Shards of Trauma: Modelling the Narrative about Poles in the Auto-Reflexive Dimension (Based on Oksana Zabuzhko’s Novel The Museum of Abandoned Secrets)

This article focuses on determining the specificity of modelling the traumatic narrative about Ukrainian-Polish relationships presented in Oksana Zabuzhko’s novel The Museum of Abandoned Secrets. In order to reveal the structure of the author’s “narrative code” (Igor Papusha’s term), an attempt is made to comprehend the mechanisms of the interaction between narrative categories and theoretical studies of trauma and examine how the structural parameters of auto-reflection are involved in creating a literary narrative about trauma. The analysis shows that the narrative discourse about Ukrainian-Polish relationships employs autoreflexive strategies of othering the Self as the Other. This creates the image of a collective victim and constructs the future perspective, which play specific roles in postmodern writing – they invert the central binary opposition, change the narrative optics, and convey a prognostic meaning. The interpretation angle presented in the article is expected to deepen and balance the perception of the literary version of the traumatic past of Ukrainians and Poles presented in Oksana Zabuzhko’s novel.