Two Contemporary Novels About the World War II in Their Contexts of the Transition Epoch
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v45.i2.01Keywords:
literature and war, Slovenian literature, Finnish literature, culture of remembrance, World War II, national identity, Rebula, Alojz: Nocturne for the Littoral, Oksanen, Sofi: When the Doves DisappearedAbstract
This article presents a comparative analysis of two contemporary novels about the World War II from the aspect of the relations of their motifs and themes with contemporary scientific historiography and memoirs about this war in their respective cultures. The Slovenian novel Nocturne for the Littoral (2004) by Alojz Rebula refers to the World War II in the Slovenian space, and the novel When the Doves Disappeared (2012) by the Finnish author Sofi Oksanen refers to the World War II in the Estonian space. The analysis is based on the application of New Historicism’s comparative analysis of “texts and contexts” to the theory of memory culture. It reveals a correspondence of motifs and themes in both novels with the historiographical and memorial contexts in the referential spaces of their narratives, in the sense of the emergence of the “new”, hitherto relatively repressed themes of the memory of World War II and its pronounced geopolitical consequences in both referential (re)nationalised cultural spaces. Nocturne forms one, The Doves a multiplicity of synthetically interwoven themes of inherited memory previously maintained mainly in the realm of communicative memory, creating an entangled memory. The comparative analysis leads to the conclusion that both novels participate in the contemporary transformations of cultural memory in the age of transition, i.e., in the cultural memory of the still recent past of the World War II and its geopolitical aftermath in the two cultural spaces of (re)constitutionalized nation-states as referential spaces of their stories.
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