Chapter 5 The Controversial Truth: Postmemory and the Great Terror in Yulia Yakovleva’s The Raven’s Children and Eugene Yelchin’s Breaking Stalin’s Nose
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Abstract
As Marianne Hirsch points out, the notion of the inherited experience of war, dislocation and repatriation together with the traumas and anxieties involved in them captures events which have been uniquely “missing” from collective memory so far and thus assumes a return to that which has been ousted from the realm of collective consciousness. Such a tendency can be observed in the Russian writers’ ongoing search for the best ways to tell the traumatic past of the Soviet Union to children. Taking as an example two recent publications: The Raven’s Children by Yulia Yakovleva and Breaking Stalin’s Nose by Eugene Yelchin, this chapter explores the different kinds and modes of narration which shape the postmemory about the Great Terror in contemporary children’s literature. By reading the discussed texts through the lens of Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, the chapter gleans both the ways in which the authors are connected to the stories they tell and the differences between their narratives. Consequently, a clear split in their reception by their target readerships is revealed.