ABSTRACT
What happens when the memories of Soviet repression and displacement travel across spatial, linguistic, and cultural borders? This chapter discusses the question of traveling (post)memory by investigating texts on the traumatic family histories and lived experiences of the Soviet past from a transcultural perspective. The focus is on works written by two Soviet-born writers living outside Russia: Katharina Martin-Virolainen’s (b. 1986) Im letzten Atemzug: Erzählungen (“In the Last Breath: Stories,” 2019) and Anna Soudakova’s (b. 1983) Mitä männyt näkevät (“What the Pines See,” 2020). Both texts address the traumatic memories of the 1930s’ Soviet Terror, discussing how the past becomes an integral part of the present. This writing of the traumatic family past is approached with the help of the concepts of postmemory and cultural and traveling memory. It is suggested that the texts aim to address and make visible the intricate links between the transcultural mediation of traumatic historical experiences and the multilingual and multicultural identities of their writers. In so doing, they seek to draw attention to the multiple sites, languages, and identities connected to the traumatic memories.
