World War II in Andreï Makine's historiographic metafiction : : "No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten" / / Helena Duffy.

• Superior document: Faux titre, Volume 419
• VerfasserIn: Duffy, Helena,
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden ;, Boston : : Brill Rodopi,, [2018]; ©2018
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Series: Faux titre ; Volume 419.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (340 pages).

Can it be ever possible to write about war in a work of fiction? asks a protagonist of one of Makine’s strongly metafictional and intensely historical novels. Helena Duffy’s World War II in Andreï Makine’s Historiographic Metafiction redirects this question at the Franco-Russian author’s fiction itself by investigating its portrayal of Soviet involvement in the struggle against Hitler. To write back into the history of the Great Fatherland War its unmourned victims — invalids, Jews, POWs, women or starving Leningraders — is the self-acknowledged ambition of a novelist committed to the postmodern empowerment of those hitherto silenced by dominant historiographies. Whether Makine succeeds at giving voice to those whose suffering jarred with the triumphalist narrative of the war concocted by Soviet authorities is the central concern of Duffy’s book.

Table of Contents

Introduction : Andrei Makine, the Great Fatherland War, the historical novel and (Russian) postmodernism -- Andreï Makine's novels as historiographic metafictions -- The hero of the Soviet Union : from victor to victim -- The war invalid : the samovar, the kommunalka and the docile body, or the dialectic of fragmentation and plenitude -- The Jew : between victimhood and complicity, or how an army-dodger and rootless cosmopolitan has become a saintly ogre -- The Blokadnik : a saintly prostitute or a heroic defender of Leningrad? -- Conclusions : writing history of World War II as a prophet.