National mourning is being observed after the killing of 14 people at a university in Prague.

The Ukrainian writer Tanja Maljartschuk’s novel Forgottenness broods upon what I’d call zombie history. There are other terms for inherited memory of catastrophic events experienced by one’s forebears, such as intergenerational transmission of trauma and postmemory. But the past in this novel rises from the grave and takes possession of the bodies of the living. Memories resurface as tics, gestures, obsessions—the condensations of meaning that Freud called neurotic symptoms. Sometimes these show up in the personally traumatized. Much of the literature about intergenerational trauma focuses on the reappearance of symptoms in the next generation, though they may, indeed commonly do, persist into the third and beyond. Here they seem dormant in the children and resurface in a grandchild.

In Forgottenness (the first novel originally written in Ukrainian to be published by a major U.S. trade house), a young woman mops compulsively, finally driving away her fiancé. She is the narrator, a writer who is never named. The time is the present, which seems to mean about a decade ago; the novel came out in Ukraine in 2016. As a child, she learned how to wash a floor—really wash it—from her maternal grandmother, Sonia, a cleaning woman who is now barely clinging to life. You have to do the floor at least twice, Sonia taught her. Go over it once, and you’ll leave streaks of dirt. Sonia used to grab the mop out of the narrator’s hands when she didn’t apply enough force. “Why are you washing as if you haven’t eaten in three days?” she would demand.

Sonia’s reproach is not the innocent hyperbole of a babushka. Nothing is innocent in zombie history. Sonia is the one who didn’t eat for three days, likely more. Her mother died soon after she was born, and when she was 3 or 4, she tells the narrator, her father left her on the steps of an orphanage and said he’d be right back with some pampushky, garlic rolls. Instead he walked to the gatehouse of a factory and died. It was 1932, the first year of the Holodomor, a horrific famine in which close to 4 million Ukrainians were starved to death by Stalin’s monstrous agricultural policies, possibly deliberately. The orphanage took Sonia in but soon could manage to feed the orphans only three beans a day. She ran away and somehow made it home, to a large farmstead that had been turned into a commissary for the Communist Party elite. For lack of anything better to do, she went to the cemetery, lay down on her mother’s gravestone, and screamed for three days. Thereafter she spoke “almost inaudibly, her voice more like the rasp of an old wooden door.” How she survived is unclear. She had “an incredible, innate strength,” the narrator says.

Transmuting raw experience into symbols, and symbols back into raw emotions, is a basic operation of psychic processing. We do it in our dreams. Literature does it for us, as does, of course, religion. Wafers and wine conjure up the real presence of Christ; ritual is how we reconnect with the miraculous. It’s no coincidence that Sonia spent her working life cleaning a music school that had once been a Catholic monastery, lugging around a mop with a giant handle “that looked more like a cross awaiting a crucifixion.” After crucifixions come resurrections, and the narrator is getting ready to perform one. She scrubs the floor, once, then twice, day in and day out, refusing to leave her apartment, until Sonia’s long-repressed terror finally reemerges and takes hold of her. “A fear stronger than I had ever felt gripped and paralyzed me, and my mop fell to the floor with a clunk,” the narrator says.

Resurrection is the great theme of Forgottenness. Maljartschuk never uses the word, but reading between the lines, we understand that the exhuming of memory is meant to be a miracle. So much militates against it. History, for one, which she compares to the soot that coats an old painting. To restore color and detail—life—to the canvas, there must be a scrubbing, an undoing. Or, you might say, a mopping and a nervous breakdown. A mightier enemy of memory is time itself. “Time consumes everything living by the ton, like a gigantic blue whale consumes microscopic plankton, milling and chewing it into a homogenous mass, so that one life disappears without a trace, giving another, the next life, a chance,” the narrator says. “It wasn’t the disappearance that grieved me the most, but the tracelessness of it.”

That whale, monstrous and deadly, swims through the novel like a biblical leviathan. We and all that we are made up of, “billions of minuscule, almost invisible worlds,” the narrator says, begin disappearing into its maw from the moment we’re born. Meanwhile the whale endures “in its own whale-space, absolute and immutable, where the need to think about something or remember anything doesn’t exist.” Maljartschuk doesn’t say this outright either, but we understand that the only memories that have a chance of outlasting oblivion are the ones written down.

Maljartschuk was born in 1983, eight years before the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Ukraine. She is one of her country’s best-known and most prolific writers, the prizewinning author of several short-story collections and one other novel. She has lived in Vienna since 2011, and also writes in German. When Maljartschuk came of age, at the turn of the millennium, Ukrainians were engaged in what Milan Kundera called “the struggle of memory against forgetting,” revisiting the history of violence and terror under Russian czars, Soviet Communists, and German Nazis, and rehabilitating characters who were erased from memory when the history of the Ukrainian nation was suppressed.

Viktor Yushchenko, a democratic reformist and the Ukrainian president from 2005 to 2010, was particularly preoccupied with the Holodomor. He embraced the view that it was an attempted genocide and erected Holodomor monuments throughout the country, incorporated it into curricula, and initiated government-sponsored research. And then, in 2010, the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych defeated Yushchenko in a presidential election that had partly turned on Yushchenko’s uses of history. The public reckoning with the past came to an end.

Two years before Forgottenness was published, the Maidan Revolution drove Yanukovych out of Ukraine; shortly thereafter, Russia invaded the Donbas region, claiming it was Russian. The novel was presumably in process during this fraught period. In her earlier work, Maljartschuk availed herself of satire, absurdism, and fable to depict Ukraine’s mutating reality. One of her favorite tropes is having animals stand in for people and vice versa, blurring the lines between bestiary and human society. In her first novel, A Biography of a Chance Miracle (2012), set during the chaotic, impoverished Ukraine of the 1990s, a town starts paying its residents to round up stray dogs; a young, idealistic protagonist discovers that they’re being sold to restaurants and wages a quixotic campaign to save them: “Dogs of the world, unite! We won’t let ourselves get eaten!”

[Franklin Foer: It’s not ‘The’ Ukraine]

Forgottenness is more rambling than A Biography of a Chance Miracle—memoiristic (maybe) and realistic-ish, with a heavy overlay of metaphor. The tone is distraught rather than wry, at times oppressively so. Human bodies do more of the work of social critique than animal bodies—with the exception of the stupefying bulk of the whale.

The novel weaves together two stories: the narrator’s and that of Viacheslav Lypynskyi, who was a political thinker and influential theorist of Ukrainian statehood at the turn of the 20th century. The narrator comes across an obituary of him when she begins taking old newspapers out of the library as part of her mission to revive the past. Three words are splashed in huge type across the front page of a 1931 issue of the Ukrainian American newspaper Svoboda, “VIACHESLAV LYPYNSKYI DEAD.” Here’s an obviously important man she’s never heard of. She decides to research his story, because it seems somehow bound up in hers.

The broad outlines of the narrator’s account of Lypynskyi’s life are factual; Maljartschuk makes up the details and the dialogue. Lypynskyi was an unlikely Ukrainian hero, Ukrainian by choice. He was born in 1882 in the town of Zaturtsi in Volhynia, a region then in the Russian empire (now in western Ukraine) and predominantly populated by Ukrainians (then known as East Slavs). Lypynskyi came from a small elite of wealthy, aristocratic Poles. Maljartschuk imagines how he announced his decision to identify as Ukrainian to his family: at the dinner table, at the age of 19. “Don’t call me Wacław. I’m Viacheslav,” he says.

In another scene, likely fictional, set in his professor’s house near Jagiellonian University, in Kraków, he tells fellow Polish students that he’s “a Ukrainian Pole.” To his family and friends, the statement makes no sense. Hybrid identity hasn’t been conceptualized yet, and anyway, as far as they’re concerned, “Ukrainian” is barely an identity; it denotes an illiterate peasant or a “peasant tongue.” In czarist Russia, the printing of Ukrainian books is illegal. In Kraków, which is Austro-Hungarian, Ukrainian is tolerated but considered ridiculous. Lypynskyi’s professor of Ukrainian has only one outdated high-school grammar book to teach from and must supplement the lessons by reciting poetry and singing folk songs. Antiquated, tradition-bound, “the stateless Ukrainian society increasingly resembled a dust-coated stage set that someone had simply forgotten to strike,” the narrator says.

Undaunted, Lypynskyi makes the rebirth of a Ukrainian nation his lifelong cause. In the novel, Polish friends call him a traitor. For a while, he does little besides study the life and career of Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, the leader of the great Cossack revolt against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1648 that led to the establishment of a free Ukrainian state that lasted 100 years. Ukrainians now hail Khmelnytskyi as a founding father, their George Washington. Lypynskyi points out to his critics that Khmelnytskyi was the son of a Polish courtier, therefore also a Ukrainian Pole. (I have to add that, all my life, I’ve been aware of a very different Khmelnytskyi: the leader whose uprising unleashed the slaughter of perhaps as many as 20,000 Jews. How much blame he deserves is now in dispute, but he is not absolvable. Maljartschuk doesn’t mention this Khmelnytskyi; to be fair, Ukrainians almost never do.)

Perhaps to show other Poles from Ukrainian areas how to imagine themselves as Ukrainian Poles, Lypynskyi eventually comes up with what the narrator calls his “best political idea,” territorialism: Citizenship should be determined by residence on a common land, regardless of ancestry, language, politics, or creed. This is true. Territorialism was Lypynskyi’s most original contribution to Ukrainian political thought. In a 1925 book not cited in the novel, he explained how his land-based concept of the nation differed from then-prevailing European views that grounded national identity in race. “Such a notion, in our colonial conditions, with periodic migration of peoples on our territory … is a complete absurdity,” Lypynskyi wrote. “There have never been and never will be ‘pure-blooded Ukrainians.’ ” Today what seems notable is how pro-immigrant he is: “Whoever settled in our country … and became part and parcel of the Ukraine is Ukrainian, regardless of tribe or cultural origin, of ‘racial’ or ‘ideological’ genealogy.”

Lypynskyi is to Maljartschuk what Khmelnytskyi was to Lypynskyi: a prophet and warrior for a better Ukraine. For the rest of his life, in the novel and in reality, Lypynskyi fought bitterly against Ukrainian ethno-nationalists. He also opposed Ukrainian socialists, who considered nation-states reactionary and obsolete. By the mid-1920s, he had lost both battles. The Bolsheviks absorbed the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic into the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, a book by Lypynskyi’s nationalist nemesis won a following among Ukraine’s youth. They “would flail between socialist and nationalist ideologies like between the banks of a swift mountain river onto which few manage to clamber alive,” the narrator says. (The translation, by Zenia Tompkins, can get choppy.)

The portions of the novel devoted to Lypynskyi’s political evolution are straightforward and lively, even inspiring. Lypynskyi is a little pallid, though, compared with the narrator’s grandparents, who tromp through the novel like damaged giants. Bomchyk, the narrator’s paternal grandfather, is a toothless, joyous farmer. The narrator lived with him for a year when she was little, a period she associates with “the happiest times of my life.” Bomchyk weighed 330 pounds when he died. Before he got so fat, he laughed constantly. Now, as an adult, the narrator understands his transmogrification. Bomchyk laughed because he had the gift of being easily amused, but also because he had nothing besides laughter to call his own. He’d handed over whatever the Communists demanded when they established a collective farm in his village; resistance would have meant Siberia or worse. To avoid conscription, he’d played the idiot in front of the recruiters. Friends who melted into the woods to fight the Soviets wanted him to join them, but he pulled a comforter over his head and pretended not to hear them. The friends were shot and their bodies put on display as a warning, and villagers averted their eyes as they went by. Bomchyk’s laughter hid shame and powerlessness, and as life got sadder, he smothered the urge to giggle with food.

Symptoms circulate freely among the narrator and her characters: Zombie history would appear to operate on a principle of mimetic contagion. Right before she tells Bomchyk’s story, she goes through a phase of pathological overeating. This comes in the middle of a longer-lasting phase of agoraphobia, so when she runs out of food, she can’t leave to go shopping. Her parents bring over potato dumplings and cabbage rolls, which she stuffs into her mouth while they watch. “Look, don’t eat so much or you’ll end up like Grandpa Bomchyk,” her father says.

Lypynskyi is more vivid when his psychic crises hijack his body the way the narrator’s problems commandeer hers. He contracts tuberculosis and struggles to breathe, an apt malady for a man squeezed between inimical identities and mass movements that have no room for nuanced thought. His erotic impulses are bizarre. He meets his future wife under extremely unpropitious circumstances: During a lecture he gives on Ukrainian history, he claims that Polish nobles in Ukraine had fought on the side of the Cossacks during the Khmelnytskyi uprising, rather than for Poland, and a blond Polish student, a woman, stands up and screams, “Shame!” He is chased out of the building—and becomes obsessed with the woman, Kazimiera, whom he ultimately persuades to marry him. The marriage, of course, is a disaster; she can barely read Ukrainian, has no interest in Ukrainian independence, and won’t live with him on the family estate in Ukraine. This fixation on a woman who rejects him so thoroughly is a telling pathology. In a part of the world left bloody by ethnic wars, dual identity may pit the soul against itself.

You can’t rethink the past—your past, a nation’s past—without a radical shift in perspective, and sure enough, angles of vision get very strange in the novel. Drafted into the Russian army at the start of World War I, Lypynskyi narrowly escapes a massacre and ends up in a military hospital with a curious neurological condition. “Every person he encountered appeared to him to have only one eye—right in the middle, at the bridge of the nose,” Maljartschuk writes. “The human world had become a world of Cyclopes.” Shortly after the narrator tells that story, she starts standing on her head so that she can see the world upside down. Her head throbs; noise rings in her ears. “World War I has broken out in my chest,” she tells her fiancé, who thinks she’s gone mad.

The real question is: Is madness the sane response to history? Maljartschuk thwarts the urge for an answer. There turn out to be no denouement and few big revelations. One occurs during the narrator’s visit to Lypynskyi’s family estate, now a museum. The great man was buried in a nearby cemetery, but where is no longer known. The Soviets turned the property into a collective farm, and the cemetery was razed and the gravestones used for flooring. Afterward, the narrator waits for a bus that never comes, and she weeps. Too many bones have been bulldozed, too much memory excised. The dead will never be raised. We who walk unaware over their now-unmarked graves will never realize that life in their absence is a lusterless shadow of what it could have been, “just a branch growing green on a withered tree.”

And yet the novel itself pushes back against despair, simply by virtue of existing. Which means that Maljartschuk exists. She could so easily not have been born. What do we owe the ancestors who survived, notwithstanding ignominy and torment? Just that. To survive. Every single one of them had to survive for the line of descent to arrive at us, and now we must too. And maybe record a memory or two. “Through the generations, considerable interest had accrued,” the narrator says. “Little by little, I had to start paying off my debts.”

Maljartschuk’s repayment is a novel, haunted and haunting, that is disorienting and less than perfect but does what it has to do: It’s memorable. I worry, though, that she might not be doing much debt-paying at the moment. Two months after Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022, she told the German public-broadcasting company Deutsche Welle that she could no longer imagine writing poetry or fiction. Though she lives in Austria, far from the front, she said she felt “as if Russian tanks were attacking my body, my organs, my heart, my kidneys.” Watching that interview, I thought of the whale. Toward the end of Forgottenness, Maljartschuk has her narrator say, “I can hear how the gigantic blue whale is slapping its tail against the surface of the sea somewhere not too far away. Very soon, it will open its mouth and begin to suck in everything and everyone.” Far be it from me to deny the leviathan its status as the cosmic principle of death and destruction, but, I thought, it might also be Putin’s Russia.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Zombie History Stalks Ukraine.”