POST-MEMORIAL SINCERITY IN THE WRITING OF SERGEI LEBEDEV AND MARIA STEPANOVA

• Authors: Kapičiak Jakub , Ulbrechtová Helena
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This article deals with the ways the Russian writers Sergei Lebedev and Maria Stepanova conceptualize memory, remembering, and the past. The special focus is on the presence of sincerity rhetoric and its intertwinement with memory in Lebedev’s Liudi avgusta (The people of August, 2016) and Stepanova’s Pamiati pamiati (2018; In Memory of Memory, 2021). At first, the study outlines the current position of memory studies within literary theory and the main tendencies of cultural memory development in post-Soviet Russia. Lebedev’s and Stepanova’s novels are then comparatively read on this cultural-theoretical and cultural-historical background. The crucial aspect can be considered the ethos of “curative sincerity” (Ellen Rutten’s concept) that both texts seem to rely on. We approach Lebedev’s and Stepanova’s texts as examples of post-memorial writing, which does not rely on the first-hand experience with the past it depicts, but encounters the mediatized forms of the past. Therefore, imagination plays an important role for the narrator or authorial subject. The imaginative investment into remembrance accompanies the attempts to sincerely retell the truth about the past, while being aware of the impossibility of retelling the whole truth, which leads to an understanding of predecessors’ actions with empathy and compassion.

Keywords

EN

CULTURAL MEMORY; MEMORY POLITICS; SINCERITY RHETORIC; POST-SOVIET RUSSIAN NOVEL; SERGEI LEBEDEV; MARIA STEPANOVA

• Publisher: Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: World Literature Studies
• Year: 2023
• Volume: 15
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 3 – 22

Contributors

author

Kapičiak Jakub

• Institute of Slavonic Studies, Czech Academy of Sciences, Valentinská 1, 110 00 Praha 1, Czech Republic

• https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0869-4716

author

Ulbrechtová Helena

• https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6062-2678

Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31577/WLS.2023.15.1.1