Multidirektionale Assemblage

Multidirectional Assemblage: Boris Khersonskii’s Family Archive Boris Khersonskii’s most acclaimed and translated volume of poetry Semeinyi arkhiv [Family Archive] (2003/2006) consists of semi-fictional miniatures narrating the sufferings of the members of a Southwest-Ukrainian Jewish Family in the short 20th century. The speaker’s laconic tone invites less of a trauma-studies approach to the Stalinist Great Terror and the Shoah than a media-sensitive update of the formalist focus on material devices and the determination of meaning from below. This contribution proposes to read Family Archive as an assemblage of imagined material media (photographs, letters, auction objects) which trace multidirectional vectors of commemoration. It proposes the notion of directionality for resolving the undecidability of referential and a-referential readings of quasi-documentary poetry.