Pukhonska O. Post-totalitarian Memory and its Transformation in Contemporary Ukrainian Literature

This scientific work gives the real issues of modern Ukrainian literature, which defined literary features and characteristics of the cultural consciousness of Ukrainian society during the period of Independence. The author of the research appeals to the contemporary understanding of Soviet totalitarianism, post-totalitarian memory, a traumatic experience which is based on this memory. The theoretical part of the work is based on scientific works of Pierre Nora, Paul Recoeur, Jan Assmann, Aleida Assmann, Marianna Hirsh, Aleksander Ethkind, Jill Bennett and so on. Because the traumatic events of the XX century are the determining factors for the proposed study, the main attention is paid to the totalitarianism and its consequences for Ukrainian history. In the center of such option is the process of deconstruction of folk memory, forming a mass society which, according to Hanna Arendt and José Ortega y Gasset, was the main instrument of the establishment of totalitarianism in a confused post-imperial Europe. In the second part of the work there were researched those aspects of literary memory, which were forced out from cultural discourse due to obvious reasons. In this case, we are talking about national liberation struggle of Ukrainians after Soviet invader during different periods of sovietisation of Ukraine. To explain the methods of reinterpretation of lost and modified memory researcher used the novels The Black Raven (“Chornyy Voron”) and Marusia of Vasyl Shkliar. One of the reasons for forgetting also became mythologization of war and post-war doings of Ukrainian insurgents. From the one side, such mythologization was sacral, first of all for the next generation of Ukrainian patriots. From the other side, it was created by the power and was totally profaned by the Soviet post-war ideology. Importance of such experience become more evident and understandable during an aggravation of relations between Russia and Ukraine. In the same paragraph, there were research the peculiarities of the literary reception of the national trauma of GULag experience. For today there are a lot of memoirs of victims of Stalin’s and post-Stalin’s camps. But writers still find appropriate language for reflecting that traumatic experience in belletristic. Knights of Love and Hope (“Lytsari lubovi I nadii”) of Lesia Romanchuk is the literary effort of representation of GULag’s memory.