Maria Stepanova

The writer known as M. is living in exile while her home country wages war on a neighbouring state. Wracked by shame and severed from her language, M. finds herself unable to write, unmoored in a present where the future feels unknowable. When she travels to a nearby country for an event, a twist of fate leaves her stranded in an unfamiliar city, phoneless and untraceable. In this rupture, she feels a flicker of liberation – the possibility of starting over – but memories of childhood, books, films and tarot cards pull her back, the last fragments of a vanishing world. Then she meets a troupe of circus performers who invite her to join them. For a moment, reinvention seems within reach. Oscillating between reality and dream, written in rich, hypnotic prose, The Disappearing Act is a haunting meditation on identity, language and the fragile desire to disappear by Maria Stepanova, one of Russia’s greatest living writers.

Výber z poviedkovej tvorby súčasných ruských spisovateliek a spisovateľov v preklade študentiek a študentov prekladateľstva z projektu Samyzdat. Spomienky, prelínanie minulosti s prítomnosťou. Traumy, s ktorými sa treba vysporiadať. A jediným liekom je zase len plynutie času. Kde vzniká nostalgia? Autorkami a autormi poviedok v knihe sú Andrej Astvacaturov, Denis Dragunskij, Linor Goralik, Jevgenija Nekrasova, Maxim Osipov a Dina Rubina. Záverečnú esej napísala Maria Stepanova. Poviedky preložili Magdaléna Durkáčová, Veronika Goldiňáková, Beáta Koššová, Ivana Roháčová, Peter Rusina a Michaela Vinczeová.

An exploration of life at the margins of history from one of Russia’s most exciting contemporary writers Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize Winner of the MLA Lois Roth Translation Award With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms?essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents?Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.