The Novel of Memory as in Instrument for Decolonization

Following the advent of decolonial theory in social and humanistic studies, on the one hand, and in post-Soviet studies, on the other, we submit the genre of the memory novel as a valid instrument of decolonization in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc. Taken as a world genre practiced in the last decades in cultures with a traumatic political past, the memory novel reached an understandable prominence in Romania and the Republic of Moldova, where it actively modified the interliterary dynamics and inspired a new generational and memorial turn. The paper studies a subgroup of the Bessarabian memory novel, the perestroika novel written by Vasile Ernu and Lilia Calancea, seen as an attempt to enact a «decolonial aesthesis» (Tlostanova 2017) in the post-Soviet space.