Symptom of the Loser and the Melancholy of the Post-Soviet Generation

Abstract

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, trauma has become a central concept for human consciousness and post-traumatic experience can be considered a defining feature of post-Soviet literature. The entire history of the twentieth century is associated with deeply traumatic events — the Holocaust, the Second World War, Hiroshima. At the same time, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist system is also increasingly conceptualised as a trauma, which, on the one hand, erases memories of the totalitarian past and which, on the other, has a social and cultural impact, manifesting itself in the body, language and subjectivities of future generations. Studies of trauma suggest that trauma has to be thought and talked through, otherwise it transforms into a spectre — one that pursues, provoking excessive behaviour and melancholy. This chapter analyses the trans-generational effect of post-Soviet trauma in contemporary Ukrainian literature, particularly via the symptoms of ‘loserdom’ and the ‘sick body’.