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Abstract

Commenting on a visit to Ukraine from 2014, acclaimed Croatian author Slavenka Drakulić notes how shame and "repression in the form of silence" 2 affected the transmission of important knowledge about the harms of the old propaganda regime, especially among women, even within the family. This meant, according to Drakulić, that the young generation, who were the main promoters of social change through pro-European protests, "had to start learning about the past from scratch, because the battles they were fighting were against the remnants of the old totalitarian regime" 3 . Now, when the battle fought against cultural and memory erasure has turned into a war taking the toll of so many lives in Ukraine, the importance of preserving the memory of trauma and resistance in Eastern Europe cannot be overstated. This special issue of Dacoromania litteraria is intended as a contribution to this effort of preservation and reconstruction of cultural memory.We propose to look at women's works of Life Writing as enclaves of experiential testimony from an eventful, scarring, and unstable century (covered in thirteen articles with a focus spanning from the early 1900s to the twenty-first century) in a conflict-ridden territory (Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe). In interpreting these works, we gauge the social progress that the twentieth century as a "century of women" 4 has achieved against all odds (women's agency), the depth of the traumatic experience that women have overcome or are still working through (women's persistence), and the recovery (both in the sense of personal psychic healing and of salvaging cultural memory) that is going on or is still left to do (women's legacies). As we explain further, we see in Life Writing an essential component of cultural memory, with a unique ability to create an archive of counter-voices to official memory cultures. We use 1 Laura Cernat would like to thank the FWO (Flemish Research Foundation) for its generous support of her project (1240823N), which made this work possible.