engleski

On Mothers, Daughters, and Decentered Subjectivities: Oksana Vasyakina and Ivana Bodrožić in Dialogue

This paper aims to establish a dialogue between two novels by leading Russian and Croatian poetry and prose fiction authors, Oksana Vasyakina (b. 1989 in Ust Ilimsk, former Soviet Union) and Ivana Bodrožić (b. 1982 in Vukovar, former Yugoslavia). Their last novels, „The Wound“ („Rana“, 2021., in English will be published in 2023) and „Sons, Daughters“ („Sinovi, kćeri“, 2020., in English will be published in 2023), contemplate cultural and biological concept of motherhood from the perspective of their daughters-writers, and place these observations in extraordinary setting. The narrator of autofictional novel „The Wound“ travels through Russia with the ashes of her mother, who died of breast cancer, whereas the narrator in „Sons, Daughters“ is physically locked in her own body after the car accident that left her suffering from what is called in medicine „locked-in syndrome“. In both novels an image of a mother exemplifies a more benevolent version of the ancient myth of Medea (so powerfully described in earlier works by Tsvetaeva, Petrushevskaya and Ulitskaya). Mothers in Bodrožić’s and Vasyakina’s novels symbolically efface their daughters not only with their seemingly unconditional love, but also by transgenerational, matrilinear patterns of motionless and vulnerability of their gendered bodies. Moreover, for both authors narrative reflection of their relationships with their mothers becomes a way of cryptic autoreflexive travel through their own decentered subjectivities, female (trans)sexuality and invisibility in a world distorted by patriarchy. At the same time, their novels – aesthetically very sophisticated – propose that literature is a space of freedom: literature consists of unique, enigmatic, and ineffable works of art, but it also acts for a discursive reality which proposes „equally salient realities“ (Felski, 2008) of its connectedness with the social world. Both novels make use of literary language to illuminate that to fight social violence like a feminist in contemporary literature (Russian/Croatian) means to work with the national cannon and literary forms, and to creatively reinvent the language and stylistic features of literature. Despite thematizing social violence and uncovering that locked-in syndrome characterizes us both literally and metaphorically, both novels give their readers a sense of belonging – to someone else's destiny, and to someone else's experience, therefore cultivating empathy as a way of unlocking our lives and leaving its readers with an impression of (cautious) optimism

motherhood studies ; Ivana Bodrožić ; Oksana Vasyakina

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