Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory presumes that memory is unrecoverable, flawed, and at times imaginary. Just as memory defies any lasting structure, so does Stepanova’s book resist categorization. The work has been billed as a novel, but its pages contain essays, documents, literary criticism, and hints of historical biography. When In Memory of Memory was published in the original Russian in 2018, it won the Bolshaya Kniga Award for “best prose in Russian,” though Stepanova remains best known internationally as a poet. Sasha Dugdale’s English translation of the text, released by New Directions in February 2021, introduces Stepanova’s prose to an American audience.