In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova

The author is a poet, born in 1972, so she has seen quite a bit of what Russian history has to offer, through her own eyes and those of her elders. She tells us that she’s been trying to write this book of her family history for years, in some sense ever since she was an only child, growing up with parents and grandparents and, for a while, a great-grandmother, too, in an apartment in Moscow crowded with the leftover possessions of past generations: their books, teacups, newspapers, clothes, postcards, toys, photographs, as well as fragments of family anecdote. It’s the same apartment where she begins typing this fictionalized memoir, which is more like a scrapbook than a linear tale, and one that is not fraught with horrors, despite every opportunity to be exposed to them.