Oksana Zabuzhko: on Ukraine’s past and present

Much of Ukrainian history has been misunderstood or overlooked. In conversation with Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko about her historical novel The Museum of Abandoned Secrets. How are traumatic events in Ukraine’s past remembered – or deliberately silenced? And how do unresolved histories continue to shape lives and identities decades later?

With the Dutch translation of The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, we revisited this monumental family saga spanning six decades of Ukrainian history — from its Soviet past to its hesitant steps towards independence and democracy in the 1990s. Written in 2009, at a time when the future of Ukraine looked bright, but with the war in its 5th year and Russia’s continuing effort to erase Ukrainian culture, The Museum of Abandoned Secrets has never been as urgent.

Oksana Zabuzhko , Ukraine’s leading contemporary author, was born in 1960. She graduated from the department of philosophy of Kyiv Shevchenko University in1982, and obtained her PhD in philosophy of arts in 1987. After the publication of her novel Field Work in Ukrainian Sex (1996), later named ’the most influential Ukrainian book for the 15 years of independence’, she has been living as a free-lance author. She is Vice-President of the Ukrainian PEN. Zabuzhko lives in Kyiv.

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