(Un)reconciliation with History in O.S. Zabuzhko's Novel The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

The article deals with the construction of narratives about tragic historical events of the twentieth century on the territory of Ukraine in O. Zabuzhko's novel “Museum of Abandoned Secrets” (2009). Such narratives, being a part of contemporary Ukrainian culture, also become a part of commemorative culture, collective memory. The writer uses mnemonic narrative, works not only with the consciousness, but also with the subconsciousness of the characters, thus actualizing the previously silenced events of common and family history, as well as personal – all of them turn out to be connected with each other by invisible strings. The traumatic experience of the past, transmitted through personal and post-memory, can deform memories, not reconstructing but deconstructing them. Through the prism of such deconstruction, the novel depicts the famines of 1932-1933 and 1947, the activities of the UIA during and after World War II, the Volyn Massacre, and others – some of the most silenced events in official Soviet history. It is concluded that the traumatized consciousness transforms the memory of the significant past in the novel in such a way that memories of it become a trigger for a new round of struggle for national identity.