Authors

Olena Saikovska¹;  ¹ Eberhard Karls University Tuebingen, Germany

Discussion

How to retell a catastrophe? Which are the ways to overcome it in literary texts? In this presentation I want to focus on these dimensions of dealing with catastrophe in literature. Ukrainian society has faced disruptive events throughout the entire 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st, and contemporary writers are actively engaging with historical traumas. The aim of the research is to analyse how contemporary Ukrainian writers - Sofia Andrukhovych, Serhii Zhadan, Tania Maliarchuk, Tamara Duda and others - narrate the catastrophes like Holocaust, “Shot Revival”, collectivization and the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war, how they work with trauma and memory. The paper will explore the variety of strategies to narrate the catastrophes: voicing the catastrophic past and present, showing the importance of ancestral memory, recalling and rethinking historical events, establishing the interconnectedness of present-day catastrophes with Ukraine’s historical past, presenting the inevitability of today’s war, demonstrating transgenerational trauma. Two approaches of overcoming catastrophes in literary texts - individual and collective - are revealed. Participants of traumatic events overcome catastrophes in the ways of transforming tragic events into myths or fairy-tales, complete forgetting, assuming both victim and perpetrator roles, "growing up", fighting, hoping. For heirs, ways of coping include the establishing roots, acknowledgment of the mistakes of previous generations, hybrid identity. Memorising catastrophes, refusing silence, reflecting on, and reinterpreting them constitute collective strategies for survival.