War as Will and Representation in Post-Revolutionary, Post-War, and Post-Soviet Literature: Trauma Between Return and Repetition

• In Event: Representing Trauma in Literature: Possibilities and Limits of Liberation

Abstract

The canonized version of the Great Patriotic War representation, developed within the framework of socialist realism, made it possible to block or at list soften those scenarios for working with this collective experience that would describe it in terms of trauma. The ideological frame for describing the war, based on the narrative of the universal conscious and heroic efforts of the entire Soviet people, excluded the possibility of public recognition of this experience as traumatic, i.e. as an experience that resists rationalization and representation, leaving a long-term imprint on the subject’s psyche. However, we can find different versions of working with the trauma of war experience that do not fit into these schemes. They can be found in those literary representations of the (Civil) War that arose before the formation of the Soviet battle canon (Viktor Shklovsky, Isaac Babel, Artem Vesely); in Andrei Platonov’s war stories, trying to give voice to traumatic experience through the discursive filters of socialist realism; in Victor Peperstein’s and Sergei Anufriev’s texts, returning trauma as the core of the psychedelic reality they create. My presentation will be devoted to a preliminary typology of various literary forms of communication with the trauma of war, arising outside the socialist realist cultural canon, trying to escape it through a certain compromise with its poetics, using its symbolic vocabulary as a resource for retraumatization.

Author

• Ilya Kalinin, Humboldt U Berlin (Germany)