When you shake your family tree and no one of lasting historical significance falls to the ground, what do you do next to preserve the tree? If you are this modern introspective, post-Soviet, Jewish Russian writer obsessed with making some sense of her ancestry, you wax poetic about the detritus in the form of possessions, diaries, photographs, and now social media postings left to you by those forgotten insignificant people, with endless obscure analysis of the relationships between the living and the dead. This is the essence of this whimsical search by the author of this peculiar work, that is part fiction and part memoir.
Some of the writing is so opaque as to lose all meaning for me. Of a modern Alexi Tolstoy, Stepanova writes “Tolstoy’s text is very talented…arranged to give his interest the appearance of respectability, something along the lines of a ethically sprung mattress, allowing the author to recoil from the reader’s enjoyment as soon as he even begins to concern himself with what is actually happening…to the person whose Russian language you are tasting in your own mouth.”
There is abundant literature concerning the distortions of memories and how we remember our ancestors. Some folk, by the vagaries of nature, are burdened with famous or infamous forbearers, but most of us are the products of rather easily forgotten ordinary folk, for better or for worse. And there are distinct hazards in researching your genetic pool- you may discover slave owners (I think there may have been some among my ancestors) and highway robbers that you would rather not share a name with. There must be some balance in honouring and respecting one’s past family members and the way they lived their lives out without undue nostalgia and distortion, but this book did not help me find that balance.
The English translation of this Russian novel was published just this year. It was given a laudatory review in The Economist, but I admit to being disappointed and giving up half way through it. After scanning the first and last paragraphs of subsequent chapters, I returned it to the library.
The Passionate Reader 