Abstract

This article is dedicated to the analysis of the functions of photographs in bridging the broken continuity of Ukrainian memory in Sofiia Andrukhovych’s novel Amadoka. Using a character’s war-induced amnesia as a metaphor, the novel connects the contemporary Russian-Ukrainian war with previous catastrophes: the Holocaust, the Stalinist repressions and the destruction of Ukrainian culture – the “Executed Renaissance”. Drawing on Aleida Assmann’s distinction between memory as Ars (collecting and storing) and as Vis (recalling and reconstructing), the article demonstrates how photographs preserve, activate and transform memory and function as mediators between past and present, as archives of trauma and as ethical sites of witnessing. The article analyses how questions of memory falsification, memory softening or memory replacing are challenged in the novel. Photography is shown to be a dynamic space where memory is preserved, reinterpreted and ethically shared between the one who remembers and the one who looks.