Russian memoirs are prone to a particular form of angst

Perhaps the secret to understanding Russian history lies in its grammar: it lacks a pluperfect tense. In Latin, English and German the pluperfect describes actions completely completed at a definite point in the past… Early Russian had such a tense, but it was erased. This grammatical lack costs its speakers dear. Russian history never becomes history. Like a stubborn page in a new book, it refuses to turn over.

Thus wrote the Soviet dissident and writer Igor Pomerantsev, my father, during his exile in London in the 1980s. When I returned to Russia in the 2000s I had the sense that beneath the Potemkin democratic veneer, Putin’s Russia was actually a case of history repeating, and retrod my parents’ route back to England. Today, Russian dissidents are again being locked up, just as they were in my father’s youth. Russia seems stuck in an endless past imperfect.

I kept on thinking back to the plu-perfect as I wandered blissfully around Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory. The experience of the book is closer to exploring an abandoned palace than following a story. You roam through bedrooms strewn with her family’s personal letters; linger in libraries full of academic analysis on Sebald and Sontag; stroll through cemeteries and archives, past Rembrandt self-portraits and selfies.

Memoir is followed by art criticism, fiction with archival research. Stepanova is better known in Russia as a poet and literary magazine editor, and the chapters flow like a good book of poetry or well-crafted magazine. You can read the book from cover to cover, or start at the back, pause in the middle and then return to the main entrance. But on every poignant page the author returns to the question of how to give the past its due, while also putting it in perspective.