First published 2023
The narrator stands among the remnants of her aunt's life: yellowed photographs, forgotten postcards, personal letters, worn diaries, and countless mementos scattered throughout the apartment. These fragments hold the story of her family's survival through decades of Russian persecution and political upheaval. As she pieces together this material legacy, the narrator reconstructs how ordinary people maintained dignity and normalcy amid extraordinary cruelty. The family's determination to live quietly and civilly becomes its own form of resistance against historical atrocity. Stepanova weaves together memoir, essay, fiction, and historical reflection, drawing connections to thinkers like Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam. The narrator's gentle, contemplative voice guides readers through questions of how we preserve the past and what we choose to remember. This exploration of both intimate family history and broader cultural memory reveals how personal artifacts become vessels for understanding survival, identity, and the weight of inherited experience.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, memoir, biography-memoir, 21st-century, cultural-studies
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Russia
Period: 20th-century, 21st-century
510 pages · Paperback · Fitzcarraldo Editions