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

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel explores the intersections of cultural memory and space, particularly inhabited urban space, through recent works of Lithuanian and Ukrainian literature. Drawing on the theorizations of memory studies, literary urban studies and literary geographies, the presenters consider how partaking in a "community of memory" is an important part of place attachment - a meaningful relationship with one's place of residence that becomes part of one's identity. This connection is also problematized, as the papers of the panel consider erasure of voices from the city’s landscape of memory and coexistence in a nominal shared space without sharing the sphere of meanings. The papers explore these connections and ruptures by foregrounding texts that are set in moments of drastic change and physical destruction of the spaces in focus. The panel proceeds from introducing the concepts of space and place attachment to problematizing them. Daria Semenova considers Ukrainian young adult urban fantasy narratives that offer place attachment and belonging to a place-bound community of memory as a salve against the existential threats in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Oleksandra Wallo analyzes the play "A Harvest Truce" by 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. Inga Vidugirytė problematizes the concept of place itself. Using critical feminist geography, she considers the post-Soviet transition that obliterates the landscape and simultaneously activates childhood memories in Vilnius residential neighborhoods in a novel by Virginija Kulvinskaitė.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 21st Century

Chair

• Sergii Gurbych, Vilnius U (Lithuania)

Papers

• Kyiv as a Palimpsest of Cultural Memories in Ukrainian YA Urban Fantasy Since 2022 - Daria Semenova, Vilnius U (Lithuania)

• Absent Memory, Home, and Community in Serhiy Zhadan’s A Harvest Truce (2020) - Oleksandra Wallo, U of Kansas

• Urban memory and oblivion in the novel by Virginija Kulvinskaitė 'when I was ‘malalietka’' (2019) - Inga Vidugiryte-Pakeriene, Vilnius U (Lithuania)

Discussant

• Taras Koznarsky, U of Toronto (Canada)