Authors

Yuliya Charnyshova¹;  ¹ Higher School of Economics (HSE University), Russian Federation

Discussion

The paper discusses the notion of “space” in the writings of contemporary Belarusian female authors, Valzhyna Mort, Julia Cimafiejeva and Tatsiana Zamirovskaya. The material involved Mort’s book Music for the Dead and Resurrected (2020), Cimafiejeva’s cycle of poems Mother Tongue (2021) and Zamirovskaya’s novel Smerti.net (2021). The materials are in three languages — English, Belarusian and Russian. Some of the shared features of the representation of space and its politicalness appear more predictable. Those are the repetitive motives of finding oneself in an unfamiliar, unfriendly space, which appears constraining, like a place of confinement, filled with amnesia and aphasia. However, the authors suggest distinct ways of handling the situation. In Mort, memory is represented, first of all, by the spatial dimension of ruined archives and objects pulled out of places, gaps and lacunae, which the author fills with the magical presence of rituals and healing music. This allows her to establish a connection with the dead, prevents forgetting and relieves pain. Cimafiejeva’s confinement suddenly turns out to be a space of language and memory, from which one does not need to escape, but to stay intentionally. Zamirovskaya, in her turn, describes a two-fold model of the universe, in which the victory of the revolution (of the dead) is possible only under the condition of a transcending-transnational-transatlantic transfer, reuniting one with the lost cultural memory.