Authors

Olena Saikovska¹;  ¹ University of Tuebingen Slavic Department, Germany

Discussion

Contemporary Ukrainian literature tends to articulate the problems that have been kept silent for a long time. Literary texts of the last 15 years are in one way or another devoted to the problem of memory in its various manifestations (e.g., Oksana Zabuzhko's novels “Museum of Abandoned Secrets”, 2009; Yuriy Vynnychuk's “Tango of Death”, 2012; Tania Maliarchuk “Oblivion” (2016), Vasyl Shkliar “Troshcha” (2017). 

In 2020, the 800-pages novel “Amadoka” by S. Andrukhovych was published. Using amnesia (that was caused by the injury of one of the characters during the Russian-Ukrainian war in Donbas) as a metaphor, the novel voices the most painful tragedies and events, that happed to Ukrainian families and destroyed generations and entire cultures (Holocaust, Shot Renaissance, Russian-Ukrainian war in Donbas). Each period carriers not only its own traumatic memory, but also post-memory. “While working on “Amadoka” and looking for additional understanding in the sources about the Second World War, the Holocaust, or the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s, I realized that there was no way out: most of those stories would forever remain open, unjust, unrelentingly painful, incomprehensible,” Sofia Andrukhovych says about the novel. “…the only thing that could be done with this hopelessness was to…turn it into words. … Neither historical facts, nor authenticity is important, the most important is an attempt to find out how we deal with our own and other people's memories about circumstances and experiences”. 

In the novel not only memory, but also postmemory, that was called by the traumatic experience of the preceding generations, prove to be fruitful for investigation. Thus, it formed the main goal of the research - to analyze the ways of functioning of memory and postmemory in S. Andrukhovych's novel "Amadoka". 

The methodology of the research is based on the findings of memory studies (Aleida Assmann), postmemory studies (Marianne Hirsch), multidirectional memory (Michael Rothberg).

In the novel memories are recorded by all means of media (in letters, diaries, sculptures, audio and video recordings, museums, archives and cemeteries, they are even on the body of all (!!) characters), the author convinces that a traumatic experience can hide them (literary under the ground), forget them (as a result of blocking painful emotions), change them (as a result of secondary memories or ‘screen memory’). 

The novel can be read as a novel of transgenerational trauma (after S. Freud): children feel as if they had survived the same catastrophe, although their memory was not even erased, it was completely absent, since this is not their trauma, but their parents’, which they still have to live with because they inherited it. 

Articulating the traumatic experience and talking about memory issues with a therapeutic goal is one of the features of contemporary Ukraine