Yurii Lavrinenko’s memoir book as “living memory” that cultivates identity
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.28925/2311-259x.2026.1.7Keywords:
memory, memoirs, Holodomor, repression, war, consciousness, intentionality, reflections, resilience, memory studiesAbstract
The object of analysis in this article is the memoir My Garden in the Arctic and Other Memories by Yurii Lavrinenko (1905–1987), a well-known representative of the Ukrainian diaspora, intellectual, literary scholar, and publicist. Published in 2024, this book consists of several parts that differ in genre (“My Garden in the Arctic”, “Black Blizzard”, and “Other Memories”), united by the author’s personality and his understanding of the specifics and functions of memoir writing and his values. The part that gave the book its title remained in manuscript form for a long time and is being published for the first time. The scientific novelty of this publication, in which elements of a review are supplemented by literary analysis, is determined not only by the object, but also by the methodology of the study, which is based on the principles of memory studies (M. Halbwachs, P. Nora, J. Assmann, A. Assmann, etc.) and the theory of intentionality (F. Husserl, M. Merleau-Ponty, V. Marynchak, etc.). The purpose of this study is to examine the memoirs of the renowned Ukrainian intellectual Yurii Lavrinenko in the context of Ukraine’s past and present, identifying key ideas that, thanks to the author’s literary talent, can serve as axiological resources that strengthen our resilience during wartime.
The results of the study demonstrate that Yurii Lavrinenko accompanies his descriptions of his experiences with critical reflections, which often develop into profound existential musings and historiosophical analyses of the fate of the nation and the possibilities of the human spirit. The modus of memoir writing in this book is determined by the author’s intentionality — the focus of creative consciousness on its own content and the ability of this consciousness to produce axiologically significant meanings. The author appears in the mirror of his own memory both as an object of representation and as a subject who reveals to the reader the external causes of certain situations and circumstances, the internal motivation and consequences of certain actions, recreating the tragic experience of his generation. This preservation of the memory of the historical catastrophe that befell Ukraine during the Bolshevik terror allows the reader not only to empathically experience and intellectually comprehend this catastrophe, but also paves one of the paths to the spiritual self-realization of the nation.
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