Schlagwort: Erinnerung

This blog post reviews Dinara Rasuleva’s Travmagochi (2025), a novel at the crossroads of fiction and autofiction, engaging deeply with the themes of memory and oblivion. It explores how language, religion, and the city of Kazan in the 1990s shape personal and collective memories of post-Soviet Tatar identity.

Dieser Blogbeitrag rezensiert Dinara Rasulevas Roman Travmagochi (2025), der sich, an der Schnittstelle zwischen Fiktion und Autofiktion, intensiv mit den Themen Erinnerung und Vergessen auseinandersetzt. Der Roman untersucht, wie Sprache, Religion und die Stadt Kasan in den 1990er Jahren die persönlichen und kollektiven Erinnerungen der postsowjetischen tatarischen Identität prägen.

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WHOEVER WANTS TO, LET THEM REMEMBER.

(KTO KHOCHET PUST’ POMNIT.)

(Dinara Rasulеva, Travmagochi, p. 20)

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To remember or not to remember – that is the question. But how can one recall, if the choice to forget has already once been made? The heroine of the novel, Dilyara, in Dinara Rasuleva’s Travmagochi (a title formed from the words “trauma” and Tamagotchi, the popular 1990s toy), lives in a parallel Berlin and finds herself working under a personified Death. Having once agreed by contract to forget her past, she nevertheless decides to reclaim it. And, despairing of remembering, she invents her past anew.

The book was published in 2025 by shell(f), a digital and small-press publisher of Russian-language fiction, essays, autofiction, and cross-genre writing that explores the universal human experiences of coming-of-age, (metaphorical and literal) migration, loss, vulnerability, and professional or scholarly life. The novel stands at the intersection of fiction, autofiction, and memory studies and, given the near absence of academic work on Tatar memory in the post-Soviet context, represents an important contribution to the discussion of memory studies in this discursive field.

Since the novel is not an academic text, I will attempt to single out and discuss its work with memory in relation to language, religion, and space, separating fiction and the emotional, auto-therapeutic layer from the analytical layer. I will try to show how Rasuleva, through her novel, remembers while openly calling this process the construction of memory about language, religion, and the city of childhood.

If I had to answer in a single word what this novel is about, I would say it is about memory, oblivion, and the return of memory through recollection. In the book, this is the painful process of reclaiming one’s childhood and youth, family, native language, and “one’s own” religion, all rejected after the multiple trauma of losing loved ones.

The theme of death runs as a red thread through the entire novel. The narrative centers on the loss of loved ones, which marks the boundary between the heroine’s “past” and “new” life. Death appears both as a character, episodically taking the role of Dilyara’s superior, and as the emotional driving force of the plot: the book reads as a work of mourning for a threefold loss and as the point of departure for oblivion.

In the novel, the past takes on a corporeal form in the shape of a fantastical organ, the saq-soq bladder, in which traumatic memories are preserved and from which they are released. In Tatar folklore, however, Saq and Soq are twin brothers cursed by their mother to live as birds, condemned to eternal separation until the Day of Judgment. Rasuleva’s image of the “saq-soq bladder” seems to reimagine this myth: it functions almost like a repository of trauma, symbolizing the heroine’s deepest wound – the loss of her parents. The past must be released into the world, for it can no longer remain inside. Yet the question remains whether the past contains anything beyond personal trauma. At the same time, the layers of memory connected to the city as a stage, to language, and to religion form an entire field of inquiry.

Kazan

The work of memory takes place in Berlin, where the heroine of the novel begins a new life, having completely severed her ties with the city of her childhood and forgotten her past. That past, which Dilyara struggles to reclaim, is bound up with Kazan.

Rasuleva does not say much about Kazan in the 1990s. What she describes are family and school, a childhood that unfolded during years of social upheaval. The behavior, attitudes, emotions of the characters, and even their words bear the imprint of the collective fear and hope that saturated the atmosphere of large cities in post-Soviet Russia.

The author introduces recognizable toponyms of Kazan – Gabishev, 8th of March, Safiullin, and Dauriya Streets, as well as Gorky Park. Yet the city reveals itself more through the spirit of the time than through concrete space. As a result, what emerges before the reader is the image of a large Russian city of the 1990s.

The heroine’s family is portrayed through the archetypal figures of the era: a father who “went into business in the mid-1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the ghostly free future flickered in neon, luring the ambitious and the reckless with its glittering lights” (Dinara Rasuleva, Travmagochi, p. 101); a mother, weeping and fearing the loss of their apartment; and a brother, drawn into the criminal underworld. Together, these figures recreate the atmosphere of social collapse and the criminalization of everyday life.

The pervasive fear and anxiety, yet at the same time the sense of freedom and hope, point to the collective experience of post-Soviet Kazan. In this sense, Rasuleva’s city can be read as a chronotope of post-Soviet childhood in Bakhtin’s understanding, a place where time folds in on itself, where the historical 1990s coincide with the heroine’s personal childhood, and where the city becomes a space for experiencing time.

Language

The main emotional driving force of the novel, alongside death, is language, which restores the past. If death appears as a depressive, oppressive, and dark principle, then language, by contrast, is associated with the heroine’s brightest experiences. At the same time, the author demythologizes death, weaving it into everyday life as a way of coming to terms with its power. Memories of the Tatar language connect her to her deceased parents and grandmother: it is the language of home, of care, and of love. Yet within the text there emerges a contrast between the perception of the native language in the familial sphere and in the school setting, where its value is questioned. Thus, in the novel, language functions not only as a medium of memory but also as a point of conflict between the personal and the collective perceptions of it.

Throughout the book, the heroine quite literally tries to reclaim the lost language: she articulates words that come to her in dreams, relearning the sounds. Individual Tatar words and expressions, heard many times i n childhood, turn out to be hidden anchors of memory, holding within them what had seemed irretrievably lost: “…fragments of phrases in a strange, barely perceptible language began little by little to break through into her thoughts, as if a firmly forgotten past were seeping through accidental cracks.” (Travmagochi, p. 12).

Memories of the native Tatar language in the book are also tied to the experience of discrimination against non-Russian languages in the urban public sphere, even as Tatar remained the language of the family and traditional contexts. Such was the status of a native language for a child from a Tatar family growing up in an urban environment in the 1990s: a Tatar accent in Russian and the pressure to eliminate it, the lack of “prestige” in speaking Tatar, the constant demand to demonstrate flawless command of Russian. The child had to strive for exceptional literacy in order to avoid accusations of “not knowing the main language,” which were immediately followed by reproaches about “non-Russian origin.” Yet it is impossible to stop being who you are.

Through the heroine’s work with personal memory and trauma, a political dimension also emerges, likewise tied to language. The episode with a sticker in Tatar reading “millät betä” (“the nation is disappearing”; Travmagochi, p. 7), which Dilyara finds tucked inside a volume of Clarice Lispector in the pocket of an old coat, is placed at the very beginning of the book. Were it not for the text’s emotional focus on death, trauma, and loss, this episode could well have been given pride of place: it points to the loss of something native, bound up with language and roots.

The sharpest reference to the theme of disappearing languages appears in the figure of the heroine’s acquaintance, Lyokha, wearing a red shirt emblazoned with the words “The Komi do not believe in death” (Travmagochi, p. 115). This phrase, associated with the worldview of Finno-Ugric peoples, in the light of recent history inevitably recalls the self-immolation of the Udmurt scholar and activist Albert Razin, who in September 2019 set himself on fire in front of the State Council of the Udmurt Republic in Izhevsk as a protest against language restrictions. In this historical context, the slogan on a red background reads as a metaphor of political memory and interethnic solidarity in the face of the erasure of Russia’s indigenous languages.

Finally, the very choice of language in the novel and the way it is used underscore the author’s special relationship to language. To let a marginalized non-Russian language into a Russian-language text is to signal an emotional attachment to it. The main language of the work is Russian, with small but poetically expressive insertions of Tatar, English, and German. The Tatar fragments do not seek to conform to the norms of the modern literary language: they reproduce “childhood memory,” the pronunciation and intonations preserved in recollection.

Religion

Among all that was forgotten and later brought back in memory, religion holds an important place. It appears in a very specific form – in the spirit of what Adeeb Khalid has called “Islam after Communism” (2007). Kazan in the novel is not depicted as a center of religious revival, yet the reader senses how religion quietly and steadily makes its presence felt in the city and expands. “A mosque appeared right in the courtyard of the new house, behind the minimarket, and Father, out of convenience and proximity, seemed to start dropping in there little by little…” (Travmagochi, p. 44). Beginning in the early 1990s, Kazan itself gradually became dotted first with old, newly reopened mosques, and later with new ones. In the novel, the appearance of a mosque “behind the minimarket,” within the everyday reach of the heroine and her family, renders religion visible and almost (in the imagination) audible to the reader through the azan (call to prayer) that fills the city’s space.

Nevertheless, for Dilyara religion becomes an important part of her memories above all through the inner space of the home: the “golden picture with Qur’anic verses” hanging in the place of honor in the living room; the funeral meals (ash) with Qur’an recitation and the mutual distribution of sädaqa (voluntary almsgiving), a word the heroine remembered in childhood as sälähä; but most of all through the prayers she learned by heart with her grandmother. Recalling these key surahs and ayahs of Islamic practice, the heroine remarks: “It amazes me to think that these words have meanings. As a child I knew them as incantations; they did not need meaning.” (Travmagochi, p. 62). This is another feature of post-communist Islam: after decades of atheist practice, religion was remembered anew. Since the level of involvement of the Tatar Muslim population varied greatly, and not everyone wished to attend mosque or study Arabic, prayers were often transcribed into Cyrillic and circulated in pamphlets and small booklets. Pronunciation in such sources was approximate, and although the transcription was accompanied by a translation of the original sense, the texts were in practice memorized “like incantations.”

Another aspect, tied less to doctrine than to the broader sphere of religiously inflected tradition, is the memory of shame, understood as an important, and above all gendered, emotion of the heroine’s childhood. It stemmed from the way girls were raised, a form of upbringing that, after the Soviet decades, was no longer seen as explicitly religious but still carried its traditional moral force. “…Shame, shame, shame / It has always been there.” (Travmagochi, p. 106). The repeatedly invoked Tatar word oyat (shame), embedded in a Russian sentence, appears here as the recollection of a deeply imprinted feeling that seems to pulse through the text. It is untranslatable, inseparably tied to language and family. Recalling and reinterpreting this feeling in adulthood, Dilyara brings out new shades of meaning in it, extending even into the political.

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And yet the result of the heroine’s work with the past remains unconvincing. She wavers and begins to question: “Is my past, too, nothing more than a roughly glued collage? Memory is full of holes and blurred fragments spoiled by time, like a scratched cassette tape. The pieces do not always fit together into a whole. What emerges crackles, flails, tries to cohere. But what if these are fragments of different mosaics?” (Travmagochi, p. 56).

As one reads, there inevitably arises the expectation of an allusion to the well-known passage in the Kyrgyz author Chingiz Aitmatov’s novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years (1980) about the mankurt, and yet it never appears. The mankurt is the image of a person who has forgotten the past, or more precisely, of one whose memory has been violently taken away. This figure has become so firmly embedded in the discourse and languages of the post-Soviet Turkic world that it has turned into almost a cliché. But the answer comes gradually: the mankurt, and the forgetting of one’s own past, is always about power, about the deprivation of will through the deprivation of memory. In Rasuleva’s novel, however, power and resistance do not become central themes; they remain part of personal memory rather than emerging as an explicit political discourse, as in the Tatar nationalist rhetoric of the 1990s.

In any case, the book becomes a valuable addition to the corpus of artistic explorations of memory and an important read for those engaged in the study of Tatarstan in the 1990s. And above all, to recall Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion from Wahrheit und Methode (1960): understanding presupposes a “fusion of horizons” between the interpreter and the text.

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References

Aitmatov, Chingiz. I dolshe veka dlitsya den’ / The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years (1980).

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (1960).

Khalid, Adeeb. Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia (2007).

Rasuleva, Dinara. Travmagochi (2025).

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Title picture: Suyumbike Tower, Kazan.

All pictures by Diliara Brileva.