Ukrainian Research Lectures: Tetiana Grebeniuk

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We are happy to present you a lecture by Tetiana Grebeniuk from the Department of Cultural and Ukrainian Studies of Zaporizhzhia State Medical University, "Time of Habitual Lies: Memories about Era of Stagnation in Contemporary Ukrainian Fiction".

One of the characteristic features of contemporary Ukrainian fiction is the attempt to find historical explanations for contemporary social problems. The most popular and discussed novels of recent years, such as "The Museum of Abandoned Secrets" by O. Zabuzhko, "Dom's Dream Kingdom" by V. Amelina, "Amadoka" by S. Andrukhovych, introduce the concept of the influence of historical memory on contemporary events and the need to deal with historical traumas and mistakes in order to alleviate their pressure. In the context of Russia's current war against Ukraine, the problem of habitual falsehood of the Soviet reality, represented in the above-mentioned works, deserves special attention. The aim of the talk is to analyze the representation of the propagandistic distortion of reality in the Soviet era of stagnation, the period immediately preceding Ukraine's attainment of national independence, in contemporary Ukrainian fiction. The narrators' memories in the analyzed works connect propagandistic narratives and symbols with the background of significant events or situations. The incompatibility of a propagandistic image with universal human values is often presented as a traumatic experience of the characters. The key feature of these works is that they are based on the personal experiences of the authors and their loved ones, which results in the apparent subjectivity of the narrative. These fictional worlds are usually based on the memories of a real biographical author (or on the memories of other real people collected by an author). The analyzed texts consider the typical Soviet willingness to accept a distorted picture of reality as a crucial precondition for the current war.