Ta rana wciąż krwawi. Międzypokoleniowy transfer traumy – Granica zapomnienia Siergieja Lebiediewa i Koniec Marty Hermanowicz

The present article is a comparative analysis of Sergei Lebedev’s Oblivion and Marta Hermanowicz’s In the End through the prism of the category of trauma transmitted between generations. The protagonists of both works struggle with the rejected past of their ancestors, which hampers their attempts at constituting their own identities. Oblivion and In the End are examples of autofiction, which on the one hand belong in the current of postmemory literature, in the sense given to the term postmemory by Marianne Hirsch, and on the other hand represent the generational novel. Dreams play a key role in each of the texts. In the End sees a granddaughter dream the dreams of her grandmother from the time she was exiled in Siberia, and this mingles the war past with the present of the political transformation in Poland. In Oblivion dreams give the narrator insight into the dark past of the Second Grandpa. In both works time is as if arrested by means of past events, and the protagonists, because of traumatic experiences to which they don’t have full access, remain immobilized in time with no chance of internal development.