ABSTRACT
Over the last decades, memory studies have played an important role in the reflection on historical continuity and the reconsideration of historical experience. Significantly, memory is always affiliated with individual experience and subjectivity. This chapter analyses how individual memory and narratives function within the global Soviet state narrative through the example of how an image of the Ukrainian nation state is shaped in the diary entries of Oleksandr Dovzhenko. Dovzhenko’s artistic persona split into two: on the one hand, he was a socialist realist, but on the other hand, he was an artist deeply rooted in the Ukrainian landscape and national traditions. The past was also framed by the Ukrainian national landscape. This reflection was private and self-centred, and frequently could not be articulated directly. Subsequently, Dovzhenko’s diary presents the voice of a former Ukrainian nationalist. Dovzhenko’s diaries presuppose a certain strategy, which always appeals to the suffering of the Ukrainian people, contrary to the Soviet heroic discourse.
