The Holodomor and the Origins of the Soviet Man: Reading the Testimony of Anastasia Lysyvets(24 Ukrainian Voices)

Anastasia Lysyvets’s memoir Tell us about a happy life … (Skazhy pro shchaslyve zhyttia …), published in Kyiv in 2009 and now available for the first time in an English translation, is one of the most powerful testimonies of a victim of the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine. This mass starvation was organized by the Soviet regime and resulted in millions of deaths by hunger. The simple village teacher Lysyvets’s testimony, written during the 1970s and 1980s without hope of publication, depicts pain, death, and hunger as few others do. In his commentary, Vitalii Ogiienko explains how traumatic traces found their way into Lysyvets’s text. He proposes that the reader develops an alternative method of reading that replaces the usual ways of imagining with a focus on the body and that detects mechanisms of transmission of the original Holodomor experience through generations.

About the Author :
The editor: Dr. Vitalii Ogiienko studied history at the National Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv. Since 2008, he is researcher at the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance at the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine. He also taught at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. His papers have been published by, among other outlets, Krytyka and Ukraina Moderna. He has contributed a chapter to the forthcoming book Image, History and Memory: Central and Eastern Europe in Comparative Perspective (Routledge 2021). The authors of the forewords: Natalka Bilotserkivets is a well-known Ukrainian poet whose poetry has been translated into many languages. Dr. Serhy Yekelchyk is Professor of History and Germanic & Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria, Canada. The translators: Dr. Alla Parkhomenko has taught at the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute. Recently, she translated Viktor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom (Smoloskyp 2022). Dr. Alexander J. Motyl is Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, Newark, USA, and c0-editor of The Holodomor Reader (CIUS Press 2012).

Review :
“Through the eyes of a ten-year-old girl, Anastasia Lysyvets delivers a terrifying testimony of the famine-genocide organized by Stalin against the Ukrainian peasantry in 1932–1933. With the innocent cruelty and terrible lucidity of a child, she relates the killing by starvation of her family and neighbors. At the same time, this child-turned-adult exhibits magnificent courage in testifying against the forgetfulness, denial, and destruction of memory practiced by communist regimes, which force their victims to glorify their executioners and sing of ‘the radiant future of communism’. An essential account.”—Stéphane Courtois, Director of Research, CNRS, Paris “The 1932–1933 Great Famine in Ukraine is one of the most debated topics of Soviet history. Its epistemological importance goes beyond the discussion over the legal definition of this mass starvation under Stalin. The number of personal accounts of the Holodomor experiences remains—especially, in English language—rather limited. Thus, the publication of this book enriches the existing research field and provokes critical thinking as well as further investigation of the complexity of human responses and social as well as psychological consequences of the trauma of the Famine.”—Andrii Portnov, Professor of Entangled History of Ukraine, European University Viadrina, Frankfurt-Oder “Anastasia Lysyvets has produced a remarkable account of the everyday experience of the Holodomor. Her unembellished, direct, and descriptive prose draws readers into the lives of Ukrainian peasants trapped in a frightful world. We feel their anguish and empathize with their plight as much as we despair at their powerlessness.”—Alexander J. Motyl, Professor of Political Science, Rutgers University-Newark