew that I would be the first writer in the family and would own the material. Decades later, when I was facing the family archive, everything was disjointed, including in my mind: I had to invent some way of telling these stories, while acknowledging all the blank spaces. I wanted to include all the letters and notes and go to all the places where my family used to live, not in hope of some mystical recollection, but to put myself in the same landscape and see that everything has changed. And they were speaking in the language of lost times; to reconnect, I physically wrote down the bulk of the written material, not only the letters or quotes I was planning to use.
CS Did the process of typing everything up make it feel like your own?
MS Writing to me is very physical. I felt that I was able not only to speak with their voices but to understand what constituted them. Among these letters were some from my father dating from the 1960s, a time of huge hopes for the Soviet Union. After typing and editing them, I regarded myself as their author and felt it was up to me to organise the “material” that was the living and breathing presence of my father. His objection was quite unexpected. He was very kind, but he said, “I don’t want people to think that’s how I used to be.”
CS As a child, I did not like to hear the stories of the past, they were foreign and dark and often somehow forbidden, but you wanted to write your family story when you were ten.
MS Maybe it had something to do with the atmosphere I grew up in. Since the 1920s Soviet designers had produced a recognisable style for everything, from food packaging to street signs and books. The idea was to create a world of equality, which meant modesty. The design was nice, smart and sometimes pretty in a low-key way. We saw it everywhere, but my family had a lot of objects that belonged to a different time and different lifestyle. They had nothing to do with Soviet aesthetics, and the difference was striking. I spent hours going through my grandfather’s old postcards; I was fascinated by a hat with an ostrich feather. I used them as escape routes because they were something completely different.
CS Considering that you were designated the family scribe so early, it took you a while to start your project.
MS Telling your parents’ story is close to telling your own, and I was afraid of alienating myself from the feeling of togetherness that means a lot to me. My mother died in 1998, and I still feel very close to her because she was the person who was most interested in my writing. She wanted me to write and it’s hard to tell if the impulse behind my writing is my own or if I’m just fulfilling her wish. Sometimes I cannot tell whether In Memory of Memory was some kind of a message I had to deliver and even if the parcel belongs to me. It was her history, and I always saw myself as the smallest figure in a matryoshka-like line-up. I’m the one who cannot be pulled apart, the solid doll – I’m supposed to handle the things they could not.
CS You have described the past as such a vast and ambiguous space that even misunderstandings lead to epiphanies. The prime example would be your conviction that you had found your great-grandfather’s house in Saratov. All these feelings ran through you, and then you learned it was not his house. This experience, you write, has taught you everything you know about memory.
MS It’s important to me that the past, as oblique and obscure as it might be, used to exist. I’m always wearing my grandmother’s ring – it can get lost or lose all meaning but as long as I’m here, the connection works. Sometimes I’m mistaken, as happened with my ancestor’s house, but I still embraced and recognised my reconnection with some emotional aspect of this unknown past. It was a powerful thing, and a real experience. It could easily be regarded as something purely imaginary, but I think it was not.
CS With the mission to find out about one of your ancestors, you went to the cemetery in Kherson. The thorny vegetation around the gravestones scratched and trapped you until you gave up. Does this encounter with the past suggest that it’s better preserved in writing and images than in the physical realm?
MS I don’t quite know what to make of it and I don’t want to overdo it. You are not supposed to go back; that is a physical and metaphysical axiom: life is this one-way street. If you invest enough strength, you can go a few steps back – but it’s a painful process. Remember the Arabian fairy tale of Sinbad riding on a huge bird that needs to be fed so he has to give it pieces of his own flesh to make the journey. The Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of Kherson is very old. I had to climb over the fence and then through this dense mess of overgrowth. I wanted to get right into the middle, but it was not possible. When I took a shower later I saw that my legs were covered with blood. When I washed it away the scratches from the thorns looked like the script of an unknown language. The illegible writing had gotten under my skin. This was my most physical contact with the past, and maybe it was also a stop sign.
CS It was upsetting to read that scene. You came with such gentle intentions, but suddenly you were in hostile, forbidden territory.
MS The past is forbidden territory. One of the Russian futurists from the 1910s or 1920s wrote about Russia as a land that is full of spectres and living beings that mix and mingle, sometimes too intimately. Some warnings are needed.
CS Apropos of danger: I also wanted to ask about your political work.
MS For the first few months after we started our daily website openspace.ru [in 2007], we were dealing primarily with culture. Then came the war in Georgia [in August 2008], and politics were added as a necessary component. We wanted to address it directly, as well as through a cultural lens. Then we started another site, colta.ru, and laws against independent media were issued, so we registered as a blog and not as a newspaper. Sometimes Roskomnadzor, the censorship ministry, created difficulties, but we just paid the penalties. It didn’t seem particularly dangerous. Then I was invited to a panel somewhere and I saw my title as “internet activist”. I am not an internet activist – they are brave people who are doing unthinkable things – but for the last few years, especially the last six months, the Russian state has viewed any kind of independent activity as activism. A few weeks before the war, the number of independent media was reduced to about 15 publications. Now everything has been closed down.
CS I want to quote your rich and inspiring phrase “the inner zoo of the soul” in praise of difference and diversity and as an antidote to nationalism and territoriality.
MS I’m always thinking of the human soul as real, just as I see my books as spatial objects. Our souls are densely populated – with the world’s mythologies, with the heroes of antiquity. Our inner zoo contains all the creatures from Noah’s Ark, and sometimes you meet a very rare beast – a beautiful surprise. ◉