Authors

Discussion

This paper investigates the rich approaches to memory and space in Elena Chizhova’s investigative novel, Gorod, napisannyi po pamyati (A City Written from Memory) (2018). This text is a key example of the trend in Russian women’s writing of the 2010s to provide an alternative vision of historical events by tracing and reconstructing family memory, specifically here the heroic state narrative of the siege of Leningrad. I explore the forms and constructions of space and the complex relationship between personal memories transmitted to the author through postmemory and state-imposed narratives, and demonstrate the blurring of the binaries of cultural and communicative memory. 

The overarching state narrative of heroism and redemptive suffering regarding the siege of Leningrad—a historical event that haunts her mother, grandmother, and Chizhova’s own memory through the fragments of family history that she pieces together—leads her to search for traces of the past in alternative spaces and places. I show how the radio—and its cultural significance during the siege—as a space that bridges the public and private; that enters the home and generates competition over memory. Further to this, I examine the site of the blockade museum in St Petersburg and the fragmented family memories that Chizhova collects, or inherits through postmemory, and brings to the museum exhibition, alongside her special sensitivity to the affective traces of the past. Finally, I attend to St Petersburg’s material culture more broadly as a palimpsest of (female) family memory that in lieu of adequate public commemorative spaces serves as one way to access and construct narratives that have not been incorporated into the national narrative.