Inhaltsangabe
From the renowned Russian author of In Memory of Memory comes a haunting meditation on identity, exile, language, art, and the fragile desire to disappear.
The writer M has been living in exile in the city of B since her homeland declared war on a neighbouring state. Wracked by shame and despair, and severed from her language, M finds herself unable to write, unmoored in a present where the future feels unknowable. When she is invited to give a reading at a literary festival in a nearby country, a strange turn of events occurs. After a series of missed connections and mishaps during her trip, including losing her phone, she finds herself stranded and untraceable in an unfamiliar coastal town.
Cut off from everyone she knows, M feels a sense of freedom and the possibility of starting over, but memories of childhood, books, films, and tarot cards pull her back, the last fragments of a vanishing world. Then she meets a troupe of circus performers who invite her to join them, and reinvention feels within reach.
In this brief interlude, it seems as if M may finally escape from herself, her past, and her nationality. Written in rich and hypnotic prose, The Disappearing Act oscillates between reality and dream, between an oppressive present and a lost past, between life and literature.
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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren
MARIA STEPANOVA is an award-winning poet, novelist, essayist, and journalist. She is the author of many books, including the poetry collection Holy Winter 20/21 and the acclaimed novel In Memory of Memory, both translated into English by Sasha Dugdale. In Memory of Memory won Russia’s Bolshaya Kniga Award and the NOS Prize in 2018 and was later awarded the Berman Literature Prize in 2023. It was also nominated for several other awards, including the International Booker Prize, the Dublin Literary Award, the National Book Award for Translated Literature, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Stepanova has received numerous international literary awards, including the prestigious Andrey Bely Prize and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship. She founded and served as Editor-in-Chief of the independent, crowdsourced online journal Colta.ru, which engaged with the cultural, social, and political reality of contemporary Russia until the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, when all dissenting media in Russia were forced to shut down. As a prominent critic of Putin’s regime, she had to leave Russia and is now living in exile in Germany.
SASHA DUGDALE is a UK-based poet and translator. Her sixth book of poetry, The Strongbox, was published in 2024. Dugdale’s translation of Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory was a finalist for the International Booker Prize and won the MLA Lois Roth Award. She has translated two of Stepanova’s poetry collections, including Holy Winter 20/21 and War of the Beasts and the Animals, as well as work by several other Russian-language women poets, including Elena Shvarts and Marina Tsvetaeva.
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