'Non-Place' of the Soviet Past: Between Trauma and Deliverance

• In Event: Remembering the Soviet: Un(Mixing) Trauma and Nostalgia

Abstract

The paper examines the literary imaginary of the urban place as a territory encoding the traumatic memory of the Soviet past in various ways. The bifurcation point where memory confronts oblivion—and where forgetting resists remembrance—is embedded in Russian and Ukrainian post-Soviet fiction through the specific spatial imagery of the “non-place” (Marc Augé), which carries a dual semiotic charge of trauma and deliverance. Using Marc Augé’s spatial paradigm as our main heuristic model, we will focus on the works of Sergei Lebedev, Dmitry Glukhovsky and Serhiy Zhadan, while drawing comparative parallels with other literary traditions.

Author

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