Displacement of Memory in Maria Stepanova’s In 'Memory of Memory' (2017)

• In Event: Reimagining the Past: Memory and Postmemory in Russia in the 2010-2020s

Abstract

The paper will demonstrate how Stepanova’s book pivots around the search for the memory traces of her Jewish
family and ancestors with the view to rescue their lives from oblivion. The book challenges the Soviet grand narrative imbued with the celebration of the heroic past by reviving the legacy of symbolic representation of female subjectivities found in Russian 19th and 20th-c. cultural history. The paper will also discuss Stepanova’s appropriation of Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory which she views is an important feature of the twentieth-century Russian history characterised by omnipresent violence.

Author

• Alexandra Smith, U of Edinburgh (UK)