Review of Maria Stepanova’s The Disappearing Act – A Poetic Exploration of Russian Guilt | imaginary

Ma 50-year-old novelist who lives in an idyllic setting next to a lake, travels to a literary festival to give a lecture. A series of events, most of them beyond her control, leave her stranded in an unfamiliar town. It’s completely quiet, except for the traveling circus that camps out on the outskirts. M enters a hotel, ignores her phone and wanders around, remembering the books she has read, the films she has seen, and the museums she has visited. Some of these memories are based on myths. Others are downright realistic. Among the latter are memories of her childhood and youth, which she spent in “a country that no longer exists except on old maps and history books.”

M describes the country she is from as a “monster” waging war on its neighbour. We can guess its meaning without referring to the author’s biographical note. Maria Stepanova – the owner of the amazing work Memory Family memoirs, essays and novels – she left her native Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. We might also wonder how closely The Disappearing Act traces her own life. But Novelist M is not here to discuss autofiction; she has more important things to think about.

What was it like inside the monster? “She’s lived her whole life… doing nothing, or just doing what’s natural to her, and she wants to believe she’s gotten away with it.” Was it wrong for her to enjoy her life there? She realizes that “Joy was the very thing that the Beast was bent on exterminating… and that it was important to keep him alive to spite the Beast,” but that is of little consolation now that her former compatriots have killed others “with missiles, skyfire, and their bare hands.”

M’s relationship with the legacy of her ancient homeland – above all, its language – is inevitably at risk. One of the stories she retells, that of a linguist whose tongue was cut out before he could use it, could be about herself. But the book’s succinct style, with its distant poetic echoes, skillfully conveyed by translator Sasha Dugdale, shows that M still has the ability to narrate.

True to the novel’s title, M’s presence gradually diminishes, beginning with her realization that she is “cut off, a spare limb.” Watching the young lovers, “she felt as if these things no longer affected her; the exciting economy of choice and exchange had nothing to do with her present existence.” She serves bread in a café, leaves it on the plate before suddenly putting it in her mouth, as if trying to convince herself that she is hungry and therefore still there. These transformations may be unsettling, but as her inner self “gradually calms down, becomes soft and childlike,” they bring a sense of freedom and possibility. Part of her longs to recreate the dream in which “she was on a train to her dacha, and the years were falling from her as she traveled” so that she could be a little girl again.

Her mother once told her about a sign that said “No Exit”: M is thinking about her exit strategy. Can she find “a new way out of a hopeless situation”? With no specific plan, she visits the circus and offers to help perform a magic act. It involves lying in a coffin with her knees up to her chin, which she finds “boring and painful” although not difficult. The circus owner asks her if she is Jewish, and M happily, having abandoned her “Russian novelist” identity, says yes.

The world has called her a writer, but she wants to be seen as herself – whatever that means – and the circus promises the opportunity to make that happen. She leaves most of her possessions behind and sets out to join the band. You will walk through the empty city. She would start back at the beginning. It’s not too late, is it?

“There was so much guilt around M, and inside her, that it was hard to breathe” – over the past four years, this feeling has become familiar to many Russians opposed to the war in Ukraine. Authors such as Mikhail Shishkin have spoken of collective guilt in their nonfiction works; “A common enough idea,” M says of another remembered story. Wherever her next adventure takes her, she is proof that it takes a novelist with a poetic imagination to capture the nature of a beast.