Trauma Therapy: Literary Concept of Overcoming Collective Pain (considering the works of modern Ukrainian prose)

Abstract

The article studies the literary concept of tragedy in contemporary Ukrainian prose about Soviet past. The problem is relevant, because the trauma is important in the consolidation of Ukrainian society, affected by new trials. The subject of literary analysis is the comprehension of the Kurenivka man-made disaster of 1961, the history of which was declassified only in the era of independence. The novels “Life in Pink” by Halyna Horytska and “The Thaw Book. 1954–1964” by Tymur and Olena Lytovchenko. The author of the studio is guided by the theories of “collective trauma”, “culture of wound”, “trauma therapy”, “place of memory”. Accordingly, the literary model of collective tragedy is analysed. It is determined that the depiction of trauma in the context of memory of the Soviet past in both novels has many common features, namely: showing a characteristic of victims and perpetrators (a specific perpetrator — a representative of the authorities; a generalised perpetrator — the Soviet system; a perpetrator — relative); giving the places of remembrance the signs of grief by tracing the immediate destruction of objects in space; describing the death as understanding the transition of the soul to the afterlife; demonstrating memory erasure (forced silence of trauma, deliberate refusal of memory); identifying categories of remorse and punishment (suicide).The similarity of the author’s means of artistic speech is revealed: the combination of fiction and nonfiction, the introduction of journalistic comments and emotional judgment, giving semantic weight to details-symbols. The novelty of the study is the expansion of theoretical views on the problem of trauma in literary work, modeling the image of tragedy in the context of memory of the Soviet past. Further study of the problem is promising in the analysis of the aesthetic concept of the traumatic past, which is comprehended in modern prose.