ABSTRACT
Literature has always explored the possibilities and limitations of memory. Odysseus’ return to Ithaca after 20 years away is as much about the uncertainty of recognition as it is the story of the hero’s homecoming. In the twentieth century, Anna Akhmatova’s masterpiece Poem Without a Hero (Poèma bez geroia, 1965), begun during the Stalinist period, evoked the ghosts of a lost generation of Russian modernists. In our own century, Karl Ove Knausgård’s six-volume memoir-novel My Struggle (Min kamp, 2009–11) mines memory to record the minutiae of the 40-something author’s life-to-date. Throughout the centuries, literary works have evoked, provoked, ransacked and interrogated memory in myriad ways.
