‘A Tree Reaching Out for the Sky in Despair’: Intertextuality, Memory and Trauma in Sofia Andrukhovych’s Amadoka

Abstract

This article explores the intertextual dialogue between two major Ukrainian novels which probe into Ukraine’s contested Soviet past, specifically into the conflicting interpretations of World War Two and political repressions. It argues that Amadoka (2020) by Sofia Andrukhovych can be seen as tessera in Harold Bloom’s terms: a strong misreading of The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (2009) by Oksana Zabuzhko, which problematizes and antithetically completes Zabuzhko’s narrative of World War Two. In particular, Amadoka complements the dominant historical narratives of World War Two in Ukraine with the traumatic memory of the Holocaust, raising issues of the writer’s entitlement to represent a historical catastrophe of such scale and scrutinizing the need for and risk of affiliative memory transmission.