The problem of post-memory in Elena Chizhova’s novel “The city written from memory”

Abstract

Based on Elena Chizhova’s novel “The City Written from Memory”, the article examines the nature of the memory problem function in modern Russian literature. The problem of memory has become one of the dominant ones in Russian literature since the second half of the twentieth century. The turn of the 20th–21st centuries is characterized both by a change in the content of the problem of historical memory and its structure. The problem of memory is beginning to give way to the problem of post-memory, characteristic of a fairly wide range of texts, their greater part consisting of the works of femme prose. The problematization of post-memory, in the form presented in modern works of femme prose, takes place in the context of Marianne Hirsch’s ideas, primarily her work “The Generation of Post-Memory. Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust”. This concept involves the consideration of commemorative practices in the transfer of inter- and trans-generational experiences as the basis for the formation of affiliation memory. Along with Maria Stepanova’s “Memory of Memory”, Elena Chizhova’s novel is one of the most representative texts in post-memory literature. The article examines the strategies that make up the “family romance” and reveals the performative nature of memory: family photographs, audio recordings of the stories of the narrator’s mother, Vera, and the dumbness of her grandfather and father. The main plot of the novel becomes the narrator’s reflection on the process of developing family and affiliation post-memory, which simultaneously performs an identification function. Both processes are metaphorized, the first option is metaphorized by the “fabric theme”, the second by the metaphor of lifting the blockade.