Postmemory of Stalinist Repressions and the Siege of Leningrad in Olga Lavrentieva’s Graphic Novel Survilo (2019)

Abstract

Olga Lavrentieva’s graphic novel Survilo, published in Russia in 2019, and since then translated into a few languages, is one of the recent examples of harnessing the comic form to overcome historical taboo in contemporary children’s and young adult literature. The polemic around accounts of the Stalinist repressions in the 1930s and the period of the Leningrad siege that arose a few years ago in Russia’s cultural space shows that the quest for the truth about the past continues to haunt successive generations of Russian authors. Lavrentieva spins a narrative based on the history of her own family and, specifically, on the life of her grandmother, Valentina Survilo, whose childhood overlapped with the Great Terror with its atrocities and her adolescence with the blockade of Leningrad. The author of this article argues that although she writes about Stalinist atrocities, in her fragmented biographical graphic novel, Lavrentieva does not deconstruct the Soviet myth of the Great Patriotic War but weaves a narrative based on a particular version of postmemory. The author uses the framework of memory studies and focuses predominately on the textual layer of Survilo; however, the black-and-white vignettes composed by Lavrentieva add up to a formally and thematically thought-provoking book.