Memory or Oblivion?: The Mnemopoetics of Sergey Lebedev and Serhiy Zhadan

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

Abstract

In my paper, I will confront the memorial strategies of Sergey Lebedev's novels with the status of forgetting in the work of Serhiy Zhadan. Lebedev’s historical fictions emerge at the junction of personal, individual traumatic memories (micro-history) and the macro-history narrative of the “whole past” in its integrity without separating it into “accepted” and “rejected”. Memory is understood as retrieval and replication, and forgetting is interpreted as the dangerous inverse of memory which conditions its selective character. Сompared to Lebedev's narrative, the mnemopoetics of Zhadan's texts is more complex and ambivalent. His pre-war novels refer to the therapeutic and saving quality of oblivion, which provides a deliverance from the oppressive traumatic memory of the Soviet past. By contrast, in his more recent texts, the bifurcation point at which oblivion confronts memory and memory resists forgetting is shaped by constant reference to the ongoing war. Oblivion is no longer desirable or possible: the new atrocious wartime context orders the future to preserve the traumatic memory of the present.

Author

• Anastasia de La Fortelle, U of Lausanne (Switzerland)