Maria Stepanova’s book is an attempt to write the history of her own family, instantly leading to the question of whether it is even possible to preserve memory of the past; a breakdown of a family archive turns into a look at the ways the past lives in the present, and into a history of the main events of the 20th century—how they can exist within the personal memory of a modern person.
People and their traces disappear, objects lose their purpose, and the evidence speaks in dead languages—describing and discarding various intermediaries between itself and the larger history, the author of “Memory of Memory” remains with us and leaves us one on one with our past.