Monolatii, Ivan. Overcome grief. Mnemonic figures of (non)state literature. Ivano-Frankivsk: Lileya-NV, 2020. - 256 p.
In his book, historian Ivan Monolatii highlights the "mnemonic figures" - literary images through which Ukrainian writers of the 1930s-1980s, both from Soviet Ukraine and the diaspora, described the Ukrainian experience of twentieth-century history. Considering fiction as a space for creating national memory, the study continues the author's previous historical and literary research From Donetsk to Przemysl. How Modern Literature "remembers" Ukrainian Cities (Ivano-Frankivsk: Lileya-NV, 2019), which was previously reviewed by Krytyka (p. 11-12, 2019). Monolatii titled the new book Overcome Grief, reworking the Latin expression vae victis, "woe to the vanquished", because, according to the author, to comprehend grief is to overcome it.
The book is divided into eleven chapters, which present eleven pairs of "mnemonic figures" of Ukrainian literature, chosen according to the subject matter and time of writing of the prose works.
The review shows that the sequence of internally connected periods of Kysylyn's history is a sequence of decreasing levels of influence that emanated from it. They were extremely limited by the harsh anti-Ukrainian policies of the Second Polish Republic and the USSR and the Ukrainian state's indifference to its own territories in the last two decades.
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