After the death of her aunt, Maria Stepanova inherits the remains of a family archive. 

The work is how she reconstructs these fragments into a history, a philosophy of sorts,  and explores what happens when the desire to preserve the past begins altering it.

Moving between memoir, essay, travel writing, literary criticism and archival investigation, Stepanova follows the lives of her Jewish family through revolution, war, persecution and Soviet history while thinking alongside writers and artists including W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes and Osip Mandelstam. Photographs become especially unstable objects: apparently documentary, yet full of absences, accidents and meanings supplied after the fact.

It is an extraordinary inquiry into the machinery of memory itself. Translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale. Fitzcarraldo describes the book as moving across essay, memoir, fiction, travelogue and historical documents; it was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize. 

Fitzcarraldo Editions, London, 2021. Second UK edition. Translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale. Paperback. Light handling and shelf wear to the white covers, with a few faint marks and minor creasing at edges/corners. Internally clean and unmarked; binding firm. Very good condition.