Time and Memory in Tanja Maljartschuk’s “Forgottenness”

Over the past few months, I have read a lot of Eastern European authors, specifically from Hungary, Poland, and Ukraine. I started with Hungarian writer Miriam Katin’s Letting It Go, a graphic memoir that details the lingering impacts on the Holocaust on Katin, especially as she visits Berlin to see her son then to go to a museum exhibit highlighting her work. I picked up Polish writer Magdalena Tulli’s In Red last year during a trip to Philadelphia, and I read it this spring. I picked up another Polish writer and Noble Prize winner, Olga Tokarczuk, in April. Her novel Flights drew me in with its interrelated stories and its poetic nature. All of this prepared me, in some way, to read Ukrainian writer Tanja Maljartschuk’s Forgottenness, a truly dreamlike and beautiful novel that uses Ukrainian history to examine memory, death, loneliness, and the stories we tell ourselves and one another.

Forgottenness brings together two interweaving stories, linking together an unnamed female narrator in the present who discovers, through a newspaper headline, the death of Viacheslav Lypynskyi, and Lypnskyi’s story from the early 1900s as he worked towards Ukranian independence from Poland and Russia. At its core, the novel is, as Tokarczuk puts it, “[a]n impressively sincere self-inquiry about identity” through the two characters, each residing in different…