Book review: the Variegated and wonderful journey into the history

From the mid-1800s until shortly after the first world war were manufactured in Germany immensely popular porslinsdockor in sizes from a few to 50 centimeters. They were cast in one piece, frozen in his pose and went on easily broken. The smallest could be concealed in bread or porridge, populate the doll house or carried in your pocket as a stresskula. On the cover of Maria Stepanovas ”Recollections of memory” floats such broken dolls, they are a picture of history as it comes to our meeting, regardless of whether we are looking back to major events, or our own family history: in shards.

Maria Stepanova was born in 1972 in Moscow and has a central position in Russian cultural publicity: essayist, poet, editor-in-chief for an online magazine, last year a visiting professor in Berlin and currently working on his first novel. That is to say, it begins as the novel: ”My aunt died”, a home should be disclosed, berättarjaget looking among the postcards, photos and diaries which, unfortunately, only includes everyday notes strumptvätt and inmates medicindoser. No thoughts, nothing to build a great familjeroman around, nothing like the Romain Rollands 10 volumes of Jean-Christophe, who stands in the fasterns bookshelf.

for our time, inspired by predecessors such as W G Influence, an excavation where a seemingly unimportant findings open the door to the hidden torture chamber, where a postcard from Montpellier lead to a whole world that had been lost, where the investigative subject moves between fantasy and fakticitet. The only thing that reminds people of the great epic novels is the multitude of names and nicknames, Ljolja, Ljonja, Ljodik, impossible to keep apart, but it is not needed, for the Stepanova can not, do not want to tie up all the narrative threads into a coherent tapestry. Not only is there too little to build on, our time do not believe any longer in that kind of reconstruction of history.

Stepanova follow the tracks of her Russian-jewish family for over a hundred years. She describes it as a marvelous escapes of the world wars, the Holocaust and Stalin's purges. It has endeavoured to preserve a protective obscurity, hidden fortunes and academic education in the rest of the world behind the neutral yrkesangivelser as ”mechanic” or ”official”. For a little matter for a novel, too much emptiness. But the conscious concealment hides the sometimes unmentionable sufferings, as in the letter the 19-year-old soldier Ljodik writes to his mother from the front just before he is killed in Leningrad: Not a word about the cold, hunger, damage, death all around, only that everything is fine, he hopes that the mother will have a good time.

From the letters goes Stepanova on to other people's testimony, she converses with the dead poets such as Anna Akhmatova of the siege of Leningrad, Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam, with western writers from the period after the second world war: Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag.

histories leads to an exhaustive essay of Charlotte Salomon's story in over seven hundred paintings, Leben oder Theater, impossible to set out in its entirety. When Stepanova criticizes the tendency to read images as autobiographies exemplify she with Francesca Woodmans photographs. Both of these artists have in recent years received considerable attention by retrospective exhibitions, Stepanova look back, but she is doing it with their time.

It would be wrong to consider the essäistiska elements digressions, they are not only extremely inspiring in themselves, they are also important, sometimes crucial elements in an attempt to make the personal experience into a shared history. We have no relationship with her great-aunt, or her grandfather's cousin, but we can, with the help of her story, other people's literature, broken dolls, art, old food recipes, birth certificates and other sunken cargo become involved in each other's memories. Absolutely, however, may never understand or share the past, ”looking at the photos of their relatives as a human zoo, in the wild, inburade the animals with their soft, deep hidden life”.

the Quote gives an idea about both the translation quality and Stepanovas style. Nils Håkansson switches superbly between Stepanovas own prose, the old document kanslispråk and different brevskrivares vardagligheter, precisely because the stand is a wonderful mistranslation in the eyes, ”the Leningrad docks and prospectus”. It is not the brochures spread out in the town, without avenues, but you understand the idea, the prospectus are undoubtedly also among all minnesbråte.

closest to the self-possessed but she paints sometimes in photos: ”every now and Then opened a tear in the light, blomsterkransade life, who suddenly bared its coarse inner lining”. So it is to read this wonderful book, in the shadow of young girls in bloom is suddenly a slain grandfather, the porslinsdocka that now adorned the mantelpiece crushed against the floor, but just therefore you get an idea of the larger context. Her ”novel” is a series of travel without a goal or end, I am absorbed by them, and mourns only that the book itself still runs out.