NORMEMO spring 2022 guest lecture: The Solovetsky Palimpsest - On obscuring and retrieving traces of memory

Apart from huge territories not exposed to direct human activity, there are many places in Russia, which have undergone intensive transformations becoming landscape palimpsests with traces of different historical periods. Sometimes these sites may become chronotopes of memory or symbolic domain controlled by certain groups. In result, neutral palimpsest became a space of emotional conflicts, cooperations, negotiations or separations between different pasts. The Solovetsky Islands with their clearly outlined space by the sea, history dating back to the Middle Ages, and huge cultural, political and social transformations provoked by the acceleration of history in the 20th century, which provoked a few total exchanges of the island inhabitants, serve as a great example of the palimpsest memory landscape. During her lecture, Zuzanna Bogumil will discuss how in the post-Soviet times different groups through different space transformations and commemorative processes try to bring out or hide aspects of the Solovetsky past. The lecture will focus on vernacular commemorative activities, however, as different groups perceive Solovki as integral part of wider national, religious or global memory regimes, the lecture will also discuss how Solovki imagined in different narratives affect the real local transformations of the landscape.

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https://uit.zoom.us/j/66074251878?pwd=akZsOEN2YlMxeXRVdUJDYk9GSWlsUT09

Zuzanna Bogumił, PhD, works at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Her published works include The Enemy on Display: The Second World War in Eastern European Museums (Berghahn Books 2015); A time of persecution or a time of glory? The Russian Orthodox Church’s centenary commemorations of the 1917 Revolution, Religion, State and Society, (with T. Voronina, 2020); Gulag Memories: The Rediscovery and Commemoration of Russia's Repressive Past (Berghahn Books, 2018); Milieux de mémoire in Late Modernity: Local Communities, Religion and Historical Politics (with M. Głowacka-Grajper, Peter Lang, 2019), and the co-edited volume Memory and Religion from a Postsecular Perspective (Routledge 2022).