Narrative dominants of non-combatant writing in Iryna Slavinska’s essay collection “An Airy and Anxious Book”

Abstract

This article examines the narrative dominants of non-combatant (civilian) writing through the lens of Iryna Slavinska’s essay collection An Airy and Anxious Book (2023). This study stems from the need to comprehend civilian writing as a means of reflecting societal change and preserving collective memory under wartime conditions. The object of analysis is the set of narrative strategies that organise the collection’s essayistic discourse and shape representations of war, its everyday repercussions, and modes of articulating traumatic experience from a civilian perspective. The research aims to identify the key narrative dominants structuring Slavinska’s essayistic narrative and to clarify their role in depicting war as a prolonged condition of everyday life, a field of ethical dilemmas, and a catalyst for crisis-driven redefinitions of identity. Particular attention is paid to how narrative techniques communicate the experience of war without the author’s direct participation in combat. Methodologically, the study combines narrative analysis and discourse analysis with elements of trauma studies, feminist criticism, postcolonial / decolonial critique, and affect theory.

The results indicate the dominance of four narrative mechanisms: (1) fragmentation as a means of conveying the disjointedness of wartime experience; (2) narrative subjectivisation foregrounding civilians’ individual perspectives; (3) intertextuality connecting contemporary writing to Ukrainian literary tradition; and (4) ethical reflection articulated through sustained engagement with moral dilemmas in a wartime context. Together, these dominants form a distinct discourse that not only documents the realities of war but also proposes ways of rethinking human experience in extreme conditions. The study’s novelty lies in its systematic description of narrative dominants based on a single, coherent corpus (one essay collection), which strengthens methodological validity and prevents uncritical generalisation to the entire body of contemporary Ukrainian non-combatant writing. The article also reframes the role of non-combatant literature in shaping a national narrative, emphasising its importance for preserving cultural memory and resisting cultural trauma.