The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Praise for
The Museum of Abandoned Secrets
    “Many books at the top of the bestseller list today are not necessarily distinguished by the quality of their language. In Ukraine, however, a book that has been the number-one bestseller since it was published is not only an exception to this rule, but quite the opposite. Oksana Zabuzhko’s
The Museum of Abandoned Secrets
is so rich and precise in its language, and also so political and demanding, that one cannot help wondering what is different about Ukraine.”
    —
Kultur Spiegel
    “
The Museum of Abandoned Secrets
is a magnum opus, in which everything that the armory of literature can provide is mobilized against the forces of darkness: strong emotions, the power of pathos, the most compelling images...A novel of power—and a powerful novel.”
    —
Deutschlandradio
    “Pugnacious, feverish, brilliant—with her 759-page novel about the history of Ukraine in the twentieth century, Oksana Zabuzhko has thrown open a window in her homeland. She is already celebrated as a second Dostoyevsky, but above all she has triggered an intense debate about social relationships and their roots in the past that people have yet to come to terms with.”
    —
Schweizer Radio DRS
    “As an attempt at the archeology of memory it sets the world on fire, as a romance novel it is touching, and as a vivisection of social and political injustices in late- and post-communist Ukraine it has a virulence that is difficult to surpass.”
    —
Ilma Rakusa, NZZ
    “Violence and fear lie in the bones of generations of Ukrainians, and what power do the ostracized dead have over the living? Oksana Zabuzhko writes about this heavy subject as lightly and freshly as the main female character talks.”
    —
WDR
    “This book is a spectacular intellectual success. It is driven by the belief that intellectual and political freedom is the only thing worth fighting for, apart from love, of course. Equipped with an almost megalomaniacal imagination and defiant humor, the author invents dreamlike parallel collateral campaigns, illuminates culture, society, and politics in multiple perspectives, and makes ghostly excursions into the past...With
The Museum of Abandoned Secrets
, Oksana Zabuzhko has written both herself and Ukraine into the scabby heart of Europe.”
    —
Berliner Zeitung



The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
    Text copyright © 2009 by Oksana Zabuzhko
English translation copyright © 2012 by Nina Shevchuk-Murray
    All rights reserved.
    No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
    The Museum of Abandoned Secrets
was originally published in 2009 by Fact, Kiev, as
Музей покинутих секретів
. Translated from Ukrainian by Nina Shevchuk-Murray.
    Published by AmazonCrossing
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
    ISBN-13: 9781611090116
ISBN-10: 1611090113
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012946025

For Mom and Rostyk

Regardless of their original functions, objects buried for an extended time underground or under water become archeological artifacts. At the moment they are recovered, their new history begins. Being buried underground often results in damage ... to both organic and inorganic materials.... The goal of preventative conservation is to arrest the progress of such destruction by ensuring optimal storage conditions.
    —From “Cultural Welfare: Restoration of
Archeological Finds in Berlin’s
State Museums,” exhibit guide,
Altes Museum, Berlin,
March 27–June 1, 2009
    To know what’s happened to us ... wait for us.
    —A 1952 inscription on a wall of the Lviv KGB prison,
open to the public since 2009
as the Lontsky Street Prison Museum



Room 1. This
    A nd then come the photos: black and white, faded into a caramel-brown sepia, some printed on that old dense paper with the embossed dappling and white scalloped edges like the lace collars of school uniforms, all from the pre-Kodak era—the era of the Cold War and nationally manufactured photography supplies (really, nationally manufactured everything)—and yet, the women in the pictures are adorned with the towering mousses of chignons, those stupid constructions of dead and, more often than not, someone