The man looks like a monster. The body and face of the Ukrainian soldier injured in Donbass in 2014 are disfigured, pitted with scars. Perhaps even more serious, but weighs: The man has completely lost his memory. When a woman appears in the hospital who introduces herself as his wife Romana and affectionately calls him Bohdan, he can’t remember anything. Is it just because of his injuries – or is he not married to this woman at all? Isn’t it his memories at all that she wants to implant in him? What is true and where does the lie begin?
Sofia Andrukhovych has written an intricate novel on the subject of memory, closely intertwining the past with the present. Her novel seems up-to-date in an almost uncanny way, even though her Amadoka epic was published in Ukraine in 2020. At the Munich Literature Festival last autumn, the writer gave an impression of this powerful opus, the first part of which is now available in German: “The History of Romana” (Residenz Verlag). “The past won’t let us go,” Andrukhovych said at the Literature House at the time. And she recently made it clear in a conversation with the SZ: “My novel is a foreword to what is happening today.”
Sofia Andrukhovych will soon travel to Munich again from Kiev. She will present her work in the Lehmkuhl bookshop on March 30 (as part of a Theme week “People at War” of the “Winter School Ukraine” of the LMU), supplemented by readings by the actress Magdalena Müller and moderated by Alexander Kratochvil: the literary scholar and translator not only translated the novel into German together with Maria Weissenböck, but also recently brought his knowledge of Ukrainian literature to Munich as a researcher at the LMU Department of Slavic Studies.
“Who am I?” asks the wounded soldier in the novel with a desperate croak. “Your name is Bohdan Kryvodjak. You were born in a small town in western Ukraine. You have a difficult relationship with your family. You are an archaeologist.” One could add to these explanations of Romana: You are a metaphor. Because the difficult relationship to the family in this epic can also be interpreted as the difficulty of an entire society in facing the trauma of its own history.
Sofia Andruchowytsch signing after her reading at the Munich Literature Festival 2022.
(Photo: Catherine Hess)
Andruchowytsch plays this out with the help of a number of characters, all of whom are supposed to be somehow related to Bohdan’s family history – and who, in their involvement in the catastrophes of the 20th century, cannot always be clearly assigned to the victim or perpetrator side. There is, for example, the father, a professor of facial surgery who cultivates a fatal passion and suffers from feelings of emptiness and pain without really being able to access his memories. And then there’s Bohdan’s mother, who eventually has had enough “of all the hide-and-seek, half-chewed and digested secrets” of that family history, “secrets that puffed up like all their dead ones,” she says. “For years, decades, maybe even centuries, they rotted alive, poisoned by their own silence, poisoned by the illusion that nothing had happened.”
Bohdan’s mother leaves her husband to finally be free from it all. Will she succeed? In any case, Sofia Andrukhovych attempts more than a trick with this novel, which seems like a painful trip into the collective subconscious: she tells of so much memory loss, of so much silence – and obviously not only wants to break it, but also banish it. A novel as an act of liberation.
Sofia Andrukhowytsch, reading on Thursday, March 30, 7:30 p.m. Lehmkuhl bookstoreLeopoldstraße 45, reservation requested ([email protected])