Life Writing and Politics of Memory in Eastern Europe

Simona Mitroiu

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137485526
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume addresses the issues of remembering and performing the past in Eastern European ex-communist states in the context of multiplication of the voices of the past. The book analyzes the various ways in which memory and remembrance operate; it does so by using different methods of recollecting the past, from oral history to cultural and historical institutions, and by drawing on various political and cultural theories and concepts. Through well-documented case studies the volume showcases the plurality of approaches available for analyzing the relationship between memory and narrative from an interdisciplinary and international perspective.

Part I

Narratives of Belonging

1

Memories of Displacement and Unhomely Spaces: History, Trauma and the Politics of Spatial Imagination in Ukraine and Poland

Irene Sywenky

History and collective trauma are inherently connected to the problem of time and memory on the one hand, and place and space on the other. Both commemoration and forgetting are articulated within specific spatial parameters and associated with particular places that are meaningful in the context of events that are constructed as historically important. The condition of being ‘historically conscious’ means that the ‘relationship between past and present must constantly be produced and reproduced’ (Toews, 2009, p. 258). In textual narratives, this continuous dialogue between past and present assumes a discursive nature, and the narrative practices of memory are often closely linked to spatial imagination. The ongoing reassessment of the relation between the discourse of history and collective imagination – in its connection to space and place and the persistent questioning and rewriting of the official narrative of the past through the prism of memory – constitutes the main problematic of much of the literary production in post-totalitarian Eastern Europe.

Positivist history used to provide a ‘stable’ past that served to support discourses of nationhood and statehood, and to render the present meaningful. Such history – a repository of information about the past that was often perceived as objective and scientific – was juxtaposed with memory that was perceived as subjective, fluid and unreliable. Postmodern and poststructuralist revisions of the project of history, however, gave more agency to individual subjectivities and multi-perspective approaches to the study of the past. It has been noted that in recent years ‘references to the past have increasingly been made in terms of memory rather than history’ (Pakier and Stråth, 2010, p. 3), thus making scholars of history less exclusive in the areas of inquiry that deal with the interpretation and construction of the past (Pakier and Stråth, 2010). The virtual explosion of memory studies in the West during the last few decades has been of a broadly cross-disciplinary nature that engaged historical, anthropological, sociological, psychoanalytic and cultural studies perspectives, resulting in the so-called ‘hypertrophy of memory’ (Huyssen, 2003) or culture of memory (Blacker et al., 2013). According to Huyssen (2003), in a society that is continuously exposed to the overproduction of representations of the past the demarcation line between past and present becomes ever more ambivalent, especially with the popularization of historical scholarship and the proliferation of museal culture. In postcolonial, post-totalitarian societies such as those of Ukraine and Poland, the above propositions may not necessarily apply; what Huyssen (2003) describes as the condition of (Western) ‘memory fatigue’ has not yet set in the region that experienced the collapse of the Eastern bloc only two decades ago and where rewriting of the totalitarian-age history and recovering the lost voices from its collective memory is still an ongoing process. While the act of memory is always taking place in the present, it has the potential of changing our readings of the past and thus also has implications for the future. Although the concepts of history and memory do not always overlap (and often diverge), recovery of the silenced memories and construction of postmemory for the new generations often go hand in hand with rewriting of the previous, state-sanctioned narratives of history.

Since 1989, the problem of memory, remembrance and the associated issues of silence, forgetting and postmemory became key in the socio-political and cultural discourses in Eastern Europe. The end of the totalitarian metanarrative of the historical past was followed by an emergence of micro-discourses of memory reflecting a range of perspectives from different communities. While governments and state institutions ‘seek to use the past and to shape popular memory and public history as part of their nation- and state-building projects’, it is also true for various groups and individuals (Rees, 2010, p. 232). Totalitarian-age traditional history-enforcing sites such as monuments, commemorative complexes as well as official history textbooks gave way to the proliferation of polyphonic discourses that started reshaping the cultural memory of the region.

It is my contention that the literary space of post-totalitarian Ukraine and Poland, with its rich and diverse ecology of genres, forms and practices, serves as an important vehicle for the construction and shaping of collective cultural memory. The study of systemic commemorative practices often tends to focus on public visual spaces, whereas literary discourses (other than the genre of memoir or autobiography) are often relegated to the periphery of memory studies. While it may still be common to approach the study of public memory primarily through monuments, memorials and museums as the privileged repositories of memory, ‘printing, digital technologies, and the other methods of mass reproduction of texts have largely deterritorialized cultural memory, particularly in recent years’ (Blacker et al., 2013, p. 5). In today’s Eastern Europe the discourses of literary fiction and non-fiction, in a broader range of forms and genres, constitute a powerful medium for articulating past silences and collective experiences that could not be discussed publicly during the socialist regime. The act of writing in itself becomes the event of memory. With its roots in Latin memoria, the modern word incorporates the dual sense of ‘memory’ and ‘memoir’, thus reminding us of the inherent connection that has always existed between memory and writing in Western culture (Draaisma, 2000, p. 24). In the age of epistemic suspicion toward official histories and history as a discipline, and with the abandonment of the belief in the infallibility of language – whether scientific or artistic – the ever blurrier distinction between different representations (for example documentary versus fictional) gives more agency and social power to the literary text.

Referring to time as ‘the ultimate apparatus of power’, Christina Lee contends that it is time that ‘not only dictates how bodies move through space but also influences how events unfold, are recorded, and are remembered’ (2008, p. 1). While time is the primary parameter of remembrance, space is an equally important factor in the construction of discourses of memory, especially in postcolonial societies where place and territory become both geophysical and symbolic contested sites of power and belonging. In such societies, politics of memory is inherently connected to conceptualization of geopolitical spatiality. In the recent collection The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, its editors emphasize that space is an important ‘social construction relevant to the understanding of the different histories of human subjects and to the production of cultural phenomena’, and as such it has undergone a ‘profound conceptual and methodological renaissance’ (Warf and Arias, 2009, p. 1). While today many theorists of space emphasize its crucial importance to all areas of human activity, considerations of spatiality are often disconnected from memory studies. Thus, according to Huyssen, ‘the contemporary focus on memory and temporality is mostly absent from much recent innovative work on categories of space, maps, geographies, borders, trades routes, migrations, displacements, and diasporas in the context of postcolonial and cultural studies’ (2003, p. 11). Today’s literary production in Ukraine and Poland demonstrates persistent concern with the problematics of territory, place, space and home – a quality that can be conceptualized as that of ‘geographicity’. Although sometimes such texts can fit the idea of cartographic fiction, which is preoccupied on a thematic level with geographic landscapes, maps and/or imaginary cartographies, other texts privilege geopolitical and symbolic spaces rather than actual geophysical places; in either case, spatiality itself is inherently linked to the memory of the totalitarian past in the broadest sense.

In this chapter I examine the complex relationship between memory, history and the geopolitics of space/place as a locus of historical ideological tensions where totalitarian period and its experiences as a whole can be posited as a site of collective trauma. Drawing on the essayistic, semi-autobiographical and fictional works of select Ukrainian and Polish authors (Iurii Andrukhovych, Taras and Iurko Prokhas’ko, Oksana Zabuzhko, Stefan Chwin and Olga Tokarczuk), the chapter focuses on diverse articulations of memory of historical displacements (physical and symbolic) in Eastern Europe in the context of the changing political regimes and shifting borders of the 20th century. The continuous (re)construction and intergenerational reshaping of the memories of collective displacements form an inherent part of collective social imagination, thus also becoming part of the ideological order that underlies the discourses of identity, nationhood and history. I argue that in these narratives of unhomeliness (using Homi Bhabha’s concept (1994)) and displacement, the articulation of space itself posits a distinct problematic that bears on the conceptualization of collective selfhood; persistence of memory and history in space and place forms a continuum of interpretation and knowledge that informs discourses of individual and collective identities.

Mapping the geographies of memory

The postcolonial project is often seen as inherently connected to the recovery of the previously silenced or suppressed collective memory; thus, postcolonial studies can ‘itself be understood as an academic practice of memory [ … ] a development in institutionalized cultural memory’ (Uffelmann, 2013, p. 104). This proposition is particularly relevant for the region of Eastern Europe, where postcolonial literary landscapes always speak the language of the memories of the past.

The post-1989 literary cartographic narrative – with a specific thematic focus on maps, locations, places and their cultural and geopolitical readings – is represented by the works of Andrzej Stasiuk (Poland), Iurii Andrukhovych, and Iurko and Taras Prokhas’ko (Ukraine), to name a few. Often working with the essayistic genre in addition to fiction, these authors draw on the elements of travelogue, socio-historical analysis and semi-autobiographical narrative. Because Stasiuk is discussed in Chapter 3 in this volume, here I will focus on the examples of Ukrainian writing, which also associate with Andrukhovych’s concept of geopoetics – a critical mode of seeing culture through its geophysical and geopolitical parameters, and reading the landscape as a palimpsestic memory text where the totalitarian past is all pervasive. Both Andrukhovych and the Prokhas’kos prefer to explore off-centric, peripheral areas such as those of the Carpathian Mountains, which seem to be off the political map (also cf. Stasiuk’s travel writing about peripheral, rural, small-town Central Europe and the Carpathian region); yet such spaces are marked with the presence of the past that evoke their complex history.

Andrukhovych’s novel Dvanadciat’ obruchiv (Twelve Rings) (2004), which tells a story of a group of domestic travelers and an Austrian tourist at a dilapidated post-Soviet Carpathian resort, is also a detailed story of the area, its natural features and its man-made structures that bear material witness to the layers of consecutive imperial transfers. The narrative of the resort, unfolding from 1915 in Austria-Hungary, to Poland and then the Soviet Union, includes its former function as a mountain meteorological station, sport boarding school and then an unlikely recreation facility. In the building, everything bears ‘a stamp of chimerical co-existence of several layers of objects of everyday life’ (p. 70);¹ it is a grotesque museum of a random accumulation of artifacts that are devoid of meaning apart from their belonging to the distant or not so distant history. The building of the nearest railway station boasts a dilapidated roof, a tower with a stopped clock with a rusty mechanism, non-functional lanterns, cracked glass, expletive inscriptions in Russian on the wall, and a hammer-and-sickle bas-relief above the central entrance (p. 36). These seemingly random details represent a ghostlike legacy of the Soviet years, from economic neglect to blatant ideological symbols and the presence of the imperial language. The inclusion in the print edition of the novel of Lina Kim’s black-and-white art photography, which focuses on urban scenes with abandoned, decaying buildings, is an apt visual complement to the effect created by Andrukhovych’s prose. The archeology of totalitarian aftermath unveils nothing but emptiness and a post-apocalyptic feel of void, which, however, in the context of the novel, offers the hope of rebuilding a new life.

Andrukhovych picks up the theme of ruins in the essay ‘Central European Revision’ (2009), where he proposes a ‘glossary’ of ruins that form a kind of a map of the Soviet legacy – from ruins of roads to industrial ruins: ‘abandoned factories and mines, old metal, piles of pipes, radiation, rust, broken brick, absurd montage installations’, ‘a landscape catastrophe’ (p. 266). There is, however, a different kind of ruins: those of cemeteries, especially the cemeteries that became silent witnesses of genocides, ethnic cleansings, deportations:

I saw such ruins – Jewish, Armenian, Lemko. To read the names on the headstones one had to peel the moss away with fingers. I know approximately where there was a ghetto in my city [ … ] Therefore there must be ruins of languages, of words, of writings – of this fluid memory. (p. 267)

The receding, fragmentary memory of repressions and mass killings is fragile and vulnerable because it can disintegrate with the passage of time; it is still waiting to be restored from its ruins, piece by piece. Andrukhovych’s essay writings (2006, 2009) form an eclectic but comprehensive account of the inventory of collective memory of the totalitarian years: repressed, underground authors and forbidden poets; radio ‘Liberty’ that at the time was housed in Munich; informational vacuum of the Soviet empire; history of the Ukrainian language, its uses, restrictions and bans; the political opposition and resistance in the western regions of Ukraine after the takeover by the Soviet troops in 1939 and again at the end of the war, and mass deportations to Siberia; wartime and postwar changes in cartography, with vanished bridges, non-functional railways, changing maps and languages. Andrukhovych’s writing is inevitably filled with autobiographical elements and stories of his family, which allows him to claim much of the collective cultural memory as his own. The essay with the rather ironic title of ‘Bildungsroman’ is written as the author’s reflection at his father’s funeral and reconstruction of his father’s wartime hardships: running from the advancing Soviet Army in 1944, living on a train full of evacuees, being caught between the German and Soviet troops, and eventually being part of the migration wave under the Soviet regime in the 1950s, which in fact was a story of thousands of displaced people at the time. The significance of Andrukhovych’s implicit dialogue with the reader is that his father’s story is recognizable to many in his audience and that the writer consciously constructs a bond with his reader through the commonality of that experience, thus also reinforcing the narrative of collective memory.

One of the key themes in Andrukhovych’s works has been the geopolitical idea of Central Europe. Although it went through different stages of conceptualization since the beginning of his creative career in the late 1980s, the writer eventually arrives at the impossibility of separating it from the memory of the near past and the region’s political history: ‘My Central Europe – it’s the former Socialist camp, Ostblock’ (2006, p. 88, emphasis in the original); for Andrukhovych, it’s the Ostblock of free thought and resistance – the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa), Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), Budapest of 1956, Prague of 1968 and Gdańsk of 1980. These are the cornerstones of the ‘other’ history of the region, the history that had no public presence during the totalitarian years, but has been developing as a complex polyphonic narrative with multiple voices, stories, interpretations and controversies that still need to be addressed. The writer keeps asking the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Life Writing and Politics of Memory in Eastern Europe: Introduction
• Part I: Narratives of Belonging
• Part II: Life Histories and Representations of Trauma
• Part III: Political Change and Responsibility
• Index