Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on November 17, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Anastasia de La Fortelle. Moderated by Mark Andryczyk.
Anastasia de La Fortelle proposes a new interpretation of Serhiy Zhadan's poetics, illuminating underexplored spatial configurations of post-Soviet cultural memory. Critical readings of Serhiy Zhadan's fiction have already emphasized its construction of nomadic subjectivity as both a form of resistance to the State (Deleuze and Guattari) and a strategy for overcoming the immobilization of melancholic subjectivity (Benjamin). Building upon these interpretations, de la Fortelle shifts focus to the concrete mechanisms through which nomadic subjectivity negotiates its relationship to the space.
De La Fortelle examines the nexus of traumatic experiences and spatiality in Serhiy Zhadan's prose, specifically "Voroshilovgrad" and "The Orphanage" - works whose protagonists are perpetually in transit - through the lens of Marc Augé's concept of "non-place" within a broader mnemotopological framework. Drawing upon Augé's anthropology of supermodernity, she argues that Zhadan's literary texts transform non-spaces of into loci of traumatic inscription and memory work through processes of systematic de/re-semiotization.
