The subject of the analysis and interpretation of this article consists in philosophy and poetics of photography as a medium of memory in Maria Stepanova’s novel Pamyati Pamyati [In Memory of Memory]. Meanwhile, it is aimed at revealing a unique attitude of the novel’s author towards photography and its derivatives as a medium of memory and yet towards memory itself as a mandatory obligation in its essence for all the generations after the Holocaust. In a given context the notion of postmemory is binding and, hence, a separate part of the article is devoted to it. In view of the centuries-old and universal interest around the phenomenon of memory, mainly in the existential context, at the beginning of the article the emphasis is solely put on several selected aspects of it as articulated by Aristotle, Plato, Saint Augustine, Walter Benjamin and Paul Ricoeur. Respectively, the following terms are addressed by them: memoria, aisthesis, gesture of passage or picture – monument. In the article it has been shown that Stepanova is fascinated by the truth of time, the premonition of the Holocaust. She searched the shadows of the past on the faces and in the events captured in the pre-war film frames in such a way that one can experience his connection with that world, discover himself internally in that structure because, as she claims, her text is the novel about non-memory.

The article discusses two books: a fairy tale novel The Stolen City. 1941 (2017) by Yuliya Yakovleva and a graphic novel Survilo (2019) by Olga Lavrent’yeva. These are projects different in terms of genre and form, resulting from the sense of insufficiency of the methods used so far to talk about the blockade of Leningrad, going beyond the official discourse of historical politics. The works were created by the female representatives of the generation, for whom the reference point in writing about the siege is not the reality of their own biographical experience, but historical sources and the accounts of others. This connected the reflection on the content of the books with the issues of the functioning of individual memory, postmemory and collective memory. The basic task is to check how the authors “tell the siege”, what presentation strategy they choose, what goals it helps to achieve.