Our Past Is All but Fragments: Collective Memory in Contemporary World Literature by Writers of Post-Soviet Origin

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel explores the interplay of memory, trauma, and identity in contemporary world literature by post-Soviet authors, examining how these writers reconstruct and reinterpret the past across different diasporic and linguistic landscapes. The papers offer a range of perspectives – from the displacement of Volga Germans in Soviet Kazakhstan and the transformation of Soviet-Jewish collective memory in North America to the imaginative reconstruction of a Soviet past by post-migrant authors in Germany and the unique role of spiritual narratives in Russian-German literature.
An analysis of Gerold Belger's Dom Skitalca (The House of the Wanderer, 2003) examines the trauma of exile and identity displacement among Volga Germans deported to northern Kazakhstan, revealing how literary language reconstructs biographical stratification and critiques historical memory. The panel also explores how post-Soviet Jewish writers in North America, such as Boris Fishman (A Replacement Life, 2014) and Sasha Vasilyuk (Your Presence Is Mandatory, 2024), reframe collective trauma in an American context, reimagining Soviet-Jewish historical narratives for new audiences. Additionally, contemporary German writers Lena Gorelik (Die Listensammlerin / The List Collector, 2013) and Katja Petrowskaja (Vielleicht Esther / Maybe Esther, 2014) reconstruct a Soviet past neither author personally experienced, blurring the boundaries between memory, nostalgia, and imagination. Finally, the panel examines a lesser-known body of German-language narratives – memoirs and autobiographical fiction by Russian-German believers, including Johann and Elfriede Steffen’s Im Schmelztiegel (In the Crucible, 1996) and Anita Priess’s Verbannt. Eine Frau in Sibirien (Banished: A Woman in Siberia, 2011) – which offer deeply personal and religious reflections on war, deportation, and exile.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 21st Century

Chair

• Natalia Managarova, U of Auckland (New Zealand)

Papers

• Remembering Our Past in a Different Present: The Holocaust and the War in Works of Post-Soviet Jewish Writers in North America - Yelena Furman, UCLA

• The Volga German Displacement in Soviet Kazakhstan in Gerold Belger’s Dom Skitalca - Sara Ravaioli, Sapienza U of Rome (Italy)

• A Past That Never Was: Memory, Nostalgia, and Identity in Contemporary German Post-Migrant Literature - Natalia Managarova, U of Auckland (New Zealand)

Discussant

• Dorine Schellens, Leiden U (Netherlands)