Reincarnation of Memory, or Portrait of Generation in the Interior of Time: “Children of the Milky Way” by Dokiia Humenna

Abstract

The paper analyzes the tetralogy of novels by Dokiia Humenna “Children of the Milky Way” in the context of the postwar Ukrainian diaspora fiction. The researcher raises such issues as the genre nature, narrator’s position, problem of the relationship between the categories of time and space, and the alternative autobiography of the novel. The process of writing the novel is considered as an attempt to normalize the writer’s own traumatic experience, caused by two decades of totalitarian terror and repressions. Dokiia Humenna’s novel is regarded in the context of such genres as family chronicle and ‘novel of generations’, which was updated in Ukrainian literature of the post-war period as an attempt to overcome the threatening tendencies of the entropy. At the same time, considering the fact that the novel was written on the verge of fiction and documentaries, the researcher suggested reviewing the work in the context of testimonial literature. It is emphasized that ideas of generational consciousness and generational dimension of time shape the novel, and the concept of generation is associated with categories of ancestry, memory, trauma, and identity. The generation of Ukrainian 1920s, which Dokiia Humenna considers as her own, emerges in the novel as a complex and heterogeneous socio-cultural phenomenon, represented by historical fi gures that became symbols and signs of their time (Mykola Khvylovyi, Mykola Zerov, and others), by literary stories of their alter ego, and fictional characters, sometimes based on several real prototypes. The myth of primordialism is one of the most important in the novel. It is represented by the archetype of a hamlet, a patriarchal micromodel of Ukraine, traditional in classical Ukrainian literature. In addition, the author of the paper raised a question about the presence of the writer’s alternative autobiographies in the novel, which might be the ways of constructing her own identity.