While the Ox Is Still Alive
Memory and Emptiness in Serhiy Zhadan’s Voroshylovhrad
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9640474 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tanya Zaharchenko (0000-0002-8900-1880, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2013 |
| Volume | 55 |
| Issue | 1-2 |
| Pages | 45-69 |
| Publication date | 2013-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Slavonic Papers (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0008-5006 • E-ISSN: 2375-2475 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/00085006.2013.11092726 |
| OpenAlex | W2015033172 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
In Serhiy Zhadan’s recent novel Voroshylovhrad (2010), memory and emptiness form a duality of being and non-being, as represented by remembering and forgetting. This framework is proposed here as a metaphor for understanding some of the challenges facing Ukraine today. Using the concept of post-socialist memory as an entry point, this article positions Voroshylovhrad at the productive intersection of memory and literature, offers interpretations for several crucial scenes of the narrative, and contends that the novel recalibrates common paradigms of separation from a traumatic past. Finally, an argument is put forth that the book’s textual voids cast the reader as a key agent of recollection. This analysis of literary mechanisms involved in the memoryemptiness dichotomy contributes to an on-going exploration of strategies contemporary Ukrainian writers employ to engage in cultural and historical discourses, as well as to the studies of memory and literature in the post-Soviet regions of the world
Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Collective memory · Dual (grammatical number · Emptiness · Epistemology · Forgetting · Intersection (aeronautics · Linguistics · Literature · Metaphor · Narrative · Political science · Recall · Sociology · Ukrainian · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · History · Law · Military, Security, and Education Studies · Philosophy · Polish-Jewish Holocaust Memory Studies
| Citations per year | 0.29 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2019 - 2020 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |