Writing Trauma against Oblivion: The Reparative Poetics of Oksana Vasyakina

• In Event: Oblivion as Liberation (?): Memory and Forgetting in Russian and Ukrainian Post-Soviet Historical Imaginaries

Abstract

This paper will focus on the work of memory performed by the prose of Oksana Vasyakina which brings to light, and potentially makes an object of public remembering, the social violence of the Russian ‘long 1990s’. In her trilogy of autofictional novels written and published between 2021 and 2023, Vasyakina develops a language of postmemory for speaking about the interconnected but generationally specific traumas of the late- and post-Soviet periods. This language in Vasyakina’s texts that are strongly accented as feminist works against the ‘forgetting’ of the ordinary and extraordinary violence both experienced and perpetrated by working class people who have been abused, abandoned, and manipulated by the Soviet and post-Soviet Russian state. I will argue that by seeking to rescue (post)Soviet social traumas and traumatic effects from disregard and oblivion, this literary language resists the established memories of the postsocialist ‘transition’, including state-supported and liberal versions of remembering. Furthermore, Vasyakina’s texts subvert the vision of forgetting as healing within the versions of history that seek to ‘replace’ an uncomfortable past in the fiction written by her older and mostly male colleagues. My reading will outline the reparative poetics of Vasyakina’s novels by focusing on their employment of childhood memory and postmemory that is strongly localized and zeroed in on experiences of socially marginalized communities.

Author

• Ksenia Robbe, U of Groningen (Netherlands)