The guilty silences of history

Focusing on the work of Iurii Trifonov, the present essay analyzes the Soviet author’s prose, which originated from the categorical imperative to safeguard the memory of what happened during the years of Stalin’s Terror, and to make Soviet society – condemned for too long to experience forced amnesia – aware of the betrayal of its homeland perpetrated by the State. With a cryptic strategy, in contexts that apparently describe common events of Soviet daily life, Trifonov has taken on the task of addressing the problems of a complicated memory. He has also drawn a portrait of 1970s Soviet society, depicting their anxieties and obsessions, thus revealing the subtext of an uninterrupted history of repression, censorship, terror.