Authors

Anastasia de La Fortelle¹;  ¹ University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Discussion

The post-Soviet literature deconstructs the very process of history-writing by presenting it as an open text, full of unpredictable turns and alternatives. This search for a “replacement” version of the past is aimed at revising and transforming historical traumas into sources of healing and empowerment. Disruption emerges as a key dynamic in this process, challenging established narratives and generating spaces for reimagining collective identities. What function is assigned in this interplay to oblivion—therapeutic, neutral, conservative, or disruptive? Considering examples from Russian and Ukrainian post-Soviet literature, our paper will address the poetic conceptualization of the interferences between memory and forgetting, questioning the nature of the latter. Is forgetting viewed as a positive resource that disrupts the rigidity of memory, preventing it from becoming a pathology? Or, is oblivion interpreted as an avoidance strategy—a dangerous reversal of the disruptive potential of memory that highlights its selective and unstable character? We will compare the memorial strategies of Sergey Lebedev's novels with the writing of oblivion in the texts of Serhiy Zhadan, whose mnemopoetics is shaped by reference to the disruptive context of war. These cases reveal how memory and oblivion intertwine as forces that disrupt, redefine, and recalibrate individual and collective understandings of the past, while also shaping responses to contemporary traumas and catastrophes.