In Memory of Memory

Author’s note

The author would like to thank the publishers who believed in this book even before it slowly began to take shape: Suhrkampf and Novoe Izdatel’stvo. It seems likely that the book would not exist if it wasn’t for a conversation with Katarina Raabe, who convinced me to finally get on with writing the book.

Some of the book’s parts were conceived of and written with the help and support of a number of institutions. They gave me time and library resources, but also space for intellectual debate and discussion. They include the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Vienna), Tatiana Zhurzhenko and Klaus Nellen, the Kennan Institute/Wilson Center (Washington), Isabella Tabarovskaya and Matthew Rozhansky; Marion Dönnhoff Stiftung (Berlin) and Maria Birger, New York University and Josh Tucker, the Queen’s College, Oxford and Charlie Louth.

I am deeply grateful to Anna Glazova, Linor Goralik, Sasha Dugdale, Helga Olshvang-Landauer, Olga Radetzkaja, Mikhail Yampolsky, Vadim Alskan, Anna Golubeva, Anton Karetnikov, Erich Klein, Sergei Lebedev, Anna and Maria Lipkovich, Maria Mushinskaya, Olga Naumova, Elena Nusinova, Katya Petrovskaya and David Riff.

My thanks also go to Irina Shevelenko and Andrei Kurilkin, my friends and the first readers of this book.

And of course to my beloved Gleb and Grisha.