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Ein Superstar der neueren finnischen Prosa. Einige Bemerkungen zum finnischen Roman "Fegefeuer" von Sofi Oksanen

100%

Mrozewicz B.

Folia Scandinavica Posnaniensia

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2016

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vol. 19

153-169

EN

The article is devoted to Sofi Oksanen, one of the most recognizable Finnish authors of the young generation whose literary production has been an unbroken streak of success for the last ten years. It addresses in particular her groundbreaking novel Purge (Puhdistus). In the analysis, the article focuses first and foremost on the aspect of a woman’s corporeality as well as shame and exclusion resulting from sexual abuse. It is one of the central motifs in Osanen’s production. On the example of Aliide the writer depicts, from the feminist point of view, the effects of physical violence towards women used as an element of humiliation and oppression of a conquered nation. The metaphor of a woman’s body as an occupied country gives the novel a universal character and draws attention to the fact that destroying womanhood is a subtle and slow way to the fall of societies. Therefore the deeds of both women are not unambiguously condemned in the novel.

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Postmemory, stereotype, and the return home. Rewriting pre-existing narratives in Sofi Oksanen’s "Purge"

86%

Mrozewicz A. E.

Folia Scandinavica Posnaniensia

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2016

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vol. 19

133-152

EN

The article offers a discussion of Sofi Oksanen’s novel Purge, focusing on the book’s strategy of evoking stereotypical narratives about Eastern Europe, such as the (postcommunist) fallen woman and (Russian) return home narratives, as well as related intertexts, primarily Lukas Moodysson’s film Lilya 4-ever. I argue that Oksanen constructs the plot around clichés in order to challenge them in a subversive fashion, first and foremost, in the name of recuperating the notion of Home. Related to locality and the feeling of being at-home, where the wholeness of the (national) subject is possible, ‘home’ is staged as an alternative to stereotypes, associated with transnational travel and the apparatus of colonization. A significant counter-narrative embedded in the novel – and hitherto rarely discussed – is the exilic perspective with its idealization of the lost and imagined home(land). In Purge, this is mediated through the main character’s postmemory. By means of a postexilic narrative, home is reconfigured as a ‘third space’ – neither fully ideal and (ethnically) pure nor adhering to the aforementioned stereotypical narratives. The positive valorisation of home, despised by some critics as simplistic and conservative, does not prevent movement and dislocation from being included in the new experience of home(land) emerging from the post-Soviet condition.

3

“Didn’t that sound like the north was calling us?” Imagined geographies and Cold War legacies in Sofi Oksanen’s Dog Park(Koirapuisto)

72%

Jelsbak T.

Folia Scandinavica Posnaniensia

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2023

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vol. 34

121-132

EN

The article presents a discussion of Finnish-Estonian author Sofi Oksanen’s 2019 novel Dog Park (Koirapuisto), a social and psychological thriller about two Ukrainian women working in the Ukrainian fertility industry, offering surrogacy services to Western clients. The novel explores some of the new modes of exchange and cultural encounter that were established between Ukraine and the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It presents a reflection of the social and human consequences of the transition from communism to capitalism but is also a story of how the legacy of Cold War geopolitics continues to shape European mental geographies and experiences at the intersection of East and West. Drawing on concepts from human geography and postcolonial studies, the article offers a reading of Oksanen’s novel focusing especially on how the novel negotiates these geopolitical shifts as well as the position of the Nordic countries on the changing European map.

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3 Folia Scandinavica Posnaniensia

1 Jelsbak T.

1 Mrozewicz A. E.

1 Mrozewicz B.

1 2023

2 2016

Ein Superstar der neueren finnischen Prosa. Einige Bemerkungen zum finnischen Roman "Fegefeuer" von Sofi Oksanen

Postmemory, stereotype, and the return home. Rewriting pre-existing narratives in Sofi Oksanen’s "Purge"

“Didn’t that sound like the north was calling us?” Imagined geographies and Cold War legacies in Sofi Oksanen’s Dog Park(Koirapuisto)