The Disappearing Act

‘Political evil has re-emerged across the West, imposing agony upon all people of conscience, and new challenges on writers and artists. In her incandescent poems and essays, Maria Stepanova has never shirked the weight of history long borne by writers from Russia, Asia, Africa and Latin America. Her artistic, intellectual and spiritual resources seem even richer in her first novel, The Disappearing Act. I have not read a novel that attests, with such melancholy precision, to the shame, absurdity and confusion of being human today, or describes so acutely the immense but too often frustrated craving for radical self-transformation.’
— Pankaj Mishra, author of The World After Gaza

‘The Disappearing Act is a witty, unsettling and profound reflection on belonging and estrangement.’
— Abdulrazak Gurnah, 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate

‘In this captivating and capacious novel from Stepanova (In Memory of Memory), a 50-year-old novelist experiences a bizarre and liberating metamorphosis while in exile from her unnamed home country, which has just started a devastating war with its neighbour.... Far from a literary gimmick, the novel comes across as an urgent call to resist complacency and recover one’s vitality in the face of injustice. It’s a stunner.’
— Publishers Weekly, starred review

‘Extraordinary – a work of haunting power, grace and originality.’
— Philippe Sands, author of East West Street (praise for In Memory of Memory)

‘Intentionally the memoir is meandering, digressive, cumulative, compendious – a mind moving around its wide world. Dugdale’s translation appears heroic, to this reader with no Russian, in its sustained careful attentiveness…. [S]o much of what Stepanova has saved for us is remarkable and rich with meaning.’
— Tessa Hadley, Guardian (praise for In Memory of Memory)

‘A luminous, rigorous, and mesmerizing interrogation of the relationship between personal history, family history, and capital-H History. I couldn’t put it down; it felt sort of like watching a hypnotic YouTube unboxing-video of the gift-and-burden that is the twentieth century. In Memory of Memory has that trick of feeling both completely original and already classic, and I confidently expect this translation to bring Maria Stepanova a rabid fan base on the order of the one she already enjoys in Russia.’
— Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot (praise for In Memory of Memory)

‘There is simply no book in contemporary Russian literature like In Memory of Memory ... [A] truly major European writer. I am especially grateful to Sasha Dugdale for her precise and flawless translation which makes this book such a joy to read in English. This is a voice to live with.’
— Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic (praise for In Memory of Memory)

‘Stepanova’s tour de force blends memoir, literary criticism, essay and fiction. Although this is a personal and intimate work using photographs, postcards and diaries, it succeeds in mining a universal theme in contemporary Russian cultural life: how does a family – or a country – process the events of the past 100 years?’
— Viv Groskop, Guardian (praise for In Memory of Memory)

‘Dazzling erudition and deep empathy come together in Maria Stepanova’s profound engagement with the power and potential of memory, the mother of all muses. An exploration of the vast field between reminiscence and remembrance, In Memory of Memory is a poetic appraisal of the ways the stories of others are the fabric of our history.’
— Esther Kinsky, author of Seeing Further (praise for In Memory of Memory)

‘This remarkable account of the author’s Russian-Jewish family expands into a reflection on the role of art and ethics in informing memory.… Stepanova is both sensitive and rigorous.’
— New Yorker (praise for In Memory of Memory)