Landscapes of trauma: war, memory, and nature in Ukrainian literature about the Russian-Ukrainian war

Abstract

The article provides a comprehensive analysis of contemporary Ukrainian literature about the Russian-Ukrainian war through the prism of the concept of the landscape of trauma. The research material were the poetic and prose works of Kateryna Kalytko, Viktoriia Amelina, Artur Dron, Serhii Zhadan, Valeriі Puzik, Artem Chekh, Bohdan Kolomiichuk, as well as the anthology #Frontmen and other works that represent the war experience in Ukrainian culture of the 21st century.

The methodological basis of the work is the approaches of ecocriticism, memory studies, trauma studies, and testimony studies, which enable an interdisciplinary understanding of the interaction of war, space, memory, and artistic writing. The study hypothesizes that contemporary Ukrainian literature about the war represents natural and urban landscapes as carriers of individual and collective trauma and memory. The analysis of images of nature and space reveals another dimension of the experience of the Russian-Ukrainian war — ecological, affective, and existential — recorded in the artistic text. The article examines the creative understanding of war through landscapes of trauma, with an emphasis on the interactions among memory, war experience, and the natural environment.

The work’s results clarify the concept of the landscape of trauma as an artistically meaningful space, destroyed by war or violence, which becomes a carrier of psychological and ecological trauma, memory, and testimony. It is shown that, in the analyzed texts, the landscape of trauma is embodied by images of a wounded and devastated land, parallelism between the characters’ internal states and the environment, the metaphor of the land as a living being, and the combination of apocalyptic imagery with biophilia and empathy for the native land. Special attention is paid to images of home and land as part of the traumatized landscape, as well as to affective language and the bodily experience of space.

It is concluded that the landscape of trauma in modern Ukrainian literature about the Russian-Ukrainian war is an active meaning-making element that combines testimony, memory, and metaphor and provides an opportunity to comprehend both the traumatic, ethical, and ecological dimensions of war.