econstruction of Family Memory: The way from oblivion to re-gaining of identity in Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s novels The Length of Days and Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love

Abstract

The attention in the proposed study is focused on the processes of transformation of individual, family and national identity under the influence of family memory reconstruction, represented in Volodymyr Rafeenko’s novels “The Length of Days” and “Mondegreen (Songs about Death and Love)”. Family memory is considered in the article (based on the works of Astrid Erll, Bradd Shore and Sara Kauko, etc.) as a subset of autobiographical memory, which includes memories of family members about various aspects of the family life, has a decisive influence on the formation of identity and is a plastic phenomenon, capable of be changed under the influence of current events on each family member. Volodymyr Rafeyenko, a native of Donetsk, Russian philologist by profession, who, under the impression of the Russian occupation (which he experienced twice), switched from Russian to Ukrainian in his writings, describes changes of his characters’ identity, referring in many ways to his own experience. In particular, he utilizes the motif of reconstruction of the family memories replaced with the false ones by the Soviet totalitarian rule, which entails changes of identity in a whole generation representatives. The novel “The Length of Days”, which is characterized by the motifs of  early orphanhood and adoption, represents the worldview state of no-memory, unable to become the basis of a strong identity. In  the  families of the characters of the novel, not only the blood relationship is absent but  even true human closeness. There are no shared memories in this families, but only surrogates of  them: the local and Russian authorities replace the real past with artificial memories-myths designed to facilitate the attempts of Russian recolonization of Donbass (this, for example, is shown in the  inserted story “Seven Ukrops”). In the novel “Mondegreen (Songs about Death and Love)” is shown the close connection between language and identity: the protagonist Gaba Gabinsky’s delving into the language of his ancestors — the Ukrainian language, pushed out of circulation in Soviet and post-Soviet Donetsk region, — becomes a trigger for the recovery of Gaba’s previously tabooed family memories and of the transformation of his identity.