In the context of the current Russian military aggression against Ukraine, which the aggressors have justified by creating a whole geopolitical and historical mythology, it is extremely important for Ukrainians to have a clear memory of their history. The memory of the constant struggle for statehood and political agency of Ukraine and other former socialist states throughout the 20th century serves as a source of resilience for Ukrainians in the ongoing war. The panel speakers will focus on works of Ukrainian literature that represent mechanisms for processing memories of this struggle. The panel plans to examine how post totalitarian literature deals with the problems of fictional memories and collective amnesia, the influence of childhood memories on the formation of civic identity, the search for home and the need for roots, and the construction of the image of civil society based on collective memory. The panel will pay particular attention to the creation in the analysed works of an image of a democratic civil society. Although the main body of the texts under consideration consists of works of Ukrainian literature, a transnational approach to artistic material contributes to broadening the perspective on the issues. This is achieved through comparative comparisons of works of Ukrainian literature with works of Bulgarian , Polish, German and Russian (Katarzyna Jakubowska Krawczyk) literature, as well as through the analysis of the biographical narratives of writers travellers who are able to comprehend Ukraine's place in the world (presentations by Olena Haleta and Tetiana Grebeniuk). The theoretical and methodological basis of the research included in the panel covers a wide range of memory theories, starting with collective memory by Maurice Halbwachs and cultural memory by Aleida Assmann and ending with the concepts of postmemory by Marianne Hirsch, multidirectional memory by Michael Rothberg and family memory by
Olena Saikovska, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen.
"Collective Memory and Collective Amnesia in Eastern European Literature:
Bulgarian and Ukrainian Perspectives"
This paper explores the percularities of collective memory and ‘collective amnesia’ (G. Gospodinov) in post-totalitarian Eastern Europe through the literary lenses of Georgi Gospodinov’s “Time Shelter” (2020) and Sofia Andrukhovych’s “Amadoka” (2020). These two novels, emerging from Bulgarian and Ukrainian contexts, reveal how individual and national identities are shaped, fractured or erased by the pressures of history, trauma and political manipulation.
“Time Shelter” examines the construction of nostalgia and the commodification of past epochs as a response to contemporary crises, revealing how societies may accept the fabricated memories to escape present anxieties. In contrast, “Amadoka” confronts historical erasure more directly, dealing with the layered silences surrounding the Holocaust, Soviet repressions and the ongoing war in Donbas.
The she-narrator Romana (described as "not quite a person" by S. Andrukhovych) recreates the past from the photos and imposes memory on the Man, who was injured in Donbas during the Russian-Ukrainian war and who suffers from amnesia. “Collective Amnesia and the Overproduction of Memory” – is the title of the article in the book “New and Imminent Diagnoses” written alter ego of G. Gospodinov – Gaustin. Through comparative analysis the paper investigates how both authors portray the mechanisms of remembering and forgetting - not only as personal or psychological processes but also as tools of state power and cultural resistance.
The paper offers the literary strategies used for recovering ‘silenced’ histories and dealing with the ethics of memory in societies suffered from ideological pressure and violent past.
The methodology of the research is based on the findings of memory studies (Aleida Assmann), postmemory studies (Marianne Hirsch), multidirectional memory (Michael Rothberg).
Olena Haleta, Ivan Franko National University of Lviv.
"Traveling Memory: Childhood memories as the most important journey of Sophia Yablonska"
This study is dedicated to the memoirs of Ukrainian-French writer, traveler, photographer, and cinematographer Sophia Yablonska "From My Childhood" (1977), which, published in Ukrainian translation from French after the author's death, structurally completes her three interwar travelogues about Morocco, China, as well as about her trip around the world. The memoirs about the period of World War I are written from the perspective of World War II, which transformed the author from a traveler into an exile, making it impossible to return not only in time but also in space.
Written in the form of personal memories from childhood, Yablonska's book is analyzed as a story about the most influential images, challenges, and experiences that later resonated in her writing. The story of the father's country house is reread as a story about the loss of peace from encountering political confrontations. The story of the mother's city apartment is seen as a story about the ethics of coexistence, about the destruction of the idyll by facing the reality of war, which also destroys the rural utopia inspired by the child's imagination.
The study considers Yablonska's memories as a key to her travelogues, which are also structured in the form of a first-person narrative and depict the formation of a traveling and writing subject. Describing the earliest period of the author's life, the memoirs simultaneously become her concluding text, creating a new interpretive framework for what was written before. It makes possible to reread Yablonska’s travelogues as evidence of the search for home and the need for roots, of overcoming borders and setting personal boundaries in the complex cultural and political context of the 20th century.
Katarzyna Jakubowska-Krawczyk, University of Warsaw.
"From the Myth of Resistance to Civic Narratives: Transformations of the Idea of Freedom in Children’s Literature"
This paper aims to analyze literary and visual narratives in children’s literature that address the themes of freedom, democracy, and civic engagement. The focus will be on texts that, by referencing the history of the past fifty years, trace the trajectory from the myth of resistance to civic narratives – from the Polish experience of “Solidarity,” strikes, and martial law, through the symbolic moment of the fall of the Berlin Wall, to Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity.
The analysis will consider diverse strategies of remembering these events, with particular attention to the role of symbols, the transformation of collective and individual identities, and the mechanisms of constructing the image of a civic society. An important dimension of the research will also be the specific impact of these narratives on young readers, who, when confronted with them, build their own understanding of freedom and social responsibility.
The corpus includes, among others, "Bibuła w tapczanie. O Solidarności dla dzieci" [Samizdat in the Sofa: On Solidarity for Children] by Michał Rusinek; the anthology 1989: "Ten Stories about Breaking Down Walls" (featuring contributions by Olga Tokarczuk, Ingo Schulze, Ludmila Petrushevskaya, and others); as well as selected Ukrainian works such as Halyna Kyrpa’s Мій тато став зіркою (My Dad Became a Star), Khrystyna Lukashchuk’s "Казка про Майдан" (The Fairy Tale about Maidan), and "Війна, що змінила Рондо" (The War That Changed Rondo) by Romana Romanyshyn and Andriy Lesiv.
The paper demonstrates how children’s literature functions as a medium of collective memory and a carrier of democratic values, merging elements of resistance with civic storytelling, and how it contributes to preparing younger generations for conscious participation in civil society.
Tetiana Grebeniuk, University of Warsaw.
"Memory as the Basis of Resilience: The Past of the Nation and Family in Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fiction"
Oksana Zabuzhko, one of the most famous contemporary Ukrainian writers and advocates of democratic values, consistently traces in her work mechanisms of loss and regaining of independence and freedom by Ukrainian nation. The writer examines Ukraine’s past through the prism of memory, closely linked to the concept of national identity, which has been threatened and suppressed by Russia and the Soviet Union over the last century.
In Zabuzhko’s works, collective memory of Ukrainian nation is closely intertwined with family memory, and both these types serve as vehicles for the idea of the struggle for independence and political agency. National self-awareness of the protagonists of her works is firmly rooted in their family memories of resistance to Soviet oppression. The emotional backdrop to family memories of the Soviet past is the atmosphere of deep-seated fear of the totalitarian regime, despite which the older members of families fought against forced Sovietisation and Russification. This situation is presented in the novels "Fieldwork In Ukrainian Sex" and "The Museum of Abandoned Secrets", short story "Sister, Sister", and in the autobiographical story "The Gurnik Code". Protagonists’ families are shown there as carriers of democratic and national values, as opposed to the ideological oppression and antinational policy of the Soviet government.
The aim of this study is to analyse mechanisms of work of memory represented in Zabuzhko’s fiction, which closely link family and nation and ultimately form the basis of the Ukrainian nation’s resiliency in the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war. The theoretical basis of the analysis is Marianna Hirsch’s concept of postmemory and Astrid Erl’s research on the place of family memory in the structure of cultural memory.
20260729T173020260729T1900America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires4.12. Under the Protection of Memory: Representations of Memories of the 20th Century in Post-totalitarian LiteratureSVE4MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
