Escapism as a Form of Remediation and Premediation of Cultural Trauma in Contemporary Ukrainian Literature

• In Event: Escape to the Past: Escapist Trend in Ukrainian Fiction of the Turn of the 20th-21st Centuries

Abstract

Based on the assertion of researchers (e.g., Robert B. Heilman, John K. Limon) that escapist literature does reflect reality, but in different, coded forms, I will analyze three works by Ukrainian writers: Book of Genesis, Chapter Four by Oksana Zabuzhko, New Dark Ages. Colony by Max Kidruk, and Catananhe by Sofia Andrukhovych. I consider the seeming escape of the text worlds from extra-textual reality as a transfer of its representation to the implicit, hidden level. The purpose of my research is to examine the codes of past traumas in the texts, set in the future, as forms of “remediation” and “premediation” (as interpreted by Astrid Erll) of cultural traumas of totalitarian oppression and the ongoing war.

Author

• Tetiana Grebeniuk, U of Warsaw (Poland)