The Presence of the Past: Transmitting War Memory in Contemporary Russian YA Literature

This chapter follows the formation of war memory, which in the Russian context—specifically regarding Second World War or the Great Patriotic War—has always been viewed as sacred. In today’s situation, when military conflicts in the territories of former Soviet republics are part of modern reality, two predominant trends in Russian young adult literature can be identified: a revisionist historical narrative related to the Great Patriotic War and historically rooted works devoted to recent military conflicts. Using concepts such as Erfahrungsraum (space of experience) and Erwartungshorizont (horizon of expectations) developed by German historian Reinhart Koselleck, this chapter examines two contemporary novels: Natalia Volkova’s Multicolored Snow (Raznotsvetnyi sneg, 2018), which revises typical Great Patriotic War narratives, and Olga Gromova’s Valchen (Val’khen, 2021), about the lives of young Ostarbeiters taken from their homes to work in Nazi Germany.