: The article considers the relationship between memory and post-memory through the lens of translating the experience of generations. The author takesZ. Baumann’s term “retrotopia” as the basis of the research. As a new mode of referring to the past retrotopia he treats it as the phenomenon of reaction in socio-psychological and political meanings. The escape of the obsessive retrotopic past is visiblein the ability to have a dialogue (Z. Baumann), and things that link to the experienceof previous generations play here a vital role. The paper analyzes variants of things’behavior in their inter-generation interaction: the mode of tactility in collectingthings serves the setting “total recall” (M. Stepanova “To the memory of memory);interaction with other people’s things (the movie “Khrustalyov, the car”) whena live dialogue of generations is impossible. The refusal of things to converse isa symptom of guilt in losing the past. Retrotopia coordinates with another important concept — post-memory with the cult of accumulating and preserving heritageinterpreted as the result of ideology and upbringing. The cult of legacy testifi esto real anxiety of survival. Post-memory as a cult of heritage strives to reproducehistorical experience in the effects of representation, and discourses of collectivememory and traumas effectively suppress and replace real memory of the historical experience. Thus, it substantiates the transition from retrotopia to utopia, fromheritage to oblivion. Retrotopia is a form of oblivion that forces one to delve intothe past. It is not for the sake of the past, but to forget the impending terrible future.Present-day digital media create a new arrangement of memory based on the valueof the concrete and the individual. History starts to converge with memory coinciding in the limit with infi nitely changing fragments and connections that memoryorganizes not by the principle of cause-and-effect but by associations and similarities. This program has features of principally different ways of managing the heritage: retrotopia (the goal is to save and preserve), and utopia (to put the past to rest).