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The Museum of Abandoned Secrets by Oksana Zabuzhko: book review


 


The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (2012) is set in Kyiv, Ukraine, from 1943 to 2004. 

 

Journalist Daryna Goshchynska finds a photograph of five Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UIA) soldiers. Second from the right  is Olena Dovganivna. Joseph Stalin’s Soviet secret police killed Olena in 1947 when she was twenty. Daryna recalls her own KGB interrogation over three days in 1987 when she was a student, aged twenty-two. 

 

Daryna begins making a documentary about Olena. As she researches Olena’s history from World War II to the eve of the Orange Revolution in 2004, Daryna finds many ‘abandoned secrets.’

 

With her cameraman, Daryna interviews a Ukrainian artist about her show called “Secrets” – an award-winning painting exhibition – and her painting called “Contents of a Purse Found at the Scene of the Accident.” And then the artist died in an accident. Was it really an accident? 

 

Daryna is excellent at getting to the truth. As her partner Adrian says, ‘One undisputable advantage of living with a reporter is that with time, thanks to her extraordinary skill of patient questioning, she trains you to explain yourself with great coherence and in perfectly clear language …’

 

As Daryna discovers a secret history, she also learns about her own father from his old memorabilia stored in her mother’s attic. Her father died at 45 when she was seventeen,. 

 

The story is told in eight chapters, after eight ‘rooms’ – and the secrets within each room. Each chapter is like a book in itself, for this is a long, intricate, and epic history over 60 years. 

 

Feminine heroism, the power of the dead of the past, and the importance of remembering without censorship are all explored in this novel, as well as the bounds of individual breaking points in the fight for love, for friendship, for resistance, for the future, for a cause, and for freedom.








 

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MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS  is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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