Mäletamise lühis: Ene Mihkelsoni "Ahasveeruse uni"
Short Circuit of Memory: Ene Mihkelson’s Ahasveeruse uni (”The Dream of Ahasuerus”)

Summary/Abstract: Ene Mihkelson’s novel Ahasveeruse uni (”The Dream of Ahasuerus”) poses the problem of how to remember and work through historical traumas in the present. It tells the story of a middle-aged woman whose parents joined the Forest Brethren, the anti-Soviet guerilla movement in Estonian forests after World War II. In the 1990s the movement was remembered by the national narrative in heroic terms as one of freedom fighters. The protagonist’s investigation into the circumstances of her father’s death in the forest unravels histories of degradation and moral devastation caused by strategies used by the occupational powers to destroy their antagonists. In the form of a trauma narrative Mihkelson scrutinizes various practices of memory and of power (archive, president’s medals, photo-albums and memoirs) and the ways in which they may shape private and public memory. Drawing on Derrida’s notion of hauntology the article outlines Mihkelson’s own metaphors of remembering such as listening to the spectres or short-circuiting memory, and addresses the question of the ethics of remembering posed by the novel.

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