TRAUMATIZED CONSCIOUSNESS IN LYUDMILA RUBLEWSKAYA`S NOVEL THE DAGUERROTYPE

Abstract

With the tragic events of the 20th century investigation of trauma as a psychic phenomenon has acquired paramount importance. It isan interdisciplinary subject involving doctors, psychologists, philosophers, writers. The Lost Generation authors and modernists were the first to address the problem of emotional shocks experienced by their heroes during WWI. Since then trauma, its causes and consequences have been one of the essential thematic components of world literature and, consequently, trauma studies have become an object of scholarly interest in the last decades of the 20th century in various humanitarian spheres. The present article addresses the way the contemporary Belarusian writer Lyudmila Rublewaskaya represents traumatized consciousness in her novel “The Daguerrotype” (2014). The novel draws its title from an old daguerreotype described in it. It was found by two contemporary young people together with a diary recounting the events of the late 19thcentury. The novel consists of two parts called “The Book of the Inner Circle” and “The Book of the Outer Circle” which are set in two interrelated time planes –the late 19th century and our time respectively. Through the intricately interwoven life stories of five personages the writer looks into various kinds of trauma, exposes their reasons, traces their consequences and describes her heroes’ ways of overcoming the mental distress. The traumatic experience of the characters was either due to the socio-political atmosphere in Russia in the late 19th century, or to a combination of a tragic accident, superstition and manipulation, or to a clash of rough force and nobleness. The significance of unveiling a person’s secret through narration for overcoming the traumatic psychic aftermath is illustrated in the novel, too.