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Sat11 Apr09:15am(15 mins)
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Where:
Muirhead Tower 420
Presenter:
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Modern Russian society continues to grapple with historical trauma rooted in the Soviet experience, a theme that has become especially prominent in post-Soviet and contemporary Russian literature written by women. This paper examines how such generational trauma is represented in Liudmila Ulitskaia’s "Jacob’s Ladder" (2015), a family chronicle spanning four generations from the 1910s to the 2010s.
I argue that Ulitskaia stages trauma within a gendered framework: while the male protagonist Jacob is victimized by the Soviet state, it is his wife Marusya and daughter-in-law Amalia who bear the physical consequences of his unresolved suffering. Both endure difficult pregnancies followed by painful childbirths, and their children grow up estranged from their fathers. These bodily experiences function as metaphors for unprocessed trauma carried forward through female bodies. Yet the cycle eventually breaks: Jacob’s granddaughter Nora experiences a smooth pregnancy and a harmonious relationship with her son, signalling the possibility of reconciliation and healing.
The use of the body and metaphors of illness have a long tradition in Russian literature as means for critiquing the state. Ulitskaia extends this tradition by foregrounding the female body and its deformations by political and historical factors. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s concepts of postmemory and generational trauma, I read childbirth in the novel as a corporeal metaphor for the transmission of trauma—an act that simultaneously harms the mother and perpetuates historical pain, demonstrating how the unprocessed trauma of an individual extends to others and even to future generations.
In Ulitskaia’s prose, this framing underscores the strength and resilience of women, whose bodies emerge as both carriers of generational trauma and agents of its resolution. In doing so, I argue that Ulitskaia expands the symbolic meaning of female biological experience, portraying women as both constrained by their biological conditions and empowered by them.
