Transformation of Family History: (Post)Memorial Temporality in Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.57589/srl.v73i1.4205Keywords:
poetics of time, In Memory of Memory, novel of the 2010s, postmemoryAbstract
Departing from the premise that the temporality of literary texts can be understood as an anthropological-cultural category—one that archives and traces, making time “speak our language,” that is, humanizing it by giving it linguistic form—this article explores the temporal structure of Pamiati pamiati (In Memory of Memory) by Maria Stepanova. Marked by synchronicity and the co-temporality of past and present events, the novel problematizes the internal connection of events to fixed positions in historical time. It demonstrates that the three dimensions of time—past, present, and future—are neither separate nor “closed off” from one another; rather, they interpenetrate, as the past remains relevant to both the present and the future, thus revealing its extended temporality and its inherently relational, relative nature.
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