Abstract
Building on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, this article examines Oksana Zabuzhko’s latest novel The Museum of Abandoned Secrets as postmemorial fiction, which articulates the trauma of Soviet political repressions in the post–World War II period and in the 1970s via the perception of the second and third generation. The affiliative postmemory about World War II in Ukraine from the viewpoint of Ukrainian Insurgent Army partisans is emplotted via an original generic combination of contemporary Holocaust fiction and romances of the archive. Postmemory is used in the novel to shape a mythologised alternative historical narrative that reconceptualises the country’s difficult past as a story of heroic resistance.
Highlights
Oksana Zabuzhko’s latest award-winning novel The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, a story of three generations of Ukrainians from 1940s to 2004, explores various aspects of the country’s difficult past, including the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Ukrainian famine of 1947 and Soviet persecution of ideological dissidents
Scenes of contemporary life on the brink of the Orange Revolution of 2004 alternate with two earlier temporal planes: World War II Lviv seen by UPA partisans, one of whom is Adrian’s great aunt; and the Soviet stagnation era from 1960s to 1980s, recreated through Daryna’s recollections and her parents’ traumatic life stories
I will consider how this postmemory contributes to Ukrainian national identity, building on Wallo’s concept of ‘national imaginary’
Summary
Oksana Zabuzhko’s latest award-winning novel The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, a story of three generations of Ukrainians from 1940s to 2004, explores various aspects of the country’s difficult past, including the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Ukrainian famine of 1947 and Soviet persecution of ideological dissidents. I shall explore this multi-layered historical novel as postmemorial fiction produced by the generation of Ukrainians who are working through personal and collective traumatic memories about their country’s Soviet past.
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