Authors

Tetyana Lunyova¹;  ¹ University of York, UK

Discussion

Victoria Belim’s recently published book The Rooster House (2023) bears the subtitle “A Ukrainian family memoir” and is dedicated to the memory of her late grandmother. Victoria was born and spent her childhood in Ukraine, she moved to the USA with her mother as a teenager and relocated to Belgium as an adult. Her search for the hidden and forgotten parts of her family story was triggered by a short line in her great-grandfather’s notebook “Brother Nikodim, vanished in the 1930s fighting for a free Ukraine” (Belim, 2023: 31). The need to uncover the silenced past became urgent for Victoria after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 made her realise how deeply connected she was to the place of her birth. The Rooster House evolved as a result of her trips to Ukraine to visit her grandmother and do archives search. Being a book about a Ukrainian family history, The Rooster House is also a book about Ukraine’s history. Finished in August 2022, the book is prefaced with the words of hope for Ukraine to emerge victorious from the war with Russia (Belim, 2023: xiv). In her book, Belim makes it explicit that she does not only trace her family story, but also probes into the nature of Ukrainian identity, in particular, she examines Ukraine’s uneasy relationships with its Soviet past (Belim, 2023: xiii).

The focus of this study is the representation of the search for Ukrainian national identity in Belim’s anglophone memoir, which has been acclaimed for its literary merits. I will address this question following the conception of the discursive construction of identity (Wodak, Cillia de, Reisigl, & Liebhart, 2009) and employing the concept of narrative identity (Ricoeur, 1991).

In my presentation, I will discuss the explicit and implicit representations of Ukrainian national identity in Belim’s text. I will delve into the textual representation of the factors that contribute to constructing Ukrainian national identity. I will also pay attention to Belim’s reflexive problematisation of the concept of identity. In my analysis, I will consider both textual and paratextual (dedication, diagrams, and epigraphs) elements, reveal intertextual connections and scrutinise the representation of the Ukrainian language via the means of the English text.

References

Belim, V. (2023). The Rooster House. A Ukrainian Family Memoir. Virago.

Wodak, R., Cillia de R., Reisigl, M., & Liebhart, K. (2009). The Discursive Construction of National Identity. (2nd ed. Revised and extended). Edinburgh University Press.

Ricoeur, P. (1991). Narrative identity. Philosophy Today, 35.1, 73-81.