Suchergebnisse

The chapter reads Maria Stepanova's 2017 Памяти памяти (In Memory of Memory, 2021) in view of the boom of testimonies of involvement in twentieth-century mass violence in Central and Eastern European literatures. Why this interest now? Hypothesis is that the texts address convergences between past complicities and current forms of participation in the wrongdoings of neoliberalism. These issues are related, since justifications of past involvement established the terminology, narratives, and heuristics in which mass violence has been subsequently discussed, thus forming the frame for the negotiation of current problematic involvement. Stepanova's text stands out from the large corpus of contemporary family history narratives. First, it inverts the common order of critical discourse, as the literary text discusses theoretical concepts of memory studies, most notably Hirsch's "postmemory." Secondly, this discussion challenges a Western bias of memory studies, where political violence is portrayed as a traumatizing element of a past era handed down through transgenerational transmission. Stepanova outlines that in Eastern Europe, the experience of totalitarian terror and mass violence spread over several eras and multiple generations, creating a "traumatic enfilade" that comprises even the narrator's present. In Memory of Memory addresses the critical participation of analysis in forming the aftermath of terror and mass violence.

This chapter contributes to the discussions on memorability by applying assemblage theoretical thinking to the analysis of memory and by developing the notion of mnemonic affordance. It analyzes Ella Ojala's family photographs' affordances in the mediation of the memory of forced migrations and family's dispersal on multiple scales. First, the chapter explores the photographs' affordances in mediating memory of dispersed family. Second, it examines the album's affordances in mediating Ojala's life story in her memoir novels. Third, by contextualizing Ojala's literary works vis-à-vis the time of their publication at the turn of 1990s Finland and discussing their recent archiving, the chapter discusses affordances of the family album in mediation of the memory related to Ingrian Finns' experiences more generally. The chapter indicates some of the potentials of assemblage thinking for conceptualizing memory as processual, malleable, and contingent on various discursive-material and contextual circumstances.

The introductory chapter situates the collection within the field of memory studies and the study of Soviet repression and its remembrance. After briefly providing the broad historical context that connects the diverse studies explored by the chapters included in the book, the Introduction reflects on the commemoration of Soviet repression and communism within different memory cultures and the development of memory studies as an academic field. We argue that by bridging case studies of different moments and places under Stalinism, we are able to explore the connections, overlaps, and intersections of how Soviet repression and forced migration has and continues to mark and shape memory, identity, and history. Through an introduction of the twelve chapters of the book, we demonstrate the collection's contribution to better understanding the transnationalism and mobility of memory, the transgenerational aspects of the remembrance of difficult pasts, as well as their implications on the sense of belonging and identification. The chapter highlights that multiply moving – as in mobile, fluid, and emotive – memories not only reflect Eastern European or even European memory culture but reach far beyond.

This study combines economic, biographical, performative, and narrative approaches to commemoration to understand how the memory of the Stalinist repressions gains mnemonic capital through individualized practice. It is argued that an individual engaged in the field of commemoration can be seen as a cultural producer and intermediary fulfilling a whole array of different roles, adapting to changing conditions and improvising as the situation demands. The success of the commemorative activities of the organization depends significantly on the material and intangible resources at the disposal of the decision-making individual and the "vernacular creativity" the individual employs. Correspondingly, the selection of symbols used in the commemorative process relies both on the earlier collective mnemonic practices and resources of the national textual community and on the cultural and embodied capital of the decision-making individual. By extending the chains of memory labor outside the field of commemoration, an opportunity has been created for the memory of Stalinist mass repressions to transform and adapt for societal change.