Spaces of Collective Memory in Contemporary Russian Women’s Historical Fiction

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the connection between collective memory and fictional spatiality in three novels by contemporary Russian female authors: Ljudmila Ulickaja’s Zelënyj šatër, Elena Čižova’s Vremja ženščin, and Guzel′ Jachina’s Zulejcha otkryvaet glaza. These fictionalized versions of the Soviet past aim at overturning the idea of a unitary historical narrative, instead offering multiple ways of looking at the past, often from a female perspective that highlights the role of women in taking on responsibility for the maintaining of history and culture. Moreover, the novels represent an alternative cultural consciousness as a microhistorical fictional space, loaded with cultural and literary-historical meanings. Zelënyj šatër focuses on the literary geography of Moscow as an alternative to the everyday Brežnev-era reality; the alternative city is the locus for the transmission of an earlier cultural heritage in Moscow dissident communities. Vremja ženščin represents the transmission of an Orthodox worldview in post-war Leningrad in a female community and reflects on the cultural mythology associated with St. Petersburg/Leningrad. Zulejcha otkryvaet glaza focuses on a multicultural Soviet labor settlement in the Siberian forest, which echoes both old Tatar myths and the Central-European cultural heritage of the White Leningrad intelligentsia. In exploring alternative ways of looking at historical narratives and constructing possible fictional spaces, these novels aim at making sense of recent history from the perspective of the twenty-first century.