FORGOTTENNESS
Tanja Maljartschuk
Translated by Zenia Tompkins
A layered exploration of Ukrainian identity that painstakingly traces parallels between the historical and the contemporary, the collective and the individual, between the stories of two people born on the same day, a century apart – culminating in a profound double portrait.
The narrator, a writer grappling with her growing anxiety and obsessive thoughts, becomes fixated on Viacheslav Lypynskyi (1882–1931), a once-significant figure in the struggle for Ukrainian independence who has since fallen into oblivion, into the gaping mouth of Time.
As she plunges into her nation’s history to come to terms with her own, we slowly uncover the complex relationship between time, memory and identity to confront the question – what does it mean to remember?
Bullaun Press (publisher’s description)
About the Author & Translator
Recipient of this year’s Theodor Kramer Prize for Writing in Resistance and Exile (2023), contemporary Ukrainian writer Tanja Maljartschuk has published three novels and several collections of short prose and poetry. She now writes in German as well as Ukrainian and her work has been translated into more than ten languages.
American literary translator and founder of the Tompkins Agency for Ukrainian Literature in Translation (TAULT), Zenia Tompkins’ previous work includes the English translation of Maljartschuk’s A Biography of a Chance Miracle (2018).
(Photo: Michael Schwarz)