The article considers a range of literary texts about the war in Donbas and argues that one of the primary representational strategies employed by Ukrainian writers has been the use of “parapolemics.” The article operates with Kate McLoughlin’s definition of this term as a focus on the “outskirts” of armed conflict, but also relates the idea to concepts drawn from trauma studies. While, on the one hand, the use of parapolemics may be a way of avoiding direct representation of wartime violence and death, the opportunities it affords are extremely valuable: focusing on the “backstage” of war and eschewing direct representation of violence allows writers to explore otherwise marginalized, and highly complex, dimensions of wartime experience. At the same time, connecting the parapolemic approach to ideas taken from trauma theory, particularly relating to empathy and responsibility, allows us to understand how parapolemics provide a way of reflecting both on the ethics of representing war and the of self-other relationships that arise in wartime.
A comparative analysis is made of the evocation of urban memory in the work of the Polish author of detective fiction Marek Krajewski and the leading Ukrainian writer of postmodernist fiction and popular historical publications Iurii Vynnchyuk. The cities that form the focus of the work of these writers, Wrocl / aw for Krajewski and L′viv for Vynnychuk, both experienced massive population shifts after World War II, meaning that the postwar populations had little or no memory of the pre-war cities. The legacy of this disjunction can be felt to this day. This study demonstrates how both writers re-create a sense of memory through a number of similar memory strategies and concludes that the recreation of memory in these writers' work can be understood as what Marianne Hirsch calls postmemory, yet that this is postmemory removed from the traumatic context of Hirsch's original concept. It is also argued that these writers demonstrate that an effective 'cultural memory' can be produced in a situation when 'communicative memory' is lacking, through an imaginative and accessible representation of the ostensibly inaccessible past. This is achieved through the utilization of mass cultural forms, which some theorists of urban memory see as conducive only to forgetting.keywords Vynnychuk, Krajewski, postmemory, cities, Poland, Ukraine, literatureTo say that memory and place, and in particular memory and the city, are closely linked is to say nothing new. Freud for one flirts with the comparison of the individual memory to the archaeological layers of Rome; though he remains unconvinced that the analogy works completely, his idea nevertheless raises the questions of the persistence of the past in both the urban fabric and the individual psyche, and is often cited by theorists of the city and memory. 1 Walter Benjamin's interweaving of urban
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