Over the past few months, I have read a lot of Eastern European authors, specifically from Hungary, Poland, and Ukraine. I started with Hungarian writer Miriam Katin’s Letting It Go, a graphic memoir that details the lingering impacts on the Holocaust on Katin, especially as she visits Berlin to see her son then to go to a museum exhibit highlighting her work. I picked up Polish writer Magdalena Tulli’s In Red last year during a trip to Philadelphia, and I read it this spring. I picked up another Polish writer and Noble Prize winner, Olga Tokarczuk, in April. Her novel Flights drew me in with its interrelated stories and its poetic nature. All of this prepared me, in some way, to read Ukrainian writer Tanja Maljartschuk’s Forgottenness, a truly dreamlike and beautiful novel that uses Ukrainian history to examine memory, death, loneliness, and the stories we tell ourselves and one another.

Forgottenness brings together two interweaving stories, linking together an unnamed female narrator in the present who discovers, through a newspaper headline, the death of Viacheslav Lypynskyi, and Lypnskyi’s story from the early 1900s as he worked towards Ukranian independence from Poland and Russia. At its core, the novel is, as Tokarczuk puts it, “[a]n impressively sincere self-inquiry about identity” through the two characters, each residing in different temporal moments but joined together through their striving with questions of history, memory, and storytelling. These interweaving themes are what make works such as Forgottenness and Flights so engaging because they require us, as readers, to confront the ways that we construct meaning of the world, specifically through the historical narratives and myths that get passed down through the ages or completely erased from the historical record all together.

While most of the chapters in Forgottenness swicth back and forth from the unnamed narrator to Lypynskyi and back again, a few merge the two together. The opening chapter does this, and it begins with the narrator thinking about why she decided to study Lypynskyi and how their lives became so intertwined. The narrator asks herself, “Where did this story of ours com from? Who are we to one another?” She asks these questions because her and Lypynskyi never met in person, never shook hands, shared a meal, spoke to one another over coffee, or hiked together to Morskie Oko in the Tatra Mountains. The narrator details how her and Lypynskyi have different nationalities, Ukrainian and Polish respectively, how they never physically met, and other differences between them, but she also notes that they have “pointes where [their] lives intersected, two in space and one in time.”

The narrator and Lypynskyi intersected in space because he spent some time in her hometown after World War I and she made a pilgrimage to “his native village” to walk in his footsteps. Their paths merged in time because they were born on the same day in April one hundred years apart, him in 1882 and her in 1982. The latter intersection causes the narrator to think about time, specifically how the length of time increases with one’s longevity and the ways that thinking about time leads us to thinking about those who walked before us. She comments on the latter by stating, “And all the other times — those in which I haven’t lived, but which I know existed — grow over the little grain of my individual time, stratify it, encrust it.” The past informs our present, ensconcing us in its existence and guiding our directions.

When the narrator goes to visit Lypynskyi’s final resting place at his Zaturtsi estate, a villager asks her why she came and why she is so interested in Lypynskyi because while tourists occasionally stop by the museum she knows too much about Lypynskyi to be an “average tourist.” The villager shows the narrator a couple of pictures of Lypynskyi and asks her if she can identify some of the people in the photographs for him. She looks at the pictures and feels connected with him, part of the moment when the photograph occurred.

The villager tells the narrator that the Soviets demolished the Polish church and cemetery with Lypynskyi’s grave. He tells her, “a tractor driver from the collective farm — he passed away a while ago — razed the cemetery to the ground in exchange for some moonshine,” thus erasing Lypynskyi’s existence, apart from the headline that the narrator saw in the newspaper about his death. The narrator walks around the area, taking in the landscape but also thinking about the fact that his grave, like the graves of so many others, has been lost.

Walking around, the narrator says, “The abscence of Lypynskyi’s grave affected my perception in a strange way. It seemed as though his death had permeated the air. Sharp and stifling, it could be smelled, even tasted, bitter and unjust, full of distress, reproach, and blame. Deprived of a grave, his deah had willfully inscribed itself into the landscape. His bones, plowed through by a tractor in exchange for a bottle of moonshine, stirred underfoot, making the ground itself frightening. How do you tread on such ground?” With no marker, the landscape becomes haunted with the dead, as they shift and move beneath the surface. Lypynskyi’s presence remains in the atmosphere even though his body decays in the ground without a marker. The narrator cannot go to him, speak to him there. Instead, she must feel his elusive presence in the air.

This lack of a tangible marker and spot where Lypynskyi rests causes her to question how one can walk on such land with the knowledge of what lies beneath. It’s a question I ponder a lot when I go places, specifically when I travel somewhere like New Orleans and walk down the same streets and enter the same doors where enslavers marched enslaved individuals in chains then displayed them for buyers. I think about walking in rural areas, notably around Ernest Gaines’ land on False River and going back, through the quarters of Riverlake Plantation, to Mt. Zion Cemetery, surrounded by sugar cane fields, where Gaines and those who loved and wrote about rest for eternity.

When I go to these places, or elsewhere, I tread on ground where others have tread before. I may not know all of them or their stories, but I know someone was there, long before me, and someone will be there long after I perish. I will be connected, in some small way, with each of them. I commune with each of them like the narrator does with Lypynskyi. When I go to Screamer Mountain, I say hello to Lillian Smith and think about those who visited her and Paula on the mountain. I commune with them across time. What is time, ultimately, but a thread that wraps itself continually around the “little grain” getting bigger and bigger and containing everything that came before and weaving everything that will come after?

In the next post I will explore a couple of passages in Forgottenness that relate to history and time. Until then, what are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.