Description
Book SynopsisAnastasia Lysyvets's memoir Tell us about a happy life... (Skazhy pro shchaslyve zhyttia...), published in Kyiv in 2009 and now available for the first time in an English translation, is one of the most powerful testimonies of a victim of the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine. This mass starvation was organized by the Soviet regime and resulted in millions of deaths by hunger. The simple village teacher Lysyvets's testimony, written during the 1970s and 1980s without hope of publication, depicts pain, death, and hunger as few others do. In his commentary, Vitalii Ogiienko explains how traumatic traces found their way into Lysyvets's text. He proposes that the reader develops an alternative method of reading that replaces the usual ways of imagining with a focus on the body and that detects mechanisms of transmission of the original Holodomor experience through generations.
Trade ReviewThrough the eyes of a ten-year-old girl, Anastasia Lysyvets delivers a terrifying testimony of the famine-genocide organized by Stalin against the Ukrainian peasantry in 19321933. With the innocent cruelty and terrible lucidity of a child, she relates the killing by starvation of her family and neighbors. At the same time, this child-turned-adult exhibits magnificent courage in testifying against the forgetfulness, denial, and destruction of memory practiced by communist regimes, which force their victims to glorify their executioners and sing of the radiant future of communism. An essential account. Stéphane Courtois, Director of Research, CNRS, Paris
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements; Endorsements by Scholars; List of Illustrations; Foreword: An Unforgotten Life: On My Mothers Memoirs; Preface: If Monuments Could Speak; Speak of the Happy Life; Commentary: Secrets of Death, Life, and Survival during the Holodomor.
