Scholarly record

AFTER THE EXILE: CULTURAL TRAUMA AND WAYS OF REVITALIZATION IN LATVIAN AND RUSSIAN LITERATURE OF LATVIA

A. Romanovska, Z. Badins, E. Badina

Abstract

Cultural trauma appears when a group of people feels they were made some horrible event experience leading to indelible traces in their collective consciousness, leaving an imprint in their memories forever and changing their identity irreversibly. During the 20th century, first in the Western societies but soon also worldwide, people constantly were stating that they had been traumatized by some experience, event, act of violence or frightening, or just by sharp and sudden and sometimes even not very hostile experiencing of social transformation and changes. Nowadays psychologists, anthropologists and historians write that not only experience of being in concentration camp was traumatic; such was also everyday life in a comparative freedom in the totalitarian societies. For decades the soviet censorship has been forbidding to discuss many of the problems connected with the traumatic and post-traumatic effect. One of the functions of culture is to overcome trauma. The aim is to restore the collective psychological health. In this case literary text can serve as a tool allowing if not to eliminate then at least to weaken the impact of cultural trauma. An individual experience of an author or the members of his family is transferred to the characters, thus, carrying out various scenarios of typologically similar situations. In this context, a comparative analysis of works of Russian and Latvian literature of Latvia is extremely interesting.

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