MEMORY SPACE VS MEMORY OF PLACE (ANTHOLOGY “MARTIAL LAW”: CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN WAR)

The paper examines the anthology of essays “Martial Law” through the lens of cultural geography shaped during the Russian-Ukrainian war. It emphasizes the cultural and social ties between humans and the landscape. In cultural geography, the landscape functions as a cultural text, full of its own semiotics. The analysis compares the concepts of ‘place of memory’ as a real geographical space where people live, and ‘memory space’ as an imagined geographical site shaped by thought. The attention is focused on the phenomenon of war, which transforms interactions between humans and places, shifting them from the material realm to the symbolic one. Military actions destroy real geography, deprive a person of their own space, and turn it into a metaphor in the individual domain of memory. This shift results in a crisis of language, when traditional verbal means prove inadequate to describe the new military experience. The memory of a place exists in time, increases over time, and grows with the cultural memory of those connected to actual place. At the same time, the space of human memory is intertwined with language. A person gets acquainted with a space through the verbalization of specific places, integrating them into personal memory and experience. The relation of memory space and a place of memory involves the dichotomy of individual and collective memory, which marks the intersection of real and cultural geography. By summarizing individual unique experiences, we can observe how the Ukrainian mental map is shaped on both synchronic and diachronic levels. The integration of these levels into literary stories enables the existence of a single common space of collective memory. This memory ensures connection between generations in time and between Ukrainians in space. It creates the reality of a national identity that rises in defiance of the genocidal practices witnessed during the Russian-Ukrainian war.