Absent Memory, Home, and Community in Serhiy Zhadan’s A Harvest Truce (2020)

• In Event: Urban Spaces as the Space of Memory, Oblivion, and Community Belonging in Contemporary Ukrainian and Lithuanian Literature

Abstract

This paper reads the play "Khlibne peremyrya" (A Harvest Truce, 2020) by the preeminent Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan as a philosophical inquiry into the role of memory in forging and maintaining one’s sense of belonging to a place—a sense of home and community. At first glance, A Harvest Truce seems to be about capturing the abrupt and shocking destruction of a nameless Eastern Ukrainian town during the early years of the war in the Donbas, which deprives the play’s characters of a home and devastates their community. A more careful reading, however, complicates this surface meaning of the play, revealing that a strong sense of community never existed among the characters. The pervasive atmosphere of distrust and dialogues that do not even resemble genuine communication suggest the absence of what philosopher Avishai Margalit termed a “community of memory” (The Ethics of Memory, 2002). I use Margalit’s theorizations about the ethics of memory and its role in regulating important relationships—including those with one’s compatriots—to elucidate Zhadan’s understanding of what happened to the Donbas during the war and what made this war possible in the first place.

Author

• Oleksandra Wallo, U of Kansas