The recently published book “Can heavens see cats” (Чи бачать небеса котів, 2024) is a unique phenomenon in contemporary Ukrainian literature as it comprises 36 short narratives written by 36 authors and weaved together into a coherent whole within the unifying conception. Published in spring 2024, the book has attracted quite significant interest in Ukraine. Olha Polevina, one of the two co-authors of the concept of the book, described this book in an interview as a book of remembering and witnessing.
This presentation will focus on narrative and poetic mechanisms of collective co-construction of the memory of personal loss at the times of the Russo-Ukrainian war in the book “Can heavens see cats”. It will discuss the dynamics of the vivid emotionally imbued representations of individual lived experiences and inherent implicit appeal to collective remembering, the synergy of the paratextual elements of the book and the multi-authored text itself, the prominent textual image of the house/ home and the important image of cats, as well as the delicate balance between metaphoric highlights and realistic depictions of people’s lives and deaths.