The Discourse of Forced Displacement in Contemporary Ukrainian Literature
Fiction and Non-Fiction
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21780148 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tetiana Belimova (0000-0001-7094-8460) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Issue | 38 |
| Pages | 5-14 |
| Publication date | 2025-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Bulletin of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv Literary Studies Linguistics Folklore Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1728-2659 • E-ISSN: 2709-8494 |
| Publisher | Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (PUBLISHER • UA) |
| DOI | 10.17721/1728-2659.2025.38.01 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
Background.Over the course of three years of full-scale war, numerous works of fiction and non-fiction have appeared in contemporary Ukrainian literature, reflecting the forced displacement of millions of Ukrainians (poetry, prose, graphic novels and short stories, internet lore). The object of the present study is six works of fiction and non-fiction that correlate with the trauma of war and refugeehood. Methods.The article draws on trauma studies, postcolonial studies, and memory studies. Results. The study outlines the analytical framework that served as the theoretical basis for the analysis of the selected works of fiction and non-fiction. Three refugee diaries are analyzed: "That Crazy Year" (2023) by Yevheniia Kononenko, "The Night Was" (2022) by Svitlana Tkachenko, and "The Refugee" (2023) by Yulia Mattu. It was observed that all three works reveal the psychological trauma of experiencing war and forced migration. The authors resort to autofiction (self-writing), according to Y. Polischuk, when personal experience becomes decisive for the plot and the construction of the narrative. The novels "The Ladder" (2023) by Yevgeniya Kuznetsova and "How Can You Not Love Her" (2024) by Natalka Dolyak, as well as the novella "Mom, Do You Remember?" (2024) by Kateryna Babkina, were also analyzed. Nataliya Dolyak's novel and Kateryna Babkina's novella imitate the confessional discourse of a diary. This fiction, like the documentary prose, outlines the path to salvation from the Russian invasion and the search for a safe place abroad; it focuses on the processes of decolonization that are characteristic of the Ukrainian collective consciousness, which has encountered an aggressive Other. Conclusions. It has been observed that the line between documented refugee stories in diaries and short stories and novels is rather arbitrary. Works of fiction imitate and reproduce the narratives of ego-documents, approaching oral stories. Refugee documentary, on the other hand, tends toward autofiction, focusing on the accurate transmission of memories. It is noteworthy that both artistic and documentary texts reflect the process of decolonization of Ukrainian consciousness. Both types of texts – fiction and non-fiction – create a single discourse that correlates with the collective and cultural memory of Ukrainians and fills the newest Ukrainian archive
| Highly cited | No |
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