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

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Post-Soviet literatures deconstruct the very process of history-writing by presenting it as an open text, full of unpredictable turns and alternatives. This search for a “replacement” version of the past is aimed at revising and transforming historical traumas into sources of healing and empowerment. What function is assigned in this process to oblivion — therapeutic, neutral, or conservative? Considering examples from Russian and Ukrainian post-Soviet literatures, our panel will address the poetic conceptualization of the interferences between memory and forgetting, questioning the nature of the latter. Is forgetting viewed as a positive resource that prevents memory from becoming a pathology? Or is oblivion interpreted as an avoidance strategy, the dangerous inverse of memory—which conditions, both on individual and collective levels, its selective character? Dmitrii Kuznetsov analyses the motifs of forgetting in Maria Stepanova’s Pamiati pamiati, demonstrating how the novel critiques the contemporary infatuation with the past and proposes a reorientation towards the future. Alexander Dmitriev examines the strategy of literary re-identification of past Ukrainian intellectuals in spite of their ‘forgotten’ biographies in the 21st century. Ksenia Robbe focuses on the work of memory as resistance to forgetting 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’. Anastasia de La Fortelle compares the memorial strategies of Sergey Lebedev’s novels with the writing of oblivion in the texts of Serhiy Zhadan, whose mnemopoetics is shaped by reference to the context of war.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 21st Century

Chair

• David Kurkovskiy, UC Berkeley

Papers

• Writing Trauma against Oblivion: The Reparative Poetics of Oksana Vasyakina - Ksenia Robbe, U of Groningen (Netherlands)

• 'Zabyt’ znachit nachat’ byt'': Maria Stepanova’s Pamiati pamiati as a Tribute to Oblivion - Dmitrii Kuznetsov, U of Southern California

• Memory or Oblivion?: The Mnemopoetics of Sergey Lebedev and Serhiy Zhadan - Anastasia de La Fortelle, U of Lausanne (Switzerland)

Discussant

• Klavdia Smola, U of Dresden (Germany)