ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that the layered, tense archives of the post-war, post-mass-displacement city are just as potent as any other urban archive for the production of cultural memory. The framing metaphor of Ivanychuk's novel depicts the city as text, and the act of recovering that memory as reading that text, and also expresses the difficulties and responsibilities faced by the contemporary ‘archivist’. According to Katarzyna Kotynska, in the city, one of the ‘fundamental interventions’ that the contemporary writer has to make is the ‘decoding of the cultural palimpsest, or the literary appropriation of recovered/acquired/lost spaces and histories’. Attention to foreign inscriptions often begins with cemeteries, which constitute a key part of the mnemonic semiosphere of any city. In the wartime and post-war periods, cemeteries fell victim to violent erasure, with gravestones used as building materials and cemeteries put to alternative use.
