The Berman International Literature Prize rewarded the work of Russian novelist and poet Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory (translated into French by Stock). It was presented to him on Monday October 23 in Stockholm during an official ceremony. It is endowed with 750,000 crowns, the equivalent of almost 64,000 euros. The jury praised his “sinuous and finely honed prose, bringing to life images, objects, places and documents, in an evocation of the transformative power of memory, both for individuals and for communities forgotten by history .”
Aged 51, living in exile between Berlin and Paris, Maria Stepanova is the third winner of the Berman Prize, created in 2021 by a couple of Swedish patrons, Thomas and Catharina Berman. This prize had previously crowned the Israeli novelist David Grossman for Life plays with me, first author awarded, and the Hungarian Péter Nadas, in 2022.
This award is intended to highlight “literary works aimed at exploring the richness of Jewish culture, beyond eras and other cultures, and this, through the universal values of humanity.”
A vast family saga centered on the Slavic world and Jewish culture, translated in around thirty countries, In Memory of Memory presents itself as a form of torrential docu-fiction spanning nearly a century, and described as a “ duty of memory”. There we find the exploration of his personal roots through the evocation of historical facts and the broken destinies of persecuted writers such as Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva or Ossip Mandelstam.
In her reception speech, she said: “Today, when ghosts resurface, any interpretation of the past and present can become dogma, if one is prepared to kill in its name. The war waged by Russia against Ukraine is notably a war of memory, an attempt to put forward a one-sided version of History, with the help of tanks and bombs, which sow death. And it’s terrifying for me to think about the versions that might succeed it. Until now, my entire life had been spent in a post-war world, a world that emerged in the wake of the Catastrophe [Editor’s note: Russian expression for the Shoah], and the annihilation of millions of lives, in the name of a future that we were promised was better. And perfect.”
