Memory, Trauma, Therapy

The  Russian-Ukrainian war

Russo-Ukrainian War

also:

War in Donbass, Ukraine crisis, Ukraine conflict, Conflict in Ukraine, Ukrainian-Russian War, Russian-Ukrainian War, War in Ukraine, War in Eastern Ukraine

 began with the invasion by Russian forces of Ukrainian territory ( and ) on February 20, 2014. The second phase – a full-scale war – started on February 24, 2022.

The response by writers and artists was immediate and varied – from stopping writing in order to invest their whole time and energy to volunteering, to writing constantly using all the possible media to stay in contact with readers, from going to the front lines to contribute to the all-Ukrainian struggle, to speaking to all possible audiences through various platforms to keep the world's attention on the war in Ukraine.

In 2014 the volume of poetry and essays written increased sharply, offering readers texts that captured immediate thoughts, emotions, and physical reactions. The predominance of these ‘genres of quick reaction’ in crucial moments of life is common in literature, so the rise in collections of verse and essays with the beginning of the full-scale war in 2022 was not unexpected. In contrast, prose texts offer a ‘delayed’ reaction to events, as writers need time to rethink the events that have taken place in the form of a book in order to introduce the whole story.

This article deals with the prose texts by Sophia Andrukhovych, Serhii Zhadan, and Tamara Duda, which were written after 2014 and which describe the war in its various forms, to highlight two of the most widespread narratives in Ukrainian literature dealing with the Russian-Ukrainian war – those of memory and trauma. Another a function of literature that emerged during this period – a therapeutic one – is underlined in the texts of 2022 (short stories, verses, essays).

Writing about memories is not unusual in Ukrainian literature, texts about memory and related concepts (e.g., memorizing, remembering, retelling memories, and transmitting them to future generations) having been a prominent feature of Ukrainian literature since Ukraine gained independence. What makes the novel “Amadoka” by Sofia Andrukhovych exceptional?

In the novel “Amadoka” Sofia Andrukhovych presents three crucial periods in the development of the Ukrainian state – the Holocaust, the Executed Renaissance Executed Renaissance Executed Renaissance ******(**Ukrainian: ****Розстріляне відродження) - a term used to describe the generation of Ukrainian poets, writers, philosophers, scientists and artists of the 1920s and early 1930s in the Ukrainian SSR that was mostly destroyed by the Soviet regime. , and the Russian-Ukrainian war in Donbas – depicted through the memories of four generations of the Frasuliak-Kryvodiak family. The author does not represent the memory of a single event or epoch, but instead creates a sense of long-lasting memory where memories and historical events are intertwined and lead to each other’s creation. Sofia Andrukhovych focuses on the individual, collective, and transgenerational (transmitted from generation to generation) memories of these four generations, although she points out the unreliability of memory as a fixer of historical truth. While acknowledging that memory is not a reliable source of information, especially regarding traumatic events, the author still turns to it as a way of reflecting history.

Even though they are recorded in letters, diaries, sculptures, audio and video recordings, museums, archives, and cemeteries, and even appear as scars on all the characters' bodies, the author argues that traumatic experiences can bury memories (literally under the ground), obscure them (when painful emotions are blocked), or alter them (as a result of secondary memories or screen memories1). The war in Donbas is a consequence of the memory failures of previous generations.

The novel addresses transgenerational trauma, showing that none of the generations experienced ‘normal’ relationships with the previous one. Children witnessed their parents (or guardians) traumatized both physically, with mutilated bodies, scars, and cuts, and mentally. Parents and children didn't communicate with each other or reveal the truth about the past or their (grand)parents. Mothers are often introspective, plagued by recurring dreams about past events, withdrawn, as if living in their own world, detached from reality, unable to express emotions, mostly silent, unable to love, and inattentive to their children. Sofia Andrukhovych underlines the fact that the children of women who survived the war suffer from the fact that they have to “bear the full weight of an unknown past, in which there was not even a hint of [their] existence, but with which [they], from the very moment of [their] birth, [are] forced to reckon”2 (Andrukhovych, p. 105). Each subsequent generation went through the same circle “as if they had survived the same catastrophe and then suffered the consequences, although their memory was not even erased – it was completely absent”3 (Andrukhovych, p. 107), since this is not their trauma, but their mothers', which they still have to live with because they inherited it.

Although the novel emphasizes the fact that each generation had to cope with its trauma, the main concept of “Amadoka” is memory and its inability to give truthful testimony. Lake Amadoka, which may have existed and then vanished (like the events in the narrative and the memory about them), serves as the novel's central metaphor:memory is a key concept in understanding the novel.

Living through the war is a traumatic experience itself. The trauma narrative in contemporary Ukrainian literature after 2014 is another strategy for demonstrating how to ‘voice’ the war and ‘live through’ the war. Trauma is manifested in almost all the texts about war through the body (injuries, scars, disabilities, disorders including mental disorders) and through language (silence or speech) discourse. 

However, writing about the trauma of experiencing war deals not only with the problems people face during the war but also, as demonstrated in the novels “Orphanage” (2017) by Serhii Zhadan and “Daughter” (2019) by Tamara Duda4, with the issues of traumatized individuals who had different kinds of traumatic experiences in their past and then had to endure another trauma – the war of 2014. By describing these previously traumatized characters and their behavior, the authors try to explain the roots of the war.

The main character Pasha in Zhadan's novel “Orphanage” is a person without a sense of belonging: homeless in both a literal and metaphorical sense, disconnected from his historical roots, lacking his own sense of identity or ‘inner core’. He is mentally traumatized. Professionally, Pasha is a Ukrainian language teacher, a role that should entail having a clear position and shaping public opinion. However, he neither attempts to teach his pupils to think nor mentors them. Nina captures the trauma of an entire (Soviet) generation: “You’re so used to hiding. So used to staying out of things, letting someone else decide everything for you.”5 (Zhadan, p. 153). The author depicts this generation as lacking responsibility and emphasizes that taking responsibility is a personal choice. To overcome this trauma, one must mature. The future of the next generation is suggested in the novel's final lines with the image of a puppy that “will be a badass when he grows up”6 (Zhadan, p. 324).

In the novel “Daughter”, by Tamara Duda, the motive of taking responsibility is combined with that of being united and defending one’s rights, love, and country. It tells the story of a slim and tender girl (with no name, which allows anyone to identify with her) who came from western Ukraine to Donetsk, was admitted into and organized a resistance movement against Russian soldiers and politics. She participated in a demonstration to support Ukraine’s European choice, and went to the Donetsk Maidan with the Ukrainian flag.  “There were young mothers, pensioners, students, family patriarchs and matriarchs, football fans and schoolchildren, old boys from the villages, and fashionable young city ‘things’; they all suddenly became related and all one people… We all became Ukrainians, and carried our Ukraine like an athlete carrying the Olympic torch, higher that the sky… Most of us had no idea what we were dealing with, who we were dealing with, we did not know what a vile enemy we had on our hands. We had come out onto the square to convince them. They [the Russians] had come to kill us, and that was that”7. Ukrainian society could hardly cope with the trauma of being divided long before 2014 and could offer no resistance to the incoming Russian soldiers.

By showing the traumatized society as a heritage of the Soviet past and the consequences of its disabilities, the authors try to find explanations for the war of 2014, which has caused and continues to cause new traumas in Ukrainian society.

All trauma narratives aim to achieve a therapeutic effect, often reached through the act of talking, as practiced in psychiatry. Taras Prokhasko explores the challenges of articulating and sharing one's thoughts in literature in his essay: “And we know how to be silent, to be silent together about one thing” (in: “What he is silent about. A book written by men”, 2022), where he stresses: “I grew up in a culture that in every way encouraged me to remain silent. Silence is golden... the less people know about you, the better for you... Don't betray anyone, don't frame anyone... Don't talk nonsense. Don't complain, don't ask. Be patient, Cossack, you will be chieftain. Words hurt, don't hurt with words... Don't generalize your problems... Be silent when elders speak. Don't say anything unless you are asked…” (Prokhasko, pp. 243-247).8

Society must engage in dialogue to overcome its trauma, and literature plays a crucial role in this process. Contemporary Ukrainian literature, transitioning from silence to the articulation of its traumas, fulfills a therapeutic function for the community. The full-scale invasion changed the focus of the artistic movement in Ukraine. Not being silent, articulating emotions, and depicting everything in the here-and-now has became the most important issue for Ukrainian artists since February 2022. Diaries (e.g., “Body of War” by Halyna Kruk), essays (e.g., the project “Dictionary of War” by Ostap Slyvynskyi), anthologies (e.g., “War 2022: Diaries, Essays, Poetry”, “Poetry without shelter”), letters (Valerii Puzik’s book-in-letters “With love - dad!”, 2023), poetry, all the types of text that can record a person’s mental and emotional state, physical reaction, thoughts, and hopes are in high demand by society. These works are very important to Ukrainian people as one of the means to live through painful emotions collectively (with writers and other readers) and to overcome trauma.
 
For a person’s psyche, it is important to imagine a positive future that serves as a stimulus for living. Alongside voicing memory and trauma issues to cope with the painful experience of the war, speaking about a positive future is another way of providing therapy. For this reason it is easy to understand why the Ukrainian literary scientist and writer Oleksandr Mykhed presents an after-the-war narrative as an after-the-Victory one.

I want to conclude with a quote from Oleksandr Mykhed’s “tale for grown-ups” called “The Cat, the Rooster, the Cupboard” (2022). This text describes the first months of the full-scale invasion and finishes with the author’s confidence in victory:

To sum up, the literature produced in Ukraine between 2014 and 2023 stands as a testament to the impact of the Russian-Ukrainian war on its society and culture. Works like Sofia Andrukhovych’s “Amadoka”, Serhii Zhadan’s “Orphanage”, and Tamara Duda’s “Daughter” demonstrate how Ukrainian writers have explored themes of memory and trauma, offering narratives that delve into the complexities of personal and collective experiences. These literary works not only bear witness to the contemporary horrors of the war but also penetrate deeply into the long-lasting traumatic effects on individuals and society, revealing the complex connection between the Soviet past and the Russian-Ukrainian war.

Contemporary Ukrainian literature has assumed a therapeutic function, providing a platform for dialogue, healing, and collective resilience.