Works of fiction that evoke memories of the Soviet era have become very widespread since Ukraine’s declaration of independence in 1991, and they are still quite popular with readers. The most significant memories in these works, recounted in the first-person or as embedded narratives, mostly relate to people’s daily lives in various Ukrainian regions right after their forced inclusion in the USSR, Ukrainians’ lives during Soviet rule, and immediately after the fall of the USSR. The texts convey how political repression, wars, forced deportations, and the Holodomor (1932-1933) were all employed to put an end to the Ukrainian people’s resistance to the communist regime.

After 1991, the vast media coverage of these collective traumas prompted a process of reevaluating the tenets of national identity in which anti-Soviet attitudes mostly transitioned into anti-Russian ones. The aforementioned works portray the changes in Ukrainian identity during these social (and personal) transformations. Both the national identity and individual identities are often shown to be rooted in familial recollections or conceived as a result of the discovery of a fact or artefact from the past that hooks a protagonist and causes their reassessment of values. This reevaluation is linked to recent political and social developments like Russia’s continuing colonization attempts and its beginning of the invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Also, an integral part of the narrative of the works considered is permanent identity contestations – the struggle between incongruous views on the self-determination of Ukrainians.

On the basis of last scholarly studies, I will examine the ways of representation of trauma in the reviewed fiction, paying close attention to the oscillation between ideas of resiliency and reconciliation in the works against the changeable sociopolitical background of Ukraine in the various decades of the Independence period.