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Historical and cultural memory is put into practice through narratives. As a narrative medium, literature plays an important role in the process of transformation of the past events in cultural memory. This transformation includes critical reflection or affirmation of various aspects of memory and its social context. Literary texts in this paper include short stories of Jan Drda, Josef Škvorecký and Zdeněk Rotrekl which deal with the final days of the World War Two.

The latest novel, Vorošylovhrad, by Ukrainian writer Serhij Žadan takes the reader to an East-Ukrainian post-totalitarian landscape and reveals a special Žadan-like geo-poetic (e.g. in comparison with the Galizian geo-poetic of Jurij Andruxovyč). Unlike his previous novel, Depeche Mode, it is not only a story about the hero’s journey through a devastated post-Soviet landscape, i.e. a metaphorical reflection of the search for one’s own past, but as well a story about finding a way to remember this past. The ability to remember the past offers a way out of the state of transcendental and real homelessness (the story ends with a budding love-story, a novum in Žadan’s prose).