“Essential… Written with deep insight, despair and an intrinsic sense of the alarming recurrence of the present’s failure to learn lessons from the past .” Irish Times
Maria Stepanova - whose masterly In Memory of Memory combined family memoir, essay and fiction - left her native Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Translated by Sasha Dugdale, in The Disappearing Act, 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. She feels a flicker of liberation, but fragmented memories of childhood, books, films and tarot cards pull her back.
Maria Stepanova has published ten poetry collections and three books of essays. She has received several Russian and international literary awards, including the prestigious Andrey Bely Prize and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship. In Memory of Memory won Russia’s Bolshaya Kniga Award in 2018.