Forgetting and Remembering on the Solovki islands.

Yesterday at our lunch seminar Ilja Viktorov presented his impressions from a visit to the Solovki islands in Russia. What impressed me in regard to remembering/forgetting context is the erasure of memory realized through what can be called re-contextualization of the GULag experience. As the camp was actually situated in the premises of the Solovetski monastery, the only "place of remembering" that remained after the camp had been closed was the monastery without any traces of the camp. Now Solovetski monastery is functioning for religious purposes, while the memorials and the museum of the GULag are located in the places close to the monastery but not in its premises. In this way, memory of the place is dislocated to the lieux de mémoire detached from the experienced places themselves.

Soviet past: Digital memories.

Today I came across a blog entry with a collection of pictures of the USSR from 1920s up to 1991 from the РИА «Новости» archive.

It's a very nice illustration of digitalisation of memories. What always strikes me most in such a memory work is its interactive character. Whereas the pictures show mostly nostalgic images of the Soviet past, in the comments to the entry we find references to the dark sides of the Soviet regime and the problems faced in the present.

Soviet past: in search for sincerity.

In the book “What is Soviet Now” (ed. Thomas Lahusen and Peter H. Solomon, Jr.) I came across an interesting article by Alexei Yurchak “Post-Post-Communist Sincerity: Pioneers, Cosmonauts, and Other Heroes Born Today”. He addresses the use of the Soviet aesthetics by contemporary Russian artists and on the examples of celebrated artists demonstrates that turn to the Soviet is not necessarily related to the nostalgia for the Soviet past but rather to the utopian ideals of sincerity associated with this past. For artists the Soviet past seems to be “the most valuable cultural capital in the global context. Turning to the explorations of that past may become an important artistic strategy for reintegrating Russian art into the global art scene.” (275)
Artists themselves deny any politics in their works and explicitly emphasize that they do not associate themselves with anti-Soviet dissent groups, neither they see themselves in favour of Soviet political regime, they rather strive to foreground the sincerity and belief of Soviet (common) people in their ideals, in contrast to pragmatism and lack of any idealism of contemporary (post-Soviet) people. Yurchak maintains, “this aesthetics bears its own political potential … which is based on the recorded categories of sincerity and idealism.”
Yurchak concludes that such a search for sincerity which is realized through turning to the Soviet past can be reduced neither to nostalgia, nor to the response to the market demand, it is rather an instance of “reassessing the history of the Soviet modernity, exploring its meaningful aspects, and separating its original ethical aspirations of the modernity from the political regime which relied on them for its ends” (276). At the very end, Yurchak add, if it is nostalgia then it is nostalgia for “what the past might have been, for the missed opportunity of creating an alternative world” (quoting Zizek, “Lenin Shot at Finland Station”, London Review of Books, August 18, 2005).
What made me to post all this in relation to my dissertation is exactly this last conclusion about the past that might have been but has never happened. Is it not the same instance that we witness in the turn to the UPA past? Is it not the same idealization of the failed revolution that could have succeeded (especially if we think about the /failed/ revolution in 2004)? The past that had not happened has always a better position than the past that had happened. It is the same situation as competing with the dead, it is not possible for the living to be better than the dead, the dead make no mistakes, the living do. It is amazing what strength an alternative history can give for memory, especially for the memory of future generations, endorsing in such a way cultural memory of the community. In contrast to this idealization of the alternative history of our contemporaries, I remember reading elsewhere (some memoires?) that members of OUN(m) were actually glad that UPA under OUN(b) lost because the alternative future could have been even worse than that of the future that actually had come after the end of the war.

Arno Geiger's "Es geht uns gut"

Recently I read a book by an Austrian writer Arno Geiger which is called “Es geht uns gut”. This is a wonderful novel about three generations of family Erlach settled in Vienna from the beginning to the end of the 20th century.

Narratives about each generation are intertwined like a patchwork so that linearity of the plot dissolves in a texture of “now” as if there were no past at all. Each part of the time is sense-giving to each other and it does not really matter which position within the time line the event occupies. Beside the fact that it is a wonderful piece of prose it made me think about couple of thing related to memory.
First, an immense role of materiality for memory retaining and developing. Here, I think not only about the “stuff”, although its meaning is not to underestimate, I think here first of all about a body as a witness of the past, bearer of memory and a representation of memory. I came with this thought when I was reading a passage where one of the main characters faces a woman in black and only after this he remembers that someone died. In this way, the woman served as an index of the past. This very much makes me think about Lefebvre’s discussion on body as a space, but for Lefebvre the point was the spatiality of body. My point is the remembrance and "representability" of body. Now I need to find who wrote about this body/memory relation. I remember a presentation on one of the conferences I attended several years ago there a researcher from Germany presented a paper on Varlam Shalamov’s "Kolyma Tales" and she looked at the body as a witness of the past, whereas body remembered tortures of the Gulag even if the mind refused to do so. I wish I could remember whose theories this researcher was referring to. Now, I remember Hayden mentioning, "Memory is also evoked through the bodily experience of the ceremony and its formal rituals, which is shared with others" (Hayden, 1999: 145)
Second, this novel made me think about the literature where the war is addressed in general. Such novels usually encompass three generations, this is their common feature. I did not read so many novels of this kind that were written in the post-Soviet countries, but when I think about the novels I read, the common feature is an immense role of imaginary and dreams that occupy the novel space (think about Oksanen’s or Zabuzhko’s novels, e.g.). In Zabuzhko’s novel “Museum of Abandoned Secrets” there is no direct transmitting of experience from one generation into the other, the past generation speaks to their ‘grandchildren’ exclusively through dreams, although these dreams are then proved to have been reality by the archival documents and the present. It is amazing how forms of representing the past seem actually being dependent on the past itself (there were literally few who could transmit the experience). And here I am not speaking exclusively about the UPA, I think about the Soviet framework of Great Patriotic War in general which did not allow any other schemes in transmitting the past except of glorious narratives of victory.
Third, while reading the novel I thought uninterruptedly on the question “Who needs the past?” The characters in the novel seemed reluctant to “know” what was going on in the past, what they were longing for, though, was coming back to the past where everything was better. So, past is not only a foreign country, it is a better country, which can never be reached.
PS: Just remembered the interview with Arno Geiger where he mentioned his father, who was seriously ill and did not always manage to recognize people or environment. Once he said to Arno Geiger: “Ich will nach Hause” (I want home), “Wo ist dein Haus?” (“Where is you home?” asked Geiger a bit perplexed as they were sitting in the father’s house), “Zuhause ist wie hier aber ein bißchen anders” (“At home is like here but a bit different,” was the answer).
A good ending for such a long and somewhat patchy post.

Introduction: What's it all about.

Welcome to Memory Matters, a research blog shadowing my PhD activities at Baltic and East European Graduate School in Södertörn University.
My name is Yuliya Yurchuk. I am a PhD candidate affiliated to two universities: Södertörn and Stockholm but most of time I spend in the Södertörn academic environment.
Now I am in the middle of my PhD route, all the courses are now finished and the time left I can dedicate to writing (and perhaps teaching).
Generally, my research is embedded into a broader field of memory studies that means that in my dissertation I am not trying to uncover historical truth, what I am aiming to do is to scrutinize the representations of the past and their effects on the present and future. In this way, the kind of history I am dealing with is mnemohistory.
My main research interest is the representations of WWII in the post-Soviet states. Fully understanding the immense scope of this topic, on the one hand, and limitations of the PhD dissertation, on the other hand, in my thesis I decided to focus only on one country, which is Ukraine, and on the narrower episode of that time – the activities of nationalist organizations in Western Ukraine.
The preliminary title of my dissertation is “Between the hammer of remembering and the anvil of forgetting: representations of history in Ukraine since 1991”. I focus mainly on the representations of history of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and Ukrainian Insurgent Army (better known by its Ukrainian acronym UPA- Українська Повстанська Армія). While this history was silenced and misrepresented during the Soviet time, there are traces of new mythologization nowadays. I am mostly interested in interaction between various actors who are involved into the memory work – officials, intellectuals, parties, activists and ‘common’ people. I focus on the actors and processes that set frameworks for official remembering as well as look at the grassroots where (spontaneous) remembering take place. I want to see how people on local and regional levels work through this past and how they use it in performing and forming their individual and collective identities. In short, I am not dealing with first-hand memories of the people who were involved in the OUN or UPA (although I extensively refer to memoirs and archival materials), what I am dealing with is post-memories (to borrow Hirsch’s term) of subsequent generations. On the one hand, these memories are now struggling with each other for the right to become a cultural memory of the nation, to use Assmanns’ terminology.
Key questions in my dissertation are: Which and whose memories are thematised and promoted as ‘national’? What meaning is ascribed to national identity through framing of national historical narrative? What do the new ways of remembering tell us about national identity formation? What political messages they transmit? Which memories and why are activated for remembrance and which are forced out from the memory space?
Speaking about my material, from the very beginning of my dissertation plan I considered focusing on memories represented in monuments, literature, films, blogs, and popular culture. Now, I have several papers based almost on each of these sets of materials separately, still I feel as if standing on the crossroads, not sure whether I will include all of these pieces into the dissertation. Maybe I will leave only monuments at the end because they give quite a broad insight on the processes and actors involved in memory work as well as they reveal the particularities of memory, remembering and representations of history in the post-Soviet Ukraine.
I don’t have a clear explanation why I felt like starting this blog, perhaps I am doing this because I’ve been blogging so much I want finally to separate dissertation related issues from all the other things I am usually writing about. Or, perhaps I wanted to broaden the circle of discussion and find people who are also engaged in memory studies. Or just sort out hundreds of things rambling in my mind and articulate them in more or less coherent manner. All these reasons count, I guess. So, here I come with my Memory Matters where I will post literature reviews, impressions of filed trips, conferences, and workshops. From time to time, I will also post some random thoughts about memory and my project. Considering the fact that so many things matter it is hard to delineate now the boundaries of probable topics which will appear in my blog.
My blog is not a diary, in a strict sense of this word. By being public it loses the sense of ‘notes for myself only’. But it is not a polished final product for public use either. It reflects process of writing so none of the following pieces is a final finding whatsoever. Moreover, it reflects writing in a foreign language for me, which makes this process a bit more challenging, but very often rewarding. From my experience, it is easier to put a complicated thought into a concise English passage than into concise Ukrainian, because a high level of fluency in mother tongue easily ends up in a far too long bubbling. So, looking from this perspective, writing in English might be an advantage. But, please, do mind that English is a foreign country for me.
Besides Ukrainian and English I speak German, Russian, some Polish and some Swedish (you are welcome to address me in any of these languages, you can suggest me reading in these languages, although responding to you in Polish or Swedish might be a complicated task for me).
Comments, suggestion and discussions are very welcomed here.

Yuliya Yurchuk