“I nipoti non nati”: la nascita e il fantasma dell’assenza. Riscritture dell’identità come anticipazione narrativa della storia del Novecento – Lebedev, Stepanova

Abstract

The paper questions the theme of identity and the configuration of historical time starting with two of the most significant authors of contemporary Russian literature, Sergej Lebedev and Marija Stepanova. Sergej Lebedev’s debut novel, The border of oblivion, is entirely based on the elaboration of post- memory, the dynamics of memory and oblivion experienced by the generations that inherit the most traumatic events of the twentieth century, entrusted to one style and a formal work that lead to an unusual icasticity and verbal splendor by probing the darkest recesses of history as the most painful twists of identity and self-recognition and by dwelling on images of shocking plasticity. At the antipodes of the epiphanic language of Lebedev’s prose, the same lump of historical events, theoretical openings, memorial and imaginative processes, distorted mournful phantasmagorias and rewritings of identity takes place in the material language of Marija Stepanova’s poetry, most of all expressed in two published poems in 2015 in a volume entitled Spolia, which originate from the events of the 2014 Donbass war between Russia and Ukraine.