Mental geography in Askold Melnychuk``'s "Ambassador of the Dead" and "What is Told"

Abstract

The issues of mental geography and its correlation with official territorial differentiation and organization of the global space become highly important under conditions of considerable geo-political transformations and accelerated migration processes. A. Melnychuk’s novels are suitable for examining in the context of mental mapping, ethnical identity, national memory and collective trauma. Since his works were published in Ukraine, there have been a number of studies in the above-mentioned aspects. However, analysis of the available papers shows a lack of the researchers’ attention to the specificity of mental geography in the writer’s novels that makes it necessary to study them further. The purpose of the research was to identify the peculiarities of “borders” in the characters’ mental geography in the novels “Ambassador of the Dead” and “What is told”. In order to achieve the purpose, we used the following methods: biographical, psychoanalytical, intertextual and the elements of receptive esthetics.  Analysis of A. Melnychuk’s novels made it possible to draw a conclusion that mental geography is visualized distinctly through the characters of both works. The novels articulate the discrepancy between the symbolic markers of spatial objects on the maps and their reflection in the characters’ consciousness. In A. Melnychuk’s works there is a correlation between the available information about the past on mental maps and the maintenance of inherited identity: the characters who tried to erase the past, to transform virtual “sites of memory” into “non-sites”, either destroyed themselves as individuals or assimilated abroad, having lost connections with their family and nation. The collective trauma made them avoid clarity in naming their motherland that had a negative impact on its reflection on the mental maps of the younger generation of emigrants and, as a result, on their national identity. Specificity of articulating the consequences of traumatic experience in A. Melnychuk’s novels can be prospects for further research.