The Latvian Narrative in the Novels of Yelena Katishonok

• In Event: Liberating the Russian Language: Russophone Literature in the New Diaspora(s)

Abstract

Yelena Katishonok is a contemporary Latvian Russophone writer. Born in 1950, she emigrated to the USA in 1990. Despite the fact that she lives in the US, she is often seen in the scholarly world as connected to the Latvian narrative. Katishonok`s first novel was published in 2006, and it opens a series of novels, where the author recreates and re-evaluates the space of Latvia in the 20th century - the epoch of wars, terror and lifeless regimes. Katishonok’s novels concern deprivation of liberty, deportations, punishments, which leaves her characters with limited options – to dissolve in Chaos, or search for the ways to preserve one`s system of values and humanity in general. The main characters have experienced times of peace and are familiar with freedom, which makes it even harder to adapt to the new circumstances, but at the same time serves as a reference point of core values, self-esteem and self-awareness. The author equates all occupational regimes, demonstrating their cataclysmic nature, which is destructive both – in short and long term, physically and morally, locally and globally.

Author

• Kristine Juskova, Learn Russian in the European Union