From national memory to global circulation: Translated editions and paratexts in Ukrainian women’s Gulag experience

Abstract

This article examines how translation and paratextual framing shape the circulation of Gulag memory beyond a Russocentric historiographic paradigm, using Oksana Kis’s Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag (Ukrainian 2017, English 2020, Italian 2023) as a case study. Drawing on Genette’s paratext theory, Erll’s cultural memory studies, and Venuti’s approach to translation as cultural intervention, it reconstructs three distinct framing regimes corresponding to the three editions. The analysis produces three concrete findings. First, each edition repositions the same scholarly text within a different cultural context: internal national memory work in the Ukrainian edition, disciplinary academic canonisation in the English edition, and ethical-civic engagement in the Italian edition. Second, paratexts and early epitextual circulation do not merely reflect reception but actively participate in the transformation of meaning, guiding the text’s movement from archival knowledge to public and ethical discourse. Third, translational choices carry culturally specific ideological weight: the rendering of вижити ( vižiti) / перемогти (peremogti) into English and Italian produces distinct versions of ‘survival’ and ‘resistance’ that shape interpretive expectations in each context. The article proposes the notion of a ‘floating memory text’ to conceptualise how research on historical trauma circulates across semiotic regimes without losing its conceptual core, contributing to the decentralisation of Gulag memory and the recognition of Ukrainian women’s experience as an autonomous historical and cultural phenomenon.