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Traumatised Decolonial Transit: Constructing Historical Narrative in Ukrainian Culture in the Early ХХІ Century

By Tamara Hundorova

Українську версію тексту можна знайти тут.

The postmodern era in the world ended suddenly and traumatically on September 11, 2001, although the premonition of its end was already in the air. As Ulrich Beck says, the end of the World Trade Center made Americans realise what it means to suddenly wake up one day in a strange new world of risk society.[1] In Ukraine, the postmodern era continued a little further, and its final apotheosis was the Orange Revolution. It was a great carnival prepared by the 1990s, and at the same time, the beginning of a revolution, the second act of which was the Revolution of Dignity. The sense of freedom and joy of nation-building, the possibility of playing with canons and narratives, filling in the blanks and creating an alternative history, exploring public space and acquiring new identities, and the belief that things would get better — all this fueled the Carnival era of the 1990s, even though poverty, crime, disorientation, and privatization excesses were all around. “There was more and more of external freedom, and we were discovering more and more resources of internal freedom,”[2] as one of the main agents of the carnivalised era, the Patriarch of the literary performance group Bu-Ba-Bu Yuri Andrukhovych, later stated.

The carnival dispersed from the main squares into alleys, provinces, and auditoriums, giving masks and roles, inviting people to play. It spilled over beyond the “spit-up margins of Europe” that Ukraine was imagined to be, and challenged the West to pay attention. “We changed our masks and locations every time: Kyiv, Lviv, Moscow, Gdansk, Edmonton, Venice, Koktebel, Świnoujście, Munich, Warsaw, Nizhniy Bereziv, Lemberg, Toronto, Kherson, Stanislau, Danzig, Innsbruck, Monachium, Luchesk, Zaporizhzhia — everything changed with a frantic speed, flashed and crumbled into splinters, into individual sparkles,”[3] Andrukhovych later confessed.

Members of “Bu-Ba-Bu”: Yuriy Andrukhovych, Viktor Neborak, Oleksandr Irvanets. Drawings by Yurko Koch and Olha Pohribna-Koch. First publication: “Kritika”, 2000, Year IV, Issue 7–8. P. (33-34)

The emblem of Carnival’s era became his first novel Recreations, published in the first issue of Suchasnist (lit. ‘modernity’), of which the cover features a portrait of the first president of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk. It was a shedding of the Soviet midges that grew into a body and a try-on of freedom. The Chrysler Imperial car, which for a long time had been abandoned somewhere in the garage of a Soviet general, became a metaphor for the post-totalitarian era and a prototype of the future, which, like a “god in a car,” would take on to the West, to the world of new culture, wealth, and glory. Everything was turning upside down, and the hooligan poetry–opera Chrysler Imperial was staged at the Lviv Opera House in 1992. Andrukhovych’s fellow Viktor Neborak said: “For me, it was a symbol of the Americanization of Ukrainian society, which finally saw the vector where it should move.”[4]

Despite this joy of a new birth, the farewell to the Soviet Empire itself was somewhat naive: there was no break from old ideologemes, and its main narratives remained unreconstructed. The anti-colonial rhetoric actualized by the Ukrainian dissidents, or the Sixtiers, sounded strong, but remained local, limited to the post-Soviet space, and not connected to the decolonization movement in the world. The revision of history was reduced to the creation of alternative national canons and narratives, consisting of major events such as the National Revolution of 1917–1921, the Holodomor, Babyn Yar, the Sixtiers, and the People’s Movement of Ukraine. The processing of memory and past historical traumas was healed by new rituals and monuments, where the Holodomor became one of the foundations of a new identity. We were still part of the post-Soviet world.

Alongside the emerging new literature, there was undigested, disguised socialist realism “without shores” and with a “human face,” somewhat tinged and edited, left without odious phrases about “proletariat,” “socialism,” and the words “Soviet” and “bourgeois nationalists”. It is noteworthy that, for example, the canon of new literature includes Oles Honchar, who is perceived as a dissident and whose key text is considered to be The Cathedral (1968), which is in fact strongly imbued with Soviet rhetoric and mentality. The inclusion of Honchar in the official Soviet canon is not even debated. Oles Honchar’s works are being republished, and the author himself, or even his editors and publishers, remove socialist realist phrases and ideologemes, leaving the entirely Soviet tone and narration unchanged.

In general, in the post-socialist period, the rewriting of socialist realist texts is reduced to erasing the stamps of the ideology. We can find such editing in both fictional texts and methods of interpretation. An example of a cosmetic rewriting of an official socialist realist text could be the 1959 version of the preface by Leonid Novychenko, which was edited in the 1990s by a “thoughtful” reader, who could be the publisher or even the author of the preface himself. The reprints of socialist realist works were prepared by cosmetically deleting certain phrases and words, adapting them to the new ideological conditions of the early 1990s.

In the 1959 copy of the first volume of Honchar’s collected works, which I borrowed from the Central Scientific Library in the 2000s, there are notable crossouts of certain words (I indicate them in brackets and highlight them): “The Banner Bearers, reveal Honchar’s ability to poeticise the best features of the new (crossed out–Soviet) man, to reveal the spiritual wealth of the ordinary worker and warrior brought up by (crossed out–our) social system.” Such consistent editing can be seen in other places in the preface, which indicates an attempt to edit the totalitarian discourse, for example: “Khoma Hayetskyi is a vivid national image of a modern (crossed out–Soviet) Ukrainian.”

And yet, at this time, Ukrainian postcolonial literature was born. Its landmark texts become Oksana Zabuzhko’s Field Studies in Ukrainian Sex, a novel that draws on the forms of Western postcolonial literature, and Yuri Andrukhovych’s Moscoviada, in which the author violently turns the symbols and ideas of an empire that seemed to be already dead upside down.

The post-totalitarian Carnival was grotesque and had a double face: in addition to the joyful mask, behind it was the demonic image of a possible dictator. Andrukhovych captured it in Recreations, noting that the carnivalized celebration of the Resurrection of the National Spirit in a provincial town and the military coup could be similarly staged, mirror actions.

At the beginning of the noughties, against a backdrop of political and social cataclysms, comes disappointment and, more importantly, a sense that something has gone wrong. It becomes clear that the carnival has an end, and that perhaps it is in fact an escapism – a getaway from reality and history itself. The poet and politician Volodymyr Tsybulko states: “This is not the same Ukraine,” because “This hopelessness is the clammy bread of reasons death and decay honor and rank of all the Ukraines, this Ukraine not the one”[5].

For many coming out of the post-Soviet era, the beginning of the new millennium was a time of doubt:

“I look at the walls
they are not white
I look down the well
they are waterless
I scream but the wind
tears up words
those words like burnt grass
the ashes of wine and guilt
this Ukraine is not the one”[6].

The era of the Maidans was coming. I finished my book Post-Chornobyl Library. Ukrainian Literary Postmodernism (2005) sometime before the Orange Revolution. I realized that I was writing it “from the end of postmodernity” and the end of the Carnival. I was trying to understand and record the era that was already ending. The Maidan was its culmination and at the same time its symbolic end.

– 2 –

Tamara Hundorova. Transit culture and postcolonial trauma (Kyiv : Vikhola, 2024). Photo by the Author.

The time that came along with the Maidans demanded a return to the present and the creation of a new history that was no longer connected to the post-Soviet mindset. There was an urgent need to talk about historical traumas, especially how they manifest themselves in the present, influence it, and cooperate with it. It was not a question of formulating a “complete” or “finished” national history, re-read and subjective to Ukraine, as it had been imagined earlier. The historiographical model changed dramatically: it was not about knowledge of the past, but about understanding the present from the point of view of history, when, according to Walter Benjamin, it is not a “transition” but a “stop of completed time,” the present, where “personal history” is written. “History is a subject of construction, the place of which is not homogeneous and empty time, but time filled with the present,”[7] the philosopher argued.

The combination of history and modernity promises the restoration of national memory, erased and crossed out by two empires, and at the same time a farewell to the so-called post-Soviet space, which includes all former Soviet republics, despite the completely different experiences of farewell to Soviet history in the Baltic states, Georgia, Belarus, or Ukraine. Among the hot topics that history has brought to the present is the topic of different Ukraines – “two” (M. Ryabchuk)[8] or “twenty-two” (Y. Hrytsak)[9]. It also seemed that the carnival left a “merry cemetery” with many problems and unresolved issues. It also becomes clear that history can be falsified, rewritten, erased, and constructed anew.

The return to modernity coincided with the emergence of a ‘world of risk’ and a premonition of catastrophe. It did not yet have any temporal, spatial, or social specificity, but it denoted the ‘contradictory reality of the possible’[10]. This anxious existence within a threatened world, as well as the role of the media in shaping this image of the world, was clearly demonstrated by the famous Ukrainian poet and member of the Sixtiers movement Lina Kostenko in her Notes of a Ukrainian Madman (2010). The main mechanism for the deployment of such catastrophic thinking is the transformation of the catastrophe into a spectacle, and the recipient into a witness. The world at the beginning of a new millennium as a whole is perceived as a permanent catastrophe: “There is a disaster, a terrorist attack, a methane explosion. There is a military plane that has accidentally hatched a bomb. Some maniac shot passers-by. An unknown infection broke out there. A bus with children was taken hostage. A mountain cable car has collapsed in the Alps. In Tokyo, a cult gassed people in the subway. In Chervonohrad, schoolchildren trampled each other on the stairs after the movie Armageddon,–… this is no longer a chronicle of events, it is a horror documentary.”[11]

The existence of risk in society and the premonition of a possible catastrophe reminds us of Walter Benjamin’s image of the “angel of history”. Turning his face to the terrible past that he would like to collect, terrified by the vision of ruins and traces of the past catastrophe, he nevertheless rushes forward, caught by the winds of progress. The cultural consciousness at the moment of the “stopping” of history, which is called “modernity” and which reveals traces of historical traumas, including the premonition of a possible catastrophe, forms the type of culture that I call transit culture and with which I associate the phenomenon of Ukrainian culture at the beginning of the new millennium.

An essential feature of the model of transit culture in comparison with other cultural models is that it reflects the content and nature of existence in a situation of transitivity, where the point of reference, i.e., the stop, is the present. In general, the concept of transit culture is not a temporal index, but a type of culture. When we understand modernity not as a temporary transition in the sense of moving towards some complete or ideal fulfillment of history, but perceive modernity in terms of transitivity itself and feel inside the constantly established correspondence and dialogue between the past and the present, between the self and the other, between the body and the environment, then transit culture is a form of presence in a threatened modernity. Transit culture is also a special strategy for working through memory, which is also an act of historiography.

The Orange Maidan was a form of consolidation of the national community and had distinct signs of anti-colonial protest, but it ended in significant disappointment. The period between the two Maidans, or the two Ukrainian revolutions of the early twenty-first century, revealed past traumas and recorded different models of historical memory, primarily national–Eurocentric and nostalgic–Soviet–centric. I am interested in this period as a time of cultural paradigm shift: the carnivalized farewell to the Soviet past is over, postmodern decentralization and deconstruction have left behind scattered films, pictures, fragments, and fetishes of ancient and recent history. The time has come to build historiographical narratives out of fragments, films, and paintings, out of the remnants of the memory erased by the era of colonialism and totalitarianism.

Transit culture actualizes the traumas of the past that permeate and deform the body of the present in the form of symptoms. I am interested in the symptoms that reveal the presence of trauma, as well as the places where these symptoms manifest. These places are the body, memory, and language. Symptoms are emotionally colored in tones of melancholy, resentment, and nostalgia; they unfold as performances and carry messages about the work of memory and imagination aimed at overcoming trauma.

– 3 –

In terms of transit culture, I am particularly interested in the models of new decolonial historiographical narratives that are being developed in Ukrainian literature at the beginning of the new millennium. This is not a linear construction of historical continuity, but labyrinths and layers of different times, generations, and personal stories. In addition, they are rather negatives of history, files, and often insights of memory, of irrational and mystical “knowledge”.

The construction of history acquires a bizarre and mythologized color in the noughties. Many works at this time are devoted to historiography and the intergenerational trauma. Oksana Zabuzhko’s novel, or, as the writer herself interprets it, a family saga, The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (2009) revolves around the story of three generations. The story that returns to the past of her parents’ sins, recreates Maria Matios in her novel Sweet Darusia (2004). Yevhenia Kononenko devotes her detective story Nostalgia (2002) to unraveling the story of his parents during Soviet times, which leads to their suicide and binds the children together with the mystery of the past. Lina Kostenko addresses the past family history against the backdrop of Ukrainian history at the beginning of the new millennium in her novel Notes of a Ukrainian Madman (2010). A little later, real historical epics were born: The Eternal Calendar (2019) by Vasyl Makhno, Beechland (2019) by Maria Matios, and Amadoka (2020) by Sofia Andrukhovych. Chronologically, they cover several centuries, mark local and geocultural communities on the map, and recreate the generational and multi-ethnic history of the peoples who inhabited Ukraine.

These and other sagas and narratives fill in the gaps, compose of deleted fragments, and rewrite history by including entire periods and generations that were silenced or destroyed. The non-linear construction of history is becoming one of the models of transit culture. Historical memory breaks down into a number of local memories, forming a dialogically complex and diverse picture of parallel, reverse, and alternative histories. This results in a way of archiving memory that M. Hirsch calls postmemory and associates with album–making, which is the collection and assemblage of images and objects of the past based on old photographs, stories, and objects.

O. Zabuzhko’s novel The Museum of Abandoned Secrets appeals to the image of a “panorama” (panoramic vision) and three allegories of postcolonial historical narrative: a museum, an archive, and a secret. The writer reduces the concept of history to a Ferris wheel, from the height of which one can see for one brief moment a “glimpse of the panorama” – a plot pattern that gives the belief that “everything around” is based on threads of connections and memory: “Through her, Daryna Hoshchynska, hundreds of them, invisible to the eye, flow every minute into someone’s life, but it is impossible to see and hold that pattern.”[12] History in this way – as a great axial time, as a wheel of return, as an organism – “strings together people separated not only by years, generations, but by centuries”[13].

A museum involves the demonstration or display of the stories themselves. An archive refers to documents that record a real or falsified biography. Secrets refers to the silenced and hidden pages of history. All these stories gather around Daryna, a journalist who works on television and hosts a program about the hidden secrets of a silenced Ukrainian history. It is Daryna who finds a photograph of the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) rebels among archival materials, in which the image of a single woman draws her attention and starts a chain of events. On the margin of a book in her library she also finds a random entry by her father, which allows her to understand his dissident history.

The paintings of the tragically deceased Vlada, which have a magical significance, also become part of the archive. Quite archival turns out to be story of the old KGB officer’s adopted son, who is revealed to be the child of a former OUN-member. Being a decolonial narrative, the novel is polemically oriented against the media and consumerist interpretation of national history. The heroine of the novel, journalist Daryna Hoshchynska, strongly denies the perception of the past through a heroic–romantic “story with several characters (parents, children, lovers, friends, associates, who else?)”[14]. Instead, in her almost cinematic perception, history is seen as a virtual reality programmed by a museum of hidden secrets, and is equated with a gigantic, immeasurable “archive of footage that wants to be reviewed”[15]. The tapes can be viewed randomly, not chronologically, back and forth, here and there. This virtual model is based on the principle of mutually reflected time mirrors: the 1940s look back at the 2000s, the 2000s look back at the 1940s, and all three generations are intertwined with chains of mystical associations and connections, like Adrian’s dreams or Darka’s hallucinations.

In fact, the author’s idea for the Museum of… is quite ambitious: Zabuzhko wants to show that in decolonial history, the real history is not a documented factual framework or a glamorous “story,” but an inner, almost mystical knowledge that means involvement. That is why the protagonist of the novel irrationally knows the truth about the past from the very beginning and therefore states: “I know it without the SBU archives, from within, by feeling, by my own life – Artem’s basement with its rickety table, Adka, Vlada, love, dreams, the blind and unerring method by which I know the truth about my father’s death.”[16]

The writer resorts to several strategies to reconcile this knowledge within the framework of the brooding novel with its particular chronotope of the “museum of abandoned secrets.” There are several of these strategies: political science essays, parallel histories, alternative counterhistory, media projects, and autobiography. But perhaps the most important strategy for constructing a decolonial novel is mystical knowledge, which is eroticised and comes in the “moment of accidental orgasm.” In the end, if we use F. Ankersmith’s statement about the elevation of historical experience through its aestheticization, then in O. Zabuzhko’s novel we have an example of erotically sublimated historiography.

The gnostic and erotic knowledge–for–itself that Zabuzhko is so interested in binds together the entire cycle of national history, reflected in the personal destinies of different people. History in general is identified in the novel with the female body, and the fate of the discoverers of “abandoned secrets” — what lies hidden in the womb as someone’s truth about life — has an erotic and corporeal nature. The Gnostic truth restores the gap between generations, because it is revealed not rationally but bodily to grandchildren, not children, because it takes a “hook of one generation. Children are not available for this, but grandchildren are just right, two generations are exactly the right distance: systole–diastole, rhythmic breathing, the pulse of progress […].”[17]

What we have in decolonial novels is not a linear rational idea of the history of the family, but a circle of eternal return. It bridges the gap between generations that were violently interrupted by a totalitarian machine that destroyed and devoured the entire dynasty. In this way, history, as a great axial time, as a wheel of return, as an organism, “strings together people separated not only by years, generations, but by centuries.” The bridge between the past and the present is a special, existentially magical presence, which is formed, in particular, through piercing epiphanies and insights in which distant history is replayed on film and turned real, becoming part of the present life of the characters in Zabuzhko’s novel.

Translated by Sophie Schmäing.


Notes

[1] Ulrich Beck. World at Risk. Translated by Ciran Cronin (Polity Press, 2007), 68.

[2] Yuri Andrukhovych. “Hail, Chrysler!” (1994), online: https://zbruc.eu/node/89015 [last accessed 24.06.2025].

[3] Andrukhovych. “Hail, Chrysler!”.

[4] Yevhenia Nesterovych, Poetic Opera with a Car Name, (2015), online: https://zbruc.eu/node/35458 [last accessed 24.06.2025].

[5] Volodymyr Tsybulko. Mein Kaif. A Book for the People (Kalvaria, 2000), 62.

[6] Tsybulko, Mein Kaif, 63.

[7] Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in: Walter Benjamin, On the Critique of Violence (Grani T, 2012), 312.

[8] Mykola Ryabchuk, Two Ukraines, online: https://www.iwm.at/transit-online/ukraine-one-state-two-countries-with-comments [last accessed 24.06.2025].

[9] Yaroslav Hrytsak, ‘Rethinking Ukraine.’ What Does Ukraine Think? (European Council on Foreign Relations, 2015), 38–40.

[10] Beck, World at Risk, 9.

[11] Lina Kostenko. Notes of a Ukrainian Samashed (A-ba-ba-ga-la-ma-ha, 2011), 10.

[12] Oksana Zabuzhko. Museum of Abandoned Secrets (Fact, 2009) 128.

[13] Zabuzhko, Museum, 128.

[14] Zabuzhko, Museum, 32.

[15] Zabuzhko, Museum, 177.

[16] Zabuzhko, Museum, 719.

[17] Zabuzhko, Museum, 708.


About the Author

Tamara Hundorova is a principal researcher at the Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; an associate fellow at GURI (USA) and dean of the Ukrainian Free University (Germany). She is currently a visiting professor at Princeton University. Hundorova is the author of many books, including Transit Culture and Postcolonial Trauma (2024); Lesya Ukrainka. The Books of Sivilla (2023); The Post-Chornobyl Library: Ukrainian Postmodernism of the 1990s (2019); Transit Culture. Symptoms of Postcolonial Trauma (2013); Kitsch and Literature: Travesties (2008); Franko and/ or Kamenyar (2006); Femina melancholica. Gender and Culture in Olga Kobylianska’s Gender Utopia (2002), as well as numerous publications on modernism, postmodernism, postcolonial and gender studies, nuclear criticism, and the history of Ukrainian literature. She has taught at Harvard University (USA), the University of Toronto (Canada), the University of Greiswald (Germany), the Ukrainian Free University (Germany), the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, the Ukrainian Catholic University, and the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Ukraine). She is a Fulbright Scholar (1997 and 2009), as well as a recipient of the Yacyk Distinguished Fellowship (HURI, 2009), USA, 2005), Shklar Fellowship (HURI, 2001-2002), Foreign visitors fellowship (Hokkaido University, 2004), MUNK School of Global Affair fellowship (University of Toronto, 2017), Philipp Schwartz-Initiative of Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (University of Giessen).


Other recent articles in the TRAFO series Rethinking East European Studies in Times of Upheaval:

Yuliia Koniva, Dichotomy of Methodology Between the American and the French Approach in Frontier/Border Studies: Sloboda-Ukraine in the 18th Century, 19.06.2025.

Svitlana Pidoprygora, Ukraine and Ukrainians in the Panels: Global Comics Perspectives on the War, 10.06.2025.

Hanna Rudyk, Liminality and Museums in Ukraine: the Khanenkos’ Case, 27.05.2025.


Citation: Tamara Hundorova, Traumatised Decolonial Transit: Constructing Historical Narrative in Ukrainian Culture in the Early ХХІ Century, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 08.07.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/59827


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (July 8, 2025). Traumatised Decolonial Transit: Constructing Historical Narrative in Ukrainian Culture in the Early ХХІ Century. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved March 9, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14ap0


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