Generational memory and intergenerational interaction: reflections on Viktoriia Amelina’s “Dom’s Dream Kingdom” as a family saga

Abstract

This article explores the artistic representation of generational memory and intergenerational interaction in Viktoriia Amelina’s novel Dom’s Dream Kingdom. It aims to identify the specific features of generational memory transmission in the context of continuity and conflicts between different versions of the past; to outline the impact of traumatic experiences of previous generations on the formation of identity in subsequent generations; and to analyze generational memory as a factor shaping the transformation of the family saga genre in contemporary literature. The theoretical and methodological framework of the study draws on the works of Marianne Hirsch, Aleida Assmann, Agnieszka Matusiak, and Yaroslav Polischuk. The research employs methods from memory studies and trauma studies, as well as elements of historical and cultural analysis and close reading. The novelty of the study lies in interpreting V. Amelina’s novel Dom’s Dream Kingdom as a family saga and in examining the tensions and controversies of generational memory through the characters’ experiences and their intergenerational interactions.

The results of the study demonstrates that the novel under analysis represents the author’s reinterpretation of the family saga genre, in which the concept of Home is fundamentally redefined. V. Amelina depicts not a departure from the parental Home or a return to it, but rather the process of acquiring, or the impossibility of acquiring, a Home by different generations of the Tsilyk family. The causes for the family’s amnesia and the absence of both a physical and a symbolic Home are traced to the totalitarian practices of the USSR and to the generational rupture resulting from the disruption of the transmission of conditionally positive generational memory. The members of the Tsilyk family rarely communicate with one another about the past, lack shared traditions, and are unable to construct a coherent narrative of their identity. Instead, the novel reveals a clear intergenerational transmission of traumatic experience, which manifests itself indirectly: through speech and silence, patterns of behavior, dreams, alienation from one’s own history, and the appropriation and reworking of other people’s stories.

1. Amelina does not offer a model of memory healing or the restoration of a coherent family narrative in her novel. Instead, she foregrounds the problems of generational memory and the tabooing of traumatic experience, the tensions between private memory and official history, the plurality of versions of the past within different families, and the circulation of descendants’ memories within the shared urban space of Lviv. This situates Dom’s Dream Kingdom within the context of contemporary Ukrainian prose, which functions as a kind of archive that gathers and processes diverse voices of the past and traces the patterns of their influence on identity and the present of successive generations.