Viola Parente-Čapková and Riitta Jytilä 
Sofi Oksanen – Contested Memories 
in Bloodlands Fiction
In our chapter, we study contested memories in the work of the Finnish-Estonian 
writer Sofi Oksanen. Contested memories is one of the central themes in Oksa-
nen’s work: it includes how memories and history are contended, challenged, dis-
puted, questioned or even manipulated; whether and how they can be “given 
back” to both individual people and peoples in the sense of communities. At the 
same time, by contested memories, we also mean some aspects of the reception of 
Oksanen’s work: reviews and debates surrounding her writing have repeatedly 
raised the issue of the “right to memory” and right to (historical) truth.
Oksanen is one of the contemporary Finnish authors that literary scholars 
have analysed and interpreted most; her work has been commented on by writ-
ers on fiction but also other cultural and public figures including politicians,1
both in Finland and abroad.2 Her work has been widely translated (into more 
than 40 languages) and she has won a large number of literary awards both in 
Finland and internationally. In this chapter, we discuss Oksanen as a versatile lit-
erary author who is also a visible and, for some, controversial public figure, 
which is obvious from the reception of her writings and her persona. Oksanen 
has been engaging in public debates about domestic violence, racism and wom-
en’s rights, and, most consistently, about the history and current political situa-
tion of Eastern and North-Eastern Europe.
1 Before the last (2024) presidential election in Finland, the major Finnish newspaper, the daily 
Helsingin Sanomat, asked presidential candidates to write an essay to about their favorite work 
of literature. Alexander Stubb, the elected Finnish president, chose Sofi Oksanen’s Purge. He 
wrote: “Purge is a story about state oppression. It is a story that concerned all former Soviet re-
publics and those who were always oppressed by Russia throughout history. It could have been 
also Finland’s own story” (“Puhdistus on valtiollisen sorron tarina. Se on tarina, joka koski kaik-
kia entisiä neuvostotasavaltoja ja niitä, joita Venäjä on historiansa aikana sortanut. Se olisi voi-
nut olla myös Suomen tarina”). Stubb continued: “Sofi Oksanen has helped me to see. I mean to 
understand the deepest essence of the Soviet Union and Russia by means of a story” (“Sofi Oksa-
nen on auttanut minua näkemään. Siis ymmärtämään Neuvostoliiton ja Venäjän syvintä ole-
musta tarinan kautta”) (Stubb 2024).
� Oksanen has won the two major awards for prose works in Finland (the Finlandia Prize and 
the Runeberg Prize), the Nordic Council Literature Prize, The Prix Femina Ètranger and The Prix 
du Roman FNAC in France, the European Book Prize as well as other awards in France, Estonia, 
Hungary, Sweden and Italy. She has been also nominated for many prizes, including the Irish 
Dublin International Literary Award and the Swedish New Academy Prize in Literature.
Open Access. © 2025 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the 
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111389165-008
In her fictional and non-fictional production, Oksanen has been focusing on 
Finland, Russia and Ukraine, but most of all on Estonia, being herself half Esto-
nian. She was born and grew up in Jyväskylä, central Finland in 1977, where she 
also studied literature at the university, before she moved to Helsinki in order to 
study more literature and drama. Oksanen’s Estonian mother was an engineer 
who grew up under the Soviet occupation in Estonia and moved to Finland after 
marrying a Finnish electrician. Oksanen speaks Estonian but she has always writ-
ten exclusively in Finnish. Although she grew up as a Finnish speaker in Finland, 
she has always strongly identified with her Estonian family and heritage and has 
been interested in Estonian society. In her novels, Oksanen highlights experiences 
from the Estonian past which have remained outside the official historiography 
and national (Estonian) memory culture. Strong interest in the Soviet and post- 
Soviet past, with a particular emphasis on memory, both oral and written, has 
been a recurrent theme in her work. Writing in Finnish, her primary audience is 
in Finland, but by means of translations her work has addressed readers in Esto-
nia, elsewhere in Europe, and outside Europe.
The field of memory studies has undergone many transformations, and now-
adays memory is seen as dynamic, transcultural and multidirectional. Astrid Erll 
(2011b) created the concept of travelling memory: memories travel across borders 
and bring about new social constellations and political contexts. The transmission 
of memories from one cultural context to another has become a central ethical 
concern: who has the right to tell untold memories? How do changing contexts 
change the meanings of memories? The fact that memories can be contested 
shows that memories always work in the present and can be used as a powerful 
tool for interpreting, shaping and framing the past. Although remembering is di-
rected to the past, it always takes place in the present. In the process of communi-
cation, circulation and exchange of memories cultural artefacts can play an im-
portant role; some of them are given more attention than others and can help get 
themes into the sphere of public memory (e.g. Rigney 2005, 20; Rothberg 2009).
Oksanen’s novels highlight trauma histories of the Soviet Union and Eastern 
Europe. The milieus of her novels vary; some are set in part or entirely in Fin-
land, most in Estonia and the last one in Ukraine. Hence Oksanen’s production 
can be, at least partly, read within the genre that the critic Marek Oziewicz (2016)
has called “bloodlands fiction”. The term has been derived from Timothy Snyder’s 
book Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2010) referring to the Baltic 
countries, Poland, Belorussia and Ukraine, which most brutally experienced both 
the Soviet and the Nazi terror. The concept of bloodlands helps us to grasp the 
extent and duration of the traumatic history of Eastern Europe and to realise 
how the histories of violence did not occur only in conditions of war. According 
to Snyder (2010), not all violence was related to the Second World War and not all 
136 Viola Parente-Čapková and Riitta Jytilä
victims were active combatants, but most were children, women and older peo-
ple. Although the Holocaust is often taken to represent all the evil of the twentieth 
century, the Soviet Union is also responsible for at least a third of killings of the 
bloodlands (Snyder 2010, 10–12). This is precisely what Oksanen tries to make her 
reading audience aware of in various countries and contexts. Women’s memory 
has a special place in Oksanen’s oeuvre and she does not hesitate to proclaim her-
self a feminist. As the Swedish feminist scholar Ebba Witt-Brattström (2014) puts 
it, Oksanen’s “literary technique interweaves two systems of oppression: sexism 
and Soviet imperialism”, including its colonial aspects.
The postcolonial or, indeed, decolonial perspective is something we would 
like to highlight in our research on the contested memories in the bloodlands 
fiction by Sofi Oksanen.3 Cultural memory and trauma studies are currently be-
ginning to acknowledge the need to think together post-Holocaust and postcolo-
nial legacies and to study post-Soviet memorial forms (Rothberg 2009), but as 
David C. Moore (2001, 112) has observed, there is still much work to do in bring-
ing together “too narrow postcolonial” and “too parochial post-Soviet studies”. 
Efforts to break the silence of postcolonial studies on the subject of the former 
Soviet sphere (Moore 2001, 116) have already yielded various studies (e.g. Pu-
cherová and Gáfrik 2015), and could be developed with careful contextualisa-
tion, avoiding the traps of imposing ready-made postcolonial concepts on the 
“second world” experience, and with a consistent emphasis on gender and inter-
sectionality.
In this chapter, we look at Sofi Oksanen’s way of dealing with memory and 
history on the thematic plane, i.e. with issues like passing on memories or manip-
ulating memory on both the micro- and macro-historical levels. We also tackle 
the questions of how memories of the Soviet terror travel and have been con-
tested in different cultural contexts and how the genre of fiction complicates the 
reactions to, reception and evaluation of written memories. Our methodology is 
to bring literary studies into dialogue with cultural memory studies and trauma 
studies, resulting in a close analysis of two novels by Oksanen, Purge and When 
the Doves Disappeared. As Astrid Erll (2008, 4) has stressed, in literature, it is pos-
sible to consider the specific medium or material through which memories are 
produced. Literary memories should not be considered as mere thoughts shuf-
fling back and forth in an individual mind; rather, they are constituted in the pro-
cesses of writing and reading (Erll 2008, 4; Jytilä 2018, 164).
3 Oksanen has discussed decolonisation in her essays, see e.g. Oksanen (2009c).
Sofi Oksanen – Contested Memories in Bloodlands Fiction 137
1 Fictionalised Postmemories
Oksanen can be seen as a versatile cultural agent who has mediated the mem-
ory of the twentieth-century Soviet terror to the Finnish and international pub-
lic in many roles – as a writer, editor, publisher and public intellectual who is 
very active on social media. She debuted with the novel Stalinin lehmät (Stalin’s 
Cows, 2003) with an autofictional twist, exploring the main character’s search 
for identity between Finland and Estonia, the mother–daughter relationship 
and, on a different time plane, the tragic events of twentieth-century Estonian 
history. Her second novel Baby Jane (2005) is set in Helsinki and deals with 
power dynamics in a lesbian relationship. Her first play Puhdistus (Purge), was 
staged first in 2007; in 2008, Oksanen published a novel with the same name 
(Lola Roger’s English translation Purge, 2010). Purge follows stories of several 
Estonian women along time lines in the 1940s and the 1990s.4 In Purge, Oksa-
nen wrote a “hybrid novel – a mixture of historical and postcolonial novel, a 
historiographic metafiction with elements of documented witness literature” 
(Witt-Brattström 2014). Her third novel, Kun kyyhkyset katosivat (2012, Lola 
Rogers’ English translation When the Doves Disappeared, 2015), concluded her 
“Estonian trilogy”. When the Doves Disappeared is a telling example of blood-
lands fiction, describing Estonian occupation by the Soviet Union and the Nazi 
Germany respectively. It also belongs (together with Purge) to those of Oksa-
nen’s novels in which the author makes use of elements known from thrillers 
and other genres based on suspense (Witt-Brattström 2014). In 2009, Oksanen 
co-edited a collection of essays on Estonian history, Kaiken takana oli pelko
(Fear Was Behind It All), and she re-published the Finnish translation of Sol-
zhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in her Silberfeldt publishing house (2012). 
She has also been a prolific essayist. The most recent result of her essayist 
writing is her last book, Samaan virtaan – Putinin sota naisia vastaan (2023, 
Owen F. Witesman’s English translation Same River, Twice: Putin’s War on 
Women, 2025).
The memories of occupation within the Soviet Union have been used for dif-
ferent purposes and in Oksanen’s case questions of historical accuracy and the 
authenticity of memories have been discussed. We work with Marianne Hirsch’s 
concept of postmemory: according to Hirsch, postmemory is “shaped by the at-
tempt to represent the long-term effects of living in close proximity to the pain, 
� So far, Purge has been Oksanen’s biggest success: both the play and the novel have been widely 
translated, the play has been produced in 15 countries, and the Finnish director Antti Jokinen 
made a film based on the novel in 2012.
138 Viola Parente-Čapková and Riitta Jytilä
depression, and dissociation of persons who have witnessed and survived mas-
sive historical trauma” (Hirsch 2008, 112). In our view, Oksanen’s writings repre-
sent fictionalised postmemory which has travelled across various borders and is 
narrated in a different linguistic context from the one in which the memories 
originate. This fictionalised postmemory draws on both political and aesthetic as-
pects of memorial structures.
The literary genre, here, prose fiction (and in Purge, also drama) guides 
readers’ expectations as well as how they interpret and experience the topic 
discussed. That is why we will briefly look at the reception of Oksanen’s novel 
Purge to illustrate the issue of contested memories within the debates surround-
ing Oksanen’s work. Disputes over the ownership and interpretations of mem-
ory were fierce, especially in the Estonian reception of Purge: Oksanen was ac-
cused of cultural appropriation of others’ (Estonians’) memories. Who has the 
right to look back and define the past? In spite of her multiple (Finnish and Es-
tonian) identities, Oksanen was not considered Estonian enough, neither was 
the novel understood as a realistic representation of the history of Estonia. Be-
fore discussing the novels and their reception, we outline some background for 
this discussion, looking at Oksanen’s production as a part of the construction of 
the memory culture of post-Soviet Europe and in Finland.
Since the beginning of her career, Oksanen has been very critical of how 
Nazi atrocities have dominated both historical, non-fictional and fictional re-
flection on the twentieth-century traumas while Soviet and Communist terror, 
Soviet colonialism and imperialism have been underplayed and the memories 
of these atrocities silenced in the Western perception, including that of Finland 
after the Second World War. Oksanen (2009b) quotes Jehanne M. Gheith who 
has studied oral histories of Gulag survivors. According to Gheith, the Holocaust 
has become the main discourse against which all other traumas are interpreted, 
although in general Western interpretations of trauma do not fit the experien-
ces of Gulag veterans. This incompatibility of some experiences is partly why 
the Gulag has been left out of discussion about the great disasters of the twenti-
eth century. Oksanen has proposed reasons for silencing these memories, from 
Finlandisation (i.e. not opposing USSR politics to maintain Finland’s sover-
eignty) and (self)censorship to ignorance, highlighting the way the misled pub-
lic becomes “useful idiots” in propaganda wars (Oksanen 2016). Indeed, for the 
Estonian protagonist of the novel When the Doves Disappeared, it is hard to be-
lieve that “the peace movement in the West seemed to be a constant source of 
new and productive informants, without any of the problems they had here. 
Sofi Oksanen – Contested Memories in Bloodlands Fiction 139
The enthusiasm of those informants was dumbfounding. You didn’t even have 
to pay them” (Oksanen 2012b, 246).5
When the Doves Disappeared falls, even more strongly than Purge, into the 
genre of bloodlands fiction. The genre is, according to Oziewicz (2016), a part of 
the process of reclaiming the history of countries and people who suffered wars, 
starvation and annexations, and whose stories and memories have remained un-
told. That is why bloodlands fiction is to be considered an important genre of 
trauma fiction. Genre definitions aim to frame reader expectations and to estab-
lish the phenomenon and its significance in culture (Oziewicz 2016). The works 
on remembering the Soviet terror have been called Gulag literature. Oksanen has 
claimed this concept for her literary production applying not in the strict sense of 
lagernaja literatura, i.e. literature that deals directly with the Gulag prison camps 
(see e.g. Gullotta 2011), but more broadly. Most Gulag literature comes from Rus-
sia and the former Soviet Union and has been written mostly by former Gulag 
prisoners or by writers who have been affected (directly or indirectly) by Soviet 
repressions.6
Western memory of the Holocaust and Central and Eastern European mem-
ory of Communist dictatorship are still often considered as separate, but this bi-
nary collapsed along with the Soviet Union as the transnational forms of memory 
developed (Erll 2011a, 4–5). Only recently, more studies have juxtaposed the liter-
atures of the Gulag and of Nazi concentration camps (Toker 2019). After the fall of 
the Communist regime, it became possible to speak openly about Soviet colonisa-
tion and bring up the memories which had been silenced by official history 
within the “second world” (Kōresaar, Kuutma and Lauk 2009, 329; Annus 2018). 
Memory cultures, theories and conceptualisations of them are always historically 
shaped, and as Blacker and Etkind (2013) remind us, when these cultures and the-
5 “Toisaalta lännen rauhanliikkeestä tuntui löytyvän koko ajan uusia hyödyllisiä informantteja 
eikä heillä ollut samanlaisia ongelmia kuin täällä. Heidän innokkuutensa oli mykistävää, heille ei 
edes maksettu” (Oksanen 2012a, 299).
� Memory of national and ethnic groups from the territories dominated or occupied by Russia 
and the Soviet Union have been used in fiction and nonfiction, history or essayistic writing re-
cently. Finland has focused on Karelians and Ingrians, peoples from the border areas between 
Finland and Russia. Another Finnish writer, Riikka Pelo (b. 1972), has also defined her Finlandia- 
prizewinning novel Jokapäiväinen elämämme (Our Daily Life, 2013) as “Gulag literature”. Pelo 
tells the story of Marina Tsvetajeva and her daughter Ariadna Efron during the 1920s and 1930s 
in her novel, which is close to Oksanen’s in the sense that it thematises gender aspects of the 
Stalinist repressions and focuses on the relationships between generations of women. These simi-
larities and genre definitions highlight a traumatic memory culture that has been difficult and, 
for many, impossible to voice before the collapse of the Soviet Union. See also Marja Sorvari in 
this volume.
140 Viola Parente-Čapková and Riitta Jytilä
ories travel in Eastern Europe the concepts of memory studies change. In Eastern 
Europe, memory remains distorted since a clear account with the past was never 
made, unlike as Germany did with the Holocaust and Second World War. The 
trauma paradigm and the idea that some things are too terrible to remember is 
central to Holocaust research, whereas in Eastern Europe the past has been re-
membered privately but experiences could not be shared publicly (Blacker and 
Etkind 2013, 5). The Soviet Union was cut off from this memory culture in the 
West, but with the help of many of its supporters abroad it managed to control its 
image to some extent. In the absence of evidence many failed to condemn Stalin 
(Snyder 2010, 89) and the crimes committed by the Communist totalitarian re-
gimes.
Oksanen (2009a) has stressed, in the same spirit as Oziewicz, the importance 
of telling untold stories that cannot be compared to the “canonised” Holocaust 
stories and Western memory of the Second World War. According to Oksanen 
(2009a, 16), the Estonian experience is so different from Western Holocaust mem-
ories that for Estonians it has been impossible to recognise their own experience 
in public discourses and narratives. Oksanen’s comment should be interpreted 
not as a promotion of competitive suffering but in the light of the postcolonial 
current within trauma theory. The postcolonial approach has been introduced 
into memory theory by Michael Rothberg (2009). Rothberg specialised in Holo-
caust memory, and he has criticized the very notion of competitive memory, in 
which remembering certain parts of the past would exclude or rule out other 
memories. Instead of competition, Rothberg argues, memories work multidirec-
tionally, bringing various histories into relation without erasing their historical 
uniqueness and differences. With the concept of multidirectional memory, Roth-
berg has highlighted the need to rethink the intersecting histories of violence and 
memory cultures and enable a new kind of social, political and cultural imagina-
tion. (Rothberg 2009, 3–4.)7 Oksanen herself says that she has been motivated to 
raise the Gulag out of the shadow of the Holocaust without diminishing the hor-
rors of the latter. In her production, particularly in her “Estonian trilogy” (2003– 
2012), Oksanen deals with the impact of gendered and other violence on the mem-
ory of individuals and communities.
In this respect, it is viable to frame Oksanen as one woman prose writer from 
Central and Eastern Europe (see Parente-Čapková 2013, 2023),8 including the 
bloodlands that experienced Soviet occupation. Many works on history from a 
7 For more on trauma within the postcolonial framework, see for example Craps (2013).
8 Mostly male writers who had emigrated from the countries occupied or semi-occupied by the 
Soviet Union brought up these issues for many decades, including Milan Kundera (for the com-
parison between his and Oksanen’s works see Lehtimäki 2022). However, though Kniha smíchu a 
Sofi Oksanen – Contested Memories in Bloodlands Fiction 141
women’s perspective originate from these countries. Women have been publish-
ing often semiautobiographical memories or (fictional) postmemories of Soviet 
terror including the deportations from the Baltic countries and other parts of the 
Soviet Union, like in Ar balles kurpēm Sibīrijas sniegos (2001, Margita Gailitis’ En-
glish translation With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows) by the Latvian activist and 
politician Sandra Kalniete. Similarly to Oksanen, Kalniete has argued that “behind 
the Iron Curtain the Soviet regime continued to commit genocide against the peo-
ples of Eastern Europe and, indeed, against its own people [. . .] the two totalitar-
ian regimes – Nazism and Communism – were equally criminal” (Kalniete 2004).9
The Czech writer Kateřina Tučková, who has openly appreciated Sofi Oksanen’s oeu-
vre, has also written about women’s – mostly traumatic – experiences under both 
Nazi and Communist dictatorship in the former Czechoslovakia, which did not belong 
to Snyder’s bloodlands but also experienced the double occupation. In her – also 
widely translated – novels, Tučková would take up various controversial subjects like 
expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia after the Second World War, 
Vyhnání Gerty Schnirch (2009, The Expulsion of Gerta Schnirch, Véronique Firkusny’s 
English translation Gerta, 2021), always from women’s point of view. Tučková has also 
used the technique of attaching more or less factual or fictitious archival documents 
to her novels, including those of the secret police in Žítkovské bohyně (2012, Andrew 
Oakland’s English translation The Last Goddess, 2022). Similar trends in women’s writ-
ing can be found in Poland, Ukraine, Baltic states and other countries.
These historical novels by women, some of which fall into the category of 
bloodlands fiction and use techniques known from microhistory, reflect on rela-
tionships between women, be it matrilineage or sisterhood, literal or metaphor-
ical. That is also the case of Nora Ikstena’s novel on twentieth-century Latvian 
history, Mātes piens (2016), meaning literally “mother’s milk” but translated into 
English in 2018 by Margita Gailitis as Soviet Milk. Such a need for exoticisation 
shows that even during the last decade, a historical novel conveying women’s 
experience from Latvia can hardly have a “universal” title. The “general” map 
of cultural memory (cf. Meusburger et al. 2011) has not included the countries 
placed for decades under the Communist rule, still subjected to the practices of 
Euro-Orientalism (e.g. Kuldkepp 2023). The situation has changed after the war 
in Ukraine began in 2022, but only slightly.
zapomnění (1979, Le Livre du rire et de l’oubli, the Book of Laughter and Forgetting) shows the 
perversities of totalitarianism, it can hardly be called Gulag literature or bloodlands fiction.
9 Sandra Kalniete’s (2004) speech “Old Europe, New Europe” is now available only in the Inter-
net Archive. It has been quoted in research on cultural memory, see e.g. Leggewie (2011, 127), and 
Troebst (2011, 149).
142 Viola Parente-Čapková and Riitta Jytilä
2 Transgenerational Memory and Women’s 
Trauma in Purge
Next, we will consider how travelling memories become contested in Oksanen’s 
most famous novel Purge (Oksanen 2008a; Oksanen 2008b), which focuses on the 
recent history of Estonia and the burden of intentional and unintentional for-
getting handed down to generations. In Purge, the persecution of women seem to 
form a continuum: while in the 1940s, the anti-heroine named Aliide had to suffer 
sexual torture by the Russian occupants of Estonia and their local helpers, in the 
1990s she is being reminded of her traumatic past by her great niece Zara, who 
became a victim of sex trafficking and, all of a sudden, turns up at Aliide’s coun-
try home. Regardless of geographical location or historical period, both women 
have to survive in violent circumstances and both end up committing crimes 
themselves. In the novel, Oksanen thematises gender-based and sexual violence 
with their aftermath – distressing memories, gnawing uncertainty and guilt. In 
the world created by Oksanen in Purge, one can never know what to say aloud, 
as stated in the motto by the Estonian poet and politician Paul-Erik Rummo with 
which the novel begins: “The walls have ears, and the ears have beautiful ear-
rings”.10
The novel is set on several different time levels, including the aftermath of 
the collapse of the Soviet Union when the archives opened. Its narration moves 
back and forth through time, and its literary structure is fragmented. It includes 
fictional documents and official Soviet intelligence archives. The depiction of the 
milieu and main characters, Aliide and Zara, is still very realistic and the narra-
tion emphasises the sense of authenticity, inviting the reader to imagine “what it 
feels like”. At times, the narration is almost naturalistic in the sense of highlight-
ing the raw and “ugly” aspects of perceiving reality, such as a disgusting blowfly 
buzzing in the ceiling (Oksanen 2008b, 5) and raspberry jam spread over a pan-
cake that looks like it is clotted with blood (183).11 During the war, everyday 
chores set the rhythm of the day and time passes in the uncertainty of the future; 
the characters ponder the German occupation and whether it will remain a per-
manent state or whether Aliide’s parents will return home. At the end of the war, 
Soviet deportations of Estonians to Siberia accelerated and when “the last of the 
farms was roped into the kolkhozy, plain talk vanished between the lines” (Oksa-
10 “Seinillä on korvat ja korvissa kauniit korvarenkaat” (the translations into English from 
Purge are by Lola Rogers, see Oksanen 2008b).
11 “inhottava, likaojassa kasvanut raatokärpänen lentelee katon rajassa” (11) “tummat vadelmat 
hillopurkissa näyttävät hyytyneeltä vereltä” (Oksanen 2008a, 179).
Sofi Oksanen – Contested Memories in Bloodlands Fiction 143
nen 2008b, 208).12 The remembrance of “free Estonia” lives among the people but 
is being erased from their memory and continues to live only in certain details as 
women’s food or healing recipes passed on to the following generations. The male 
characters in the novel either comply with the occupants’ regime or choose the 
resistance, as does Aliide’s brother-in-law Hans Pekk, the husband of Aliide’s sis-
ter Ingel. He joins the “Forest Brethren”, i.e. the Estonian resistance who were 
hiding in Estonian woods for decades after the Soviet occupation of the 1940s. 
Hans deserted from the German army to fight for free Estonia and is chased by 
the Soviet occupants. The sisters hide him in their family house, in a “secret 
chamber” not visible from outside. The reader of Purge can follow Hans’ thoughts 
and hopes for free Estonia by means of his diary entries throughout the book. 
Oksanen has included Hans’ diary entries as well as excerpts from (fictional) se-
cret intelligence documents. By using seemingly documentary material, Oksanen 
takes a stance on how history is written and whose perspectives and discourse 
remain in the history books.
The novel focuses on two female characters, Aliide and Zara, and their mu-
tual relationship. When Aliide and Zara meet, Aliide is an elderly woman who 
has lived through the Soviet occupation of Estonia. She lives in the Estonian coun-
tryside, finds Zara in her yard and offers her shelter. Zara’s arrival in Aliide’s 
home is not a coincidence since Zara is Aliide’s great niece (being the daughter of 
Linda, who is herself the daughter of Aliide’s sister Ingel). Zara, who is now a vic-
tim of sex trafficking, was told about her great aunt living in the Estonian coun-
tryside, and she uses Aliide’s home as a refuge while running away from her cap-
tors. Both women have been sexually violated and this brings their lives together. 
When Zara arrives at Aliide’s house she has a photo of Aliide and Aliide’s sister 
Ingel and she wants to find “a story that she hadn’t been told” (Oksanen 2008b, 
81)13 as a child. Zara’s mother Linda was exposed to sexual violence and torture 
by the Soviet interrogators and their Estonian helpers, along with Aliide and 
Ingel, while being interrogated about Hans’ whereabouts, which they never re-
vealed. They never talked about the sexual assaults they had endured. In the 
novel, the (silenced) motif of sexual violence and the memory of it unites three 
generations of women.
Seeing Zara triggers bodily memories in Aliide. From Zara’s gestures, Aliide 
recognises that she has also experienced violence: “But the girl was so clearly ter-
rified that Aliide was, too. Good God, how her body remembered that feeling, re-
12 “kun viimeisetkin talot hirtettiin kolhooseihin, suorat sanat katosivat rivien väleihin” (Oksa-
nen 2008a, 203).
13 “tarinan, jota hänelle ei ollut kerrottu” (Oksanen 2008a, 83).
144 Viola Parente-Čapková and Riitta Jytilä
membered it so well that she caught the feeling as soon as she saw it in a strang-
er’s eyes” (Oksanen 2008b, 79).14 However, Aliide’s memory of her own traumas is 
still too painful and Aliide has been used to erasing it from her mind for decades. 
By turning in her sister Ingel, who was, as a consequence, deported to Siberia, 
Aliide tries to forget and “cancel” the violence experienced and shared by women 
in her family (and, indeed, to have her sister’s husband Hans, with whom she is 
madly, secretly in love, for herself). In blanking out the memories of sexual tor-
ture, Aliide could become a respectable woman and “that was important, no one 
would ever know” (Oksanen 2008b, 168).15 When victims and perpetrators cannot 
be simply separated, it becomes difficult to talk about the suffering and remem-
ber it.
As David Clarke (2015, 227) points out, the way Oksanen deals with victim-
hood is most complex; she “actually focuses chiefly on Estonian nationals and ex-
plores their complex experience of suffering and complicity in the perpetration 
of suffering, which cannot be reduced to any schematization”. Moreover, it is sug-
gested that Aliide herself was forced to participate in sexual torture of her seven- 
year-old niece Linda. Even if she tries to forget, Aliide has to face the memory of 
extreme violence numerous times, for example when visiting a dentist in 1952: “It 
was the same man. In that room. The same hairy hands. There in the basement of 
the town hall, where Aliide had vanished, where she just wanted to get out alive. 
But the only thing left alive was the shame” (Oksanen 2008b, 254).16 The deictic 
expression “in that room” emphasises the experiential nature of the scene. In the 
Gulag context, the effects of colonisation were primarily psychological: internal-
isation of Soviet ideology sneakily crept into all thinking (Kelertas 2006, 6). Postco-
lonial theory makes visible the suffering associated with power and injustice (Ke-
lertas 2006, 8), and Purge brings out these ambiguous processes, such as 
internalisation of self-hatred visible in both Aliide’s and Zara’s characters. Oksa-
nen herself emphasises the closeness of her production to postcolonial perspec-
tives and post-Gulag literature. The novel is about the experiences that official 
history would not recognise and acknowledge, thus affecting the individual’s abil-
ity to remember and build a future.
14 “Mutta tytön kauhu oli niin kirkasta, että Aliiide tunsi sen yhtäkkiä itsessään. Hyvä Jumala, 
miten hänen ruumiinsa muistikin sen tunteen, muisti niin hyvin, että oli altis sille heti, kun näki 
sen vieraan ihmisen silmissä” (Oksanen 2008a, 82).
15 “Ja se oli tärkeää. Että kukaan ei koskaan saisi tietää” (Oksanen 2008a, 165).
16 “Sama mies. Siinä huoneessa. Samat karvaiset kädet. Siinä kunnantalon kellarissa, jossa 
Aliide oli kadonnut ja josta hän halusi selvitä hengissä, vaikka ainoa mitä oli jäänyt henkiin, oli 
häpeä” (Oksanen 2008a, 250).
Sofi Oksanen – Contested Memories in Bloodlands Fiction 145
Constant suspicion of and by other people creates an atmosphere of uncer-
tainty and fear. In the novel, the fly that dominates the opening scene becomes a 
multifaceted symbol of all the paranoia, uncertainty and violence caused by So-
viet terror. Aliide’s story begins: “Aliide Truu stared at the fly, and the fly stared 
back” (Oksanen 2008b, 4).17 The fly is associated with Aliide’s disgust towards her 
own body and with the shared shame of sexual violence (see Lappalainen 2011). It 
can be seen more broadly as part of the literary memory culture of the Gulag, 
where animal characters were used to imagine human suffering (cf. Etkind 2009, 
658). On the one hand, Aliide is a/the fly, the shameful object of violence. As we 
learn at the strongly ironic end of the novel, she was herself a part of the Soviet 
intelligence under the code name “Fly”, or “Kärbes” in Estonian.
One chapter in Purge is named “Kärsimykset pesivät muistissa” or literally 
“Suffering Nests in One’s Memory” (Oksanen 2008b, 249).18 In the novel, after all, 
the possibility of remembering depends on the connection between women, al-
though they are unable to tell each other about their experiences and their com-
munication works largely by interpreting non-verbal signs. Aliide’s encounter 
with Zara forces her to confront the burden of the past. Aliide recognises Zara’s 
experiences; memories are embodied and silent, but shared. The title of the novel 
can be easily read as referring to Stalinist purges, but it is equivocal and can be 
interpreted in many ways. The associations with dirt and filth are repeated in the 
novel referring to gendered experience of the Communist purges, giving the word 
“purge”, associated with purification, a bitterly ironic meaning. At the very end of 
the novel, it is suggested that Aliide might kill Zara’s victimizers, the ex-KGB 
agents, who became sex traffickers under the new political order of the early 
1990s. Hence Aliide – and with her, the reader – might experience a kind of puri-
fying katharsis when burning the villains’ bodies together with her house and the 
memories attached to it. These last passages of Aliide’s and Zara’s story are, how-
ever, written in the conditional: “If the girl made it home, she would tell Ingel 
that the land she lost long ago was wait[ing] for her” (Oksanen 2008b, 355).19 The 
major theme of Purge remains the depiction of the difficult and impossible 
choices, as well as complexities of intimate family history and transgenerational 
traumatic memory in the face of atrocities in the bloodlands.
17 “Aliide Truu tuijotti kärpästä ja kärpänen tuijotti takaisin” (Oksanen 2008a, 10).
�� The title’s literal translation would be “Suffering Nests in One’s Memory” but it was translated 
as “Suffering Washes Memory Clean”. In Finnish, the verbs pesiä (nest) and pestä (wash) are very 
close to each other and may have get mixed up in the process of translation. The English transla-
tion sounds very ironic, but the original phrase lacks irony altogether. 
19 “Jos tyttö selviäisi, hän kertoisi Ingelille, että täällä ne kauan sitten menetetyt maat odottavat” 
(Oksanen 2008a, 344).
146 Viola Parente-Čapková and Riitta Jytilä
3 Contested Authority of Experience: 
Transnational Memories and the Multifaceted 
Transnational Reception of Purge
Sofi Oksanen’s own experiences in Estonia have created the impression of auto-
biographical memory and intimate, authentic experiences that seemed to offer 
credibility and competence to tell the stories of the Soviet terror. Sanna Lehtonen 
(2017) argues that autobiographical memory plays a central role in Oksanen’s pro-
duction, which has caused disputes over the ownership of memories. As a public 
figure, Oksanen’s ethnic credibility in the media is built on authenticity. Her own 
childhood memories of Estonia and stories she heard about the Soviet occupation 
have been creating a public image according to which Oksanen has the right and 
competence to talk about Estonian history (Lehtonen 2017, 265–266). Oksanen’s 
own life and image is thus closely intertwined with the controversies around her 
works. In the following paragraphs, we look at the ways Oksanen’s competence 
has been discussed mainly in Finland and in Estonia after the publication of 
Purge, tackling also the Russian reception (see Lappalainen 2013; Jytilä 2022a; Pa-
rente-Čapková 2022 and forthcoming). The reception of the novel in other coun-
tries is no less interesting, from Germany and France to Italy and the English- 
speaking world (see esp. Lappalainen 2013).
Reception of Purge in Finland has been very complimentary. After the liter-
ary prizes awarded to Puhdistus, critics would analyse Oksanen’s background 
and characterise her e.g. as a “bilingual” and “bicultural” writer, calling for “rec-
ognising” and “acknowledging” her multilingual and multicultural background 
(Grönstrand 2010). In Finland, Purge has been studied in the light of narrative the-
ory, moral philosophy, ethical issues, affects such as shame and trauma. The ethi-
cal value of the novel has been seen in its narrative ambivalence and its versatile 
expression which utilises myth, from the Bible to Greek tragedy (Nystrand 2012; 
Lehtimäki 2022). Jytilä (2022a, 2022b) has placed the novel within the framework 
of trauma studies and in relation to historical fiction in Finland. Purge has been 
compared to literary classics in English by authors such as Toni Morrison (Lehti-
mäki 2010, 41–42). Päivi Lappalainen (2011) offered one of the first feminist read-
ings of the novel, concentrating on shame. All in all, literary critics in Finland 
would not question Oksanen’s competence, authenticity of the memories and ex-
periences she draws on, or accuracy and “correctness” of the historical events she 
refers to in her work.
The reception of Purge in Estonia has been contradictory. The immediate re-
actions were most positive: Oksanen was named the “Estonian Person of the 
Year” in 2009 and received prizes and other awards. However, the tone changed 
Sofi Oksanen – Contested Memories in Bloodlands Fiction 147
during the following years, as noted by Eneken Laanes (2012) and Päivi Lappalai-
nen (2013), who have studied the reception of Purge in Estonia. The criticism con-
centrated on the lack of authenticity and the act of appropriation, if not theft, of 
Estonian memories and experiences. For the Estonian poet and politician Jan Ka-
plinski (2010), the novel “pretends to be a realistic story about life in Soviet Esto-
nia in the second half of the twentieth century, and seems to have been accepted 
as such by the public in Europe and America”. Kaplinski (2010) himself took a 
very critical stance towards Purge, openly contesting Oksanen’s fictionalized post-
memory:
She is selling something that pretends to be our life, but isn’t. Our life in the Soviet Union 
was not a horror story! Of course, there were many horrific episodes, years of terror and 
counter-terror, but as a whole, we lived a life that was often quite interesting and funny. I 
cannot approve the idea that my life, the life of my parents, my friends, my colleagues was 
not a life worth living, that we felt we were prisoners in a large prison camp. The USSR 
after the death of Stalin was not a prison camp. It was a lousy country, but there were and 
there are many much more lousy countries in the world.
Kaplinski’s criticism is telling: he constructs Purge as a novel aiming at construct-
ing a testimony of collective memory, and exempts himself from that very “collec-
tive”. In Estonia, debates on the value of Oksanen’s novel also touched on the 
commercial potential of travelling trauma and the problem when remembering 
becomes consumption. Oksanen was accused of deploying and capitalising on 
other people’s suffering and other people’s memories. At the same time, as Laanes 
(2012) has pointed out, Purge confirms that literature as a medium of collective 
remembrance is a phenomenon of reception and that popular success is a prereq-
uisite for attracting transnational attention to issues of historical injustice, espe-
cially in marginal historical contexts.
The (Estonian) national perspective on Purge reinforces the understanding 
that in the process of creating fictional postmemories, historical specificity may 
be compromised. How we deal with specificity in remembering historical injus-
tice and suffering in the public arena and in literature is a question still open for 
discussion. Kaljundi, Laanes, and Pikkanen (2015) have stated that one of the most 
important tasks of the independent Estonian memory policy has been to maintain 
continuity with the interwar republic and promote the Estonian perspective on 
the Second World War and the Soviet era. This rewriting of history has not been 
easy and the success of Oksanen’s work indicates the potential of fiction in deal-
ing with the difficult past (Kaljundi, Laanes, and Pikkanen 2015, 53–54.) Neverthe-
less, Oksanen’s right to discuss history and memory as well as the “correctness” 
with which she constructed them have been questioned.
148 Viola Parente-Čapková and Riitta Jytilä
The aforementioned Estonian literary critic Eneken Laanes has been coming 
back to Oksanen and Purge during the last decade and a half, concentrating, 
lately, on the issue of memory. In her article “Born translated memories: Trans-
cultural memorial forms, domestication and foreignisation”, Laanes (2021, 41) 
“draws on translation studies, world literature studies and receptions studies to 
describe the domesticating and foreignising effects of memories that are ‘born 
translated’ and the ways they are received”. She focuses on the immensely impor-
tant issue of translation, both linguistic and cultural, discussing Purge as “a trans-
lation of memories of Soviet state terror through the transcultural memorial 
form of war rape and its foreignising effects in the local context of remembering 
of these events” (2021, 41). This article is more nuanced than the earlier Estonian 
reception (including Laanes’ own) but remains very critical: though Laanes (2021, 
51) admits that Oksanen’s Purge “opened up an important debate about the expe-
riences of women under Soviet state terror in the largely male-dominated mem-
ory cultures of WWII and the Stalinist period in Eastern Europe”, she blames Ok-
sanen for representing “sexual violence against women in post-WWII Estonia by 
subsuming it under the transcultural memorial form of war rape and thereby de-
historising it” (Laanes 2021, 52). Moreover, Laanes indicates that Oksanen’s “born 
translated memories” can lead to “simplification of local history and the implan-
tation of certain homogenising memorial forms” (Laanes 2021, 52).
Ways of questioning the author’s authority, the authenticity of the memories 
she works with and the accuracy of the historical events depicted in her novel(s) 
have also appeared in Oksanen’s Russian reception, though rather differently 
and, obviously, for different purposes. Oksanen has been presented as a writer 
drawing on “second” or “third hand” experience she heard from her Estonian 
grandmother. Reviewers point out the “historical errors” in Oksanen’s novels; 
some even question the fact that Estonia was occupied by Russia/the Soviet Union 
(montrealex 2011; Žemoitelite 2015; lustdevildoll 2017; see Parente-Čapková forth-
coming). In Russia, Oksanen’s works have received a most varied reception, from 
competent analyses of her works carried out in a positive tone to fierce attacks, 
ultimately labelling her as “mad” and “pathologically” Russophobic, attacking her 
personality (“lesbian”, “raging feminist”) and ridiculing her looks (e.g. Anony-
mous 2024; see Parente-Čapková forthcoming).
Sofi Oksanen – Contested Memories in Bloodlands Fiction 149
4 When the Doves Disappeared: Twisted Memories 
in the Bloodlands
In the essays on Estonian history that Oksanen edited, the Estonian journalist 
I. A. Masso (2009, 215) reminds readers (including those of Oksanen’s novels) that 
Estonia gained its independence at a time when it was fashionable to celebrate 
the deconstruction of all stories, proclaim the death of grand narratives and see 
all truths as relative. This trend has been rather problematic for those Estonians 
(and, of course, others) who, after half a century of Sovietisation, were able to 
search for truth about their twentieth-century history, to formulate new narra-
tives and revisit counter-narratives. Moreover, history is still a highly contested 
field in Estonia and, as there are groups claiming the nonexistence of the Holo-
caust, certain groups in the former Soviet Union have kept claiming that the Bal-
tic states were never occupied, as is obvious in Oksanen’s Russian reception. In 
Putin’s Russia, this version of history has gradually become the official truth.
Falsification of memory and history is the central theme of the novel When 
the Doves Disappeared (2012b; see also Oksanen 2009b), which refers to both Holo-
caust and Gulag. The depiction of the Nazi occupation of the Baltic states includes 
the horrors at Klooga, a subcamp of the Vaivara concentration camp complex in 
the Harju county, Estonia. Subsequently, the novel deals with the Soviet occupa-
tion after the war which makes it an example of bloodlands fiction par excel-
lence. According to Snyder (2010), the double occupation was a difficult and com-
plicated situation in which many people were operating on opposite sides at 
different stages and compromises had to be made. Again, When the Doves Disap-
peared is a historical novel which has been read against the “real” historical 
events. After the colourful reception of Purge, the Estonian translator of the novel 
Jan Kaus expressed his wish that the readers of the Doves would not concentrate 
on whether the historical events, times and places in the novel were “correct” but 
rather on the basic motifs behind people’s behaviour, namely man’s relationship 
to power, described by Oksanen in her work (Suomi ulkomailla-sivusto 2012). This 
caution sounds interesting especially vis à vis the main character of the novel, 
Edgar Parts, whose job becomes precisely the falsification of history. He is an as-
piring writer, though he appears more as a mockery of a creative writer. As 
Markku Lehtimäki (2022, 224) has pointed out, from the narratological point of 
view, the novel is partly composed as a collage, which is suggested also by the 
cover picture of the Finnish original where a man’s (presumably Parts’) face is 
being composed by cutting and pasting, showing various instruments to help the 
process: scissors, tweezers and glue. Moreover, the collage of the man’s face 
150 Viola Parente-Čapková and Riitta Jytilä
seems to be placed on his head as a mask.20 The symbolic meaning of the picture 
points to Parts’ technique of composing his works and of constructing his identity; 
hence history, memory and the author’s self are created by “cutting and pasting” 
various sources.
The novel is rather exacting for the reader, since this Oksanen’s work is 
based on hints, allusions and gaps that have to be filled, but it centres on two 
men and two women. This is a different setup than in Oksanen’s previous novels, 
which we have seen were dominated by literal or metaphorical matrilineage and 
sisterhood. Nevertheless, as in the two preceding novels in the Estonian trilogy, 
this one juxtaposes timelines (here mainly 1941–1944 and 1963–1966). Similarly to 
Purge, we have a melodramatic contrast between the patriotic resistance hero 
with a symbolic name, Roland Simson (again, one of the “Forest Brethren”), and 
his cousin and evil opposite, Edgar Parts. Edgar loyally serves the Estonian patri-
ots, the Germans and the Soviets in succession, pursuing his career at any cost. 
Like the devoted Estonian patriot Hans Pekk in Purge, Roland also keeps a kind of 
a diary, which Edgar finds in the 1960s, after having been assigned to write a pro-
pagandistic work about Nazi crimes. He becomes an established apparatchik and 
embraces the task to create history about the evils of the “Hitlerian occupation”.
Ironically enough, in his notes, Roland wanted to keep records of Soviet/Rus-
sian crimes for possible trials in the utopian free future. For Edgar, Roland’s be-
lief is a mere illusion, indeed, a delusion. Another contrast between Roland and 
Edgar is that while Roland is “straight” in various senses of the word, Edgar is a 
gay man who never comes out of the closet. Eventually, he marries Roland’s be-
loved Juudit, only to hide his homosexuality. At the end of the novel, we learn 
that Edgar behaved brutally and mercilessly not only in the war and during the 
post-war totalitarian regime but that he also murdered Roland’s fiancé Rosalie to 
prevent her from revealing his homosexuality. The reader does not get much in-
formation about Rosalie. Juudit, pursuant to her biblical name, is a controversial 
character. The true heroine of the novel becomes Roland’s daughter Evelin, who 
resumes her father’s resilience when taking part in a student demonstration for-
bidden by the Soviet regime in the 1960s. When she learns that she is in danger 
and the secret police are after her, she avoids going home so as not to jeopardise 
her parents.
Parts, who, again rather ironically, functions as the unreliable narrator in the 
novel, gets the job of “correcting history” and inventing memory because there is 
�� The cover of the Estonian translation (Kui tuvid kadusid, translated by Jan Kaus; Tallinn: Var-
rak, 2012) is identical with the original (Finnish), while the covers of the British and American 
editions of the English translation are different (When the Doves Disappeared, translated by Lola 
Rogers; London: Atlantic Books; New York: Knopf; Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2015).
Sofi Oksanen – Contested Memories in Bloodlands Fiction 151
“no greater magician with words” than him (Oksanen 2012b, 75).21 The discrimi-
nate nature of the Soviet terror, missing lists of victims or executioners and lack 
of adequate memorials enable manipulations of memory. These manipulations 
have brought about perverted forms of remembrance, such as “magical histori-
cism” (Etkind 2009, 632; Oziewicz 2016) that works in a situation when large-scale 
ignorance disabled the truth and instigated paranoia. The ways of falsification 
and manipulation become so monstrous and absurd that the most viable trope to 
deal with them is irony. In the novel, irony functions on various levels:
Parts remembered well how when the hammer and sickle was hoisted up the flagpole at 
Pikk Hermann on September 22, 1944, the flag that was taken down wasn’t Hitler’s – it was 
Estonia’s own flag. Five days of independence. Five days of freedom. Parts had seen the flag 
himself, although in his manuscript he naturally didn’t mention it, because the Soviet Union 
had liberated Estonia from the Hitlerists. (Oksanen 2012b, 258)22
The theme of falsification of memory and history is intertwined with the back-
ground outlined on the former web pages of Like, the Finnish publisher of Oksa-
nen’s novel. After the book came out, Like provided information about historical 
characters and events that had inspired Oksanen. The material included an inter-
view with Maarja Talgre, daughter of a member of the Estonian resistance, Leo 
Talgre (1919–1944), who died during his fight for freedom. The father sent his 
wife to safety in Sweden, where the daughter was born and where she became a 
journalist. She wrote a reportage novel, Leo – Ett estniskt öde (Leo – An Estonian 
Destiny, 1990), about her late father’s life. In the Like interview, she remembers 
the Cold War, when she read an article in the newspaper Kodumaa (patria, native 
country), sent to émigrés by the KGB.23 The same newspaper is mentioned in Ok-
sanen’s novel. The official Soviet Estonian propaganda very convincingly depicted 
Leo Talgre as a sadistic war criminal and a fascist, in the spirit of the old Soviet 
habit to label all opponents of Soviet totalitarianism as “fascists” without the 
slightest idea of the historical meaning of the word. Though she did not believe a 
word of what she read, Maarja Talgre felt pain and agony. Many years later, 
21 “häntä parempaa ‘sanamaagikkoa’ ei ole” (the translations from When the Doves Disappeared 
into English are by Lola Rogers; see Oksanen 2012a, 93).
22 “Parts muisti itse hyvin, että kun 22. syyskuuta 1944 sirppi ja vasara olivat nousseet Pitkän 
Hermannin salkoon, alas laskettava lippu ei ollut Hitlerin, vaan Viron oma. Viiden päivän itsenäi-
syys. Viiden päivän vapaus. Parts oli nähnyt lipun itse, vaikka käsikirjoituksessa hän ei sitä luon-
nollisestikaan voisi mainita, koska Neuvostoliitto oli vapauttanut Viron hitleristeistä.” (Oksanen 
2012a, 314).
�� The material, including the interview with Maarja Talgre, is no longer available on the Like 
website. We would like to thank the publishing manager at Like, Jaakko Launimaa, for providing 
us with the valuable information.
152 Viola Parente-Čapková and Riitta Jytilä
when she met the author of the article and asked him why he could ever write 
those aggressive and hateful lies about her father, she experienced the Arendtian 
“banality of evil”. The author said: ‘“That’s how people had to write back then. It 
was part and parcel of writing’” (Talgre 2014, 109; see also Parente-Čapková 
2013).24 This banality and complete lack of self-reflection evokes Rothberg’s (2000, 
12) concept of traumatic, which is prosaic, quotidian and extreme. In the novel, 
this is indicated by various details such as Edgar’s memories of prisoners being 
tortured by burning iron: “Parts didn’t like irons [. . .] For years afterward the 
glow of the iron still carried the reek of burning flesh [. . .] He was a sensible 
man – there was no need to threaten him. Let them use the iron on unimportant 
people” (Oksanen 2012b, 241).25
When the Doves Disappeared analyses the psychological mechanisms that 
produce writing like the texts by Parts. There is both the “obligatory” element (“it 
was part and parcel of writing”) and a deeply subjective one. In passages describ-
ing Edgar’s “creative process” while he is writing the book depicting the “horrify-
ing crimes”, “fascist conspiracies and chilling acts of murder” and “bestial forms 
of torture” committed by the “Estonian evildoers” (Oksanen 2012b, 74)26 we wit-
ness authorial ecstasy that comrade Parts, as the narrator calls him in the second 
half of the novel, experiences when he gets carried away by the rhetoric of the 
hateful propaganda. This ecstatic gratification is boosted by the pleasure of fabu-
lation felt by Parts when he is creating the myth about himself and re-creates his 
memories and his whole life story which, as he hopes, will end up in school text-
books. Parts reaches the climax when he chooses his cousin Roland (whose diary 
entries he appropriates for his own purposes) as the main target of lies and half- 
24 Maarja Talgre has also written an essay about the issue (Talgre 2014). In it, she discloses the 
name of her father’s slanderer, Andrus Roolaht, and emphasizes that in his defamatory piece 
from 1965 (called “Leo Talgre’s ‘Meteoric Flight’”, “Leo Talgre ‘tähelend’” in the original Estonian), 
he mentions “Leo Talgre’s diary” (Talgre 2014, 108). Maarja Talgre had no knowledge of her fa-
ther’s diaries, until they were found in Canada, by “a good person” who read her book (Talgre 
2014, 110). Maarja Talgre was not certain that Roolaht had really read Leo’s diaries, but suspected 
that he might have: “The whole story ‘Leo Talgre’s ‘Meteoric Flight’’ is, of course, a falsification 
and loathsome propaganda to me. What makes it even more dreadful is that Roolaht is a skilled 
KGB propagandist. It looks like he has some genuine documents at his disposal, but he uses them 
like raisins in his propaganda cake. He distorts facts and fantasizes in between” (Talgre 2014, 
110).
25 “Parts ei pitänyt silitysraudoista [. . .] Silitysraudan hehku toi vuosienkin jälkeen nenään käry-
ävän lihan hajun [. . .] Hän oli järkevä mies, ei häntä olisi tarvinnut uhkailla, silitysraudoilla 
piinattiin vain mitättömyyksiä” (Oksanen 2012a, 293).
26 [kykenivätkään] “kammottaviin rikoksiin”, [paljastetaan] “fasistisia salajuonia ja karmivia 
murhatekoja”, [lukea todistuksia] “eläimellisistä kidutusmuodoista” (Oksanen 2012a, 92).
Sofi Oksanen – Contested Memories in Bloodlands Fiction 153
truths. He gets excited by affective engagement in the hateful propaganda as well 
as by his controversial emotions, fears, megalomania and personal interests. His 
fanatical hatred for Roland is motivated, apart from jealousy, by Roland’s ex-
treme passion for truth, perceived as a major threat by Edgar who had internal-
ised the mode of living a lie. In order to persuade his reader, and perhaps also 
himself, he uses – mostly very clumsy – rhetorical devices as e. g. certain expres-
sions as degeneration (Oksanen 2012b, 102, 113)27 and rhetorical questions, com-
bined with shocking images: “Who would have believed that a man pretending to 
be an exemplary father had just a short time before mercilessly shot infants be-
fore their mothers’ eyes?” (Oksanen 2012b, 287).28
Again, most ironically, while Parts portrays Roland as a monster, he appropri-
ates some of Roland’s deeds, making use of the diary Roland was writing with the 
hope that the truth could be known one day. Parts is the embodiment of Václav 
Havel’s (1978, 9) tenet that in a “post-totalitarian state” the “individuals confirm 
the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system”. They are “objects 
in a system of control, but at the same time they are its subjects as well. They are 
both victims of the system and its instruments”, whose “position in the power hi-
erarchy determines the degree of responsibility and guilt” (Havel 1978, 16). In 
When the Doves Disappeared, evil and lies are rewarded and, unlike in Purge, 
waiting for catharsis feels rather pointless. With bitter irony, the reader is left to 
contemplate the quote from Parts’ opus: “Soon there will be no eyewitnesses left, 
only books witnessing that sadism.”29
5 Conclusions
The Gulag themes in Oksanen’s works – in some of them juxtaposed with the 
Nazi crimes – are explored within transnational processes of remembering, 
which cannot be restricted to only one framework of a specific national identity. 
Purge and When the Doves Disappeared deal with Soviet Estonia but have contrib-
uted to Finnish, and, at least to some extent, more broadly transnational memory 
27 Oksanen (2012), 127, 140. As also Markku Lehtimäki (2022, 238) notes, expressions typical for 
the totalitarian vocabulary bring together both bloodlands oppressors, Nazi Germany and the So-
viet Union.
28 “Kukapa uskoisi, että erinomaista isää näyttelevä mies oli vain vähän aikaa sitten ampunut 
armotta imeväisiä äitiensä silmien edessä?” (Oksanen 2012a, 349).
29 Oksanen’s original sentence (“Kohta silminnäkijöitä ei enää ole ja tuosta sadismista todistavat 
enää kirjat”, Oksanen 2012a, 278) was translated as “Soon there will be no eyewitnesses left, no 
more books witnessing that sadism” (2012a, 227, our italics), which lacks the irony of the original.
154 Viola Parente-Čapková and Riitta Jytilä
culture. These fictionalised travelling (post)memories contribute to debates on de-
colonisation and to enabling “a new kind of social, political and cultural imagina-
tion” (Rothberg 2009, 3–4). “Gulag is a tragic story that unites many peoples: apart 
from the Balts also the Finns, the Germans, those of Eastern Europe and so on” 
(Oksanen 2009b),30 i.e. both the bloodlands and other countries, including, of 
course, the Russians, whom Oksanen does not mention. As has happened in Fin-
land (and in many other countries), literature takes part in the process of creating 
a memory culture, sometimes after comparative historical research is popular-
ised, at other times by highlighting themes even earlier than the history writing.
Recognition of bloodlands fiction as a genre might raise awareness of mem-
ories and concepts of history that have still not been recognised in mainstream 
memory studies or popular perception. Many literary pieces have had a new 
life as TV or film adaptations, and as Jerome de Groot (2009) has noted, not only 
historians but also writers and artists more widely study how history is experi-
enced and circulates in culture. Once again, the concept of unified history is 
being challenged by non-academic, or public history, the popularity of which is 
based on the storytelling and freedom of expression inherent in fiction (Groot 
2009, 4–6).
In Oksanen’s fiction, gender plays a key role. The antiheroes of the novels 
analysed in this chapter, Aliide and Edgar, are of different genders, which deter-
mines their approach to memory. In Aliide’s case in Purge, the past is mostly 
remembered in the private and intimate sphere. It is the painful past wrought 
into women’s bodies that creates transgenerational trauma, staged against the 
background of bloodlands history. The trauma is transferred matrilineally.31
There is, of course, the matrilineage formed by Ingel, Linda, and Zara, all vic-
tims of sexual torture and exploitation under different political regimes. How-
ever, matrilineage is not the only transgenerational link between the female 
characters in the novel. Indeed, the two protagonists, Alide and Zara, are not 
mother and daughter, but more distant relatives, so the female genealogy is ex-
tended to a more general level. In When the Doves Disappeared, the intimate 
sphere plays an equally important role: the protagonist Edgar is forced to hide 
his sexual identity. It is obvious that Edgar’s evil deeds are not connected di-
rectly to his homosexuality, but the necessity to live a lie, hide, and fear expo-
sure play a most important part in his actions (see Lehtimäki 2022, 246). Edgar 
embraces the grandiose undertaking of inventing, falsifying and manipulating 
30 “Gulag on kuitenkin yhteinen surutarina monille kansoille: Baltian lisäksi suomalaisille, sak-
salaisille, koko Itä-Euroopan kansoille ja niin edelleen” (Oksanen 2009b).
31 For analysis of matrilineage in Sofi Oksanen’s Stalin’s Cows, see Parente-Čapková 2015 and 
Kačkutė 2024.
Sofi Oksanen – Contested Memories in Bloodlands Fiction 155
the history of the whole nation, though many of his constructions relate to his 
own, most intimate memories. Through her characters, Oksanen fictionalises 
postmemory, reactivating and re-embodying “more distant political and cultural 
memorial structures” (Hirsch 2008, 33). The reception of her works has raised 
fundamental questions about the concepts of collective or group versus individ-
ual memory, as well as about “translated memories”. Many memory scholars 
have conceptualised and debated these issues but the fictional discourse enables 
us to ask again and again, “Whose memories, really, are we talking about? How 
are they known, how do they come to us? In other words, to what extent are 
collective memories memories at all, rather than received ideas or historical fa-
bles?” (Hoffman 2000, 2).
As we have shown, texts travelling across borders raise many ethical issues 
on various levels. Analysis of the scholarly and broader reception of her novels 
enables us to look at Oksanen’s ways of engaging in the debates concerning mem-
ory in a more complex and versatile way. This raises “questions of engaged schol-
arship and research positionality”: not only historians, writers and artists but 
also literary historians and scholars, though indirectly, participate in debates 
about “which memory is historically sound, and which is not” (Subotić 2020, 7). 
These debates require continuous scholarly engagement, especially vis à vis the 
recent trends of deconstructing the foundations of research into memory studies 
(e.g. Gensburger and Lefranc 2020).
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