'Zabyt’ znachit nachat’ byt'': Maria Stepanova’s Pamiati pamiati as a Tribute to Oblivion

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

Abstract

Maria Stepanova’s 2019 novel Pamiati pamiati, despite paying tribute to and critically engaging with numerous forms of memorial narratives, conceptualizes oblivion as a productive, therapeutic act. Directly quoting poet Mikhail Gronas, who said that to forget is to begin being, the novel capitalizes on the creative potential of misremembering, misrecognition, and false memories, questioning our ability to veritably ‘reconstruct’ the past. I argue that forgetting is brought about as a way to escape being predetermined and retraumatized by the catastrophic past, whereas remembrance is closely associated with a hereditary, pathological obsession. Oblivion becomes a way of arguing for the autonomy of the past, while desire to recollect the past in its entirety is frequently portrayed as a violent, domineering act meant to subjugate the dead to the whims of the living by making familial and national histories ‘useful’. By studying the motifs of forgetting in Pamiati pamiati, I demonstrate how the novel critiques the contemporary infatuation with the past and proposes a reorientation towards the future.

Author

• Dmitrii Kuznetsov, U of Southern California