The tale of a Polessia village, or on the folklorisation of the memory on World War Two

The article contains the analysis and interpretation of a collective reminiscing narrative of the inhabitants of Byelorussian and Ukrainian villages. This narrative presents the most atrocious aspects of the Nazi occupational policy during the Second World War from the point of view of «ordinary people». Parallelism is a distinctive characteristic of this narrative on the war and Holocaust documented in the process of many years of ethnographic field research. The stories of the Jews executed by firing squads and of the peasants burned alive by such squads have an analogical conceptual and axiological frame: they place Jews and peasants in the same category of innocent human beings and contrast them with «non-humans», that is Germans and their local helpers. Local memory preserved in folklore patterns enables an insight into a quite poorly known variant of representation of the World War Two: one that is vernacular, autonomous, independent of the Soviet and post-Soviet discourse of (non)memory.

Keywords

reminiscing narrative, Belorussia, collective memory, Second World War, Holocaust

Received

20.12.2018

Publication date

20.12.2018

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GOST	Engelking A. The tale of a Polessia village, or on the folklorisation of the memory on World War Two // Slavianovedenie – 2018. – Issue 6 C. 27-46 [Electronic resource]. URL: https://slav.jes.su/S0869544X0001763-2-1 (circulation date: 20.04.2024). DOI: 10.31857/S0869544X0001763-2
MLA	Engelking, A. "The tale of a Polessia village, or on the folklorisation of the memory on World War Two." Slavianovedenie 6 (2018):27-46. DOI: 10.31857/S0869544X0001763-2
APA	Engelking A. (2018). The tale of a Polessia village, or on the folklorisation of the memory on World War Two. Slavianovedenie (6), pp.27-46 DOI: 10.31857/S0869544X0001763-2

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