EMIGRATIONAL TRAUMA OF WAR IN VLADYSLAV IVCHENKO’S LITERARY VISION

Abstract

The Russian war against Ukraine has been going on for 10 years and continues to influence the national culture in a very distinctive way. Over the past decade, this traumatic event has created a peculiar cultural discourse where literature has taken a special place. Its new stage, which began in February 2022, not only gave rise to an even more intense artistic reaction to the lived experience of Ukrainians, but also opened up prospects for new literary themes and methods of their interpretation. Trauma in its individual and national dimensions naturally became the central issue in such texts. Vladyslav Ivchenko’s book “After the 24th” clarifies and complements the discourse of the cultural reception of the war, describing its front and rear experiences in real time. The trauma of forced emigration, triggered by the full-scale Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, is a new problematic aspect that requires special attention. The author of the paper analyzes a new dimension of the emigrational trauma, related to the war experiences of Ukrainian refugees. Through the fates of three individual women, Vladyslav Ivchenko demonstrates the prospects of Ukrainian national trauma, which includes the loss of homes, loved ones, and, most importantly, the belief that the world and life could return to what they were before February 24, 2022. The trauma of forced emigration continuously offers new perspectives for understanding the behavior of a national culture during the war, particularly in the context of creating wartime literature, which is an effective component of the trauma recovery process. Literature plays an important role in this context, and Ivchenko’s book exemplifies this role most effectively.