Title: The Museum of Abandoned Secrets Author: Oksana Zabuzhko Creation Date: 2009 Location: Kyiv, Ukraine Collection: One Book Per Country
Brief
Oksana Zabuzhko published Muzey pokynutykh sekretiv in Ukrainian in 2009, through Faktograf Publishers in Kyiv. The English translation by Nina Murray appeared in 2012 as The Museum of Abandoned Secrets. It is Zabuzhko's most ambitious novel — over eight hundred pages spanning 1943 to the early 2000s — and it arrived at a moment when Ukraine was still working out whether it had the courage to look at its own past directly.
Zabuzhko was already Ukraine's most internationally recognised contemporary writer. Her earlier novel Field Work in Ukrainian Sex (1996) had broken ground as a work of feminist frankness unprecedented in Ukrainian fiction, and her essays on culture, politics, and identity had established her as a public intellectual willing to confront what others preferred to leave undisturbed. The Museum of Abandoned Secrets extended that confrontation to the scale of a national epic.
The novel's frame is contemporary: Daryna Hoshchynska, a television journalist and documentary filmmaker in Kyiv, becomes obsessed with the photograph of an unidentified woman — a fighter from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army who died in the 1940s. Her investigation draws her into a world of KGB archives, family silences held for decades, and relatives still afraid to speak. The wartime sections reconstruct the life of this woman, Olena Dovgan — known to her comrades as Gelya — and the partisan network she moved through. The two timelines are connected by shared dreams that Daryna's lover, Adrian, an art dealer with his own inherited connection to the UPA past, experiences — dreams that carry the sensory detail of events he could not have known. The novel's formal ambition matches its historical scope: dense, digressive, philosophically voracious, it refuses to simplify because the history it addresses was not experienced simply.
The National Voice
To read The Museum of Abandoned Secrets is to feel the specific weight of stories held silent for decades — the physical residue of terror pressed into the bodies and habits of people who spent lifetimes controlling what they said. Zabuzhko renders Ukrainian experience on two temporal planes simultaneously. There is the Kyiv of the early 2000s: caffè latte culture, oligarch-owned television stations, restless energy entangled with unresolved corruption. And there is the wartime western Ukraine of the 1940s: forest bunkers, coded messages threaded through village networks, the smell of damp earth and gun oil and the unwashed bodies of people who cannot surface.
The prose is dense and digressive — a voice that follows a thought through every branching implication before returning to the narrative line. This is not affectation but formal enactment of the novel's central argument: that Ukrainian history cannot be told simply because it was not experienced simply. Decades of Soviet suppression have made the recovery of truth an act of excavation rather than narration. Every fact requires the dismantling of the lie that replaced it.
The women's voices carry a distinctive intelligence — sharp, self-aware, capable of analysing their own emotions in real time, unwilling to accept the consolations that conventional narrative offers. Daryna and her friends think aloud in long associative chains that move from personal observation to political analysis to philosophical speculation, and the effect is of overhearing the most alive form of Ukrainian consciousness at work. This is consciousness sharpened by the effort of living honestly in a society systematically lied to. The novel captures Ukraine not through landscape or folklore but through the texture of suppressed memory — the particular stiffness of people who have spent lifetimes guarding what they know, and the electric relief when they finally speak.
The Historical Ground
The novel's historical dimension centres on the Ukrainian Insurgent Army — the UPA — the nationalist guerrilla force that fought in western Ukraine from 1942 into the early 1950s. The UPA emerged from the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and operated in conditions of extraordinary moral complexity: its fighters confronted both the Nazi occupation and the Soviet reconquest, pursuing Ukrainian independence against two imperial powers simultaneously. Its history is contested — the relationship to the Holocaust and the massacres of Poles in Volhynia in 1943-1944 remain subjects of intense historiographical debate — and the novel incorporates this contestation rather than avoiding it.
Soviet suppression of UPA memory was systematic. Captured fighters were imprisoned in the Gulag or executed. Families were deported to Siberia and Central Asia. The official Soviet narrative classified the UPA as fascist collaborators — a characterisation that delegitimised Ukrainian nationalism and justified continued persecution. Families spent decades in enforced silence. KGB files documenting the suppression campaign remained closed until Ukrainian independence in 1991, and access after that was partial and politically fraught.
The contemporary setting places the novel between the Orange Revolution of 2004 and the Euromaidan of 2013 — a period of intense contestation between pro-European and pro-Russian orientations, oligarchic capture of the state, and the emergence of an independent media and civil society. Daryna's documentary work positions her directly in this struggle: the stories she wants to tell are precisely the ones that corrupt, Russia-influenced power structures want buried. The events that followed the novel's 2009 publication — Euromaidan, Russia's annexation of Crimea, the war in the Donbas — confirmed that the secrets Zabuzhko excavated were not merely historical but prophetic.
The Literary Landscape
Modern Ukrainian literature as a national tradition begins with Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), whose poetry in Ukrainian established the language as a literary medium and whose life — born a serf, exiled for his writings — embodies Ukrainian creative genius under imperial oppression. Ivan Franko and Lesia Ukrainka extended the tradition into fiction and drama. Then came catastrophe. The Executed Renaissance — the generation of writers who flourished in the 1920s and were killed in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s — decimated the literary tradition. Mykola Khvylovy, Mykhailo Semenko, Valerian Pidmohylny: executed or driven to suicide. The survivors were forced into socialist realism.
The dissident writers of the 1960s — the shestydesiatnyky, including Vasyl Stus, Lina Kostenko, and Ivan Drach — attempted to revive an independent Ukrainian voice. Stus died in a Soviet labour camp in 1985. Kostenko survived and became the conscience of Ukrainian poetry. After independence, Yuri Andrukhovych brought postmodernist playfulness to Ukrainian fiction with Recreations (1992) and The Moscoviad (1993), while Serhiy Zhadan emerged as the voice of Ukraine's industrial east.
Zabuzhko stands apart through ambition and intellectual scope. Field Work in Ukrainian Sex made her reputation; The Museum of Abandoned Secrets is the work that attempts to hold all of Ukrainian experience — historical, political, psychological, gendered — in a single narrative structure. The strongest alternative candidates include Andrukhovych's carnivalesque satires and Zhadan's raw depictions of post-Soviet disorientation, but neither attempts the totalising vision that Zabuzhko achieves. In a literature shaped by suppression and revival, this is the novel that most fully enacts the recovery of what was lost — not by simplifying it into heroism, but by insisting on the full, tangled, painful complexity of what it means to remember.
The Reading
The Photograph
She is watching archival footage at a private screening — Soviet-era film, the kind she has spent her professional life learning to read for the gaps between what the camera captured and what the state permitted to be seen — and among the images there is a photograph of a woman in partisan uniform. Beautiful, young, unidentified. The face is composed, direct, looking into the camera with the particular steadiness of someone who knows she is being recorded and who wants the record to show her as she is. Something about it does not let go.
She begins to search for the name. This is what she does — she is a documentary filmmaker, a television journalist, a woman whose work is the recovery of things the official record has tried to bury. Her Kyiv is a city of caffè lattes and oligarch-owned television stations and a restless energy that masks a deeper paralysis, and she moves through it with the familiarity of a native and the analytical sharpness of someone who has been trained to see what is not shown. She has lost one television job already because a programme she produced about suppressed history offended someone whose identity she was never told but whose influence she felt immediately. She knows how power works in this city. She knows it works by silence.
The man she is in love with, Adrian, is an art dealer — paintings, drawings, the occasional icon that has come through the German occupation and the Soviet anti-religious campaigns and the chaos of the post-Soviet 1990s. He handles works that were loved and lost and are now for sale, and the commerce in them is itself a form of archaeology, each piece carrying the trace of the life it was part of. His relationship with history is practical and mercantile — until the dreams begin. He sells the past in pieces. She wants to assemble those pieces into a narrative the nation can recognise.
The Living Relatives
The investigation begins as professional research. She wants to make a documentary about the women of the UPA — the Ukrainian Insurgent Army partisans who have no official history because the Soviet narrative classified them as fascist collaborators and the families who survived them spent decades in silence to avoid further persecution. She begins to find the living relatives of these women — old people in western Ukraine who have been afraid for fifty years and who are still afraid. Their bodies have been shaped by decades of self-suppression: the particular stiffness of people who have spent a lifetime controlling what they say, the guarded eyes, the hands that clench when certain subjects are approached. Some refuse to speak. Others speak haltingly, in the careful language of people who have learnt that words can be weapons used against the speaker.
The woman in the photograph assembles herself in fragments. From KGB archives. From testimonies of surviving relatives. From photographs that families kept hidden in the backs of drawers for decades. Her name was Olena Dovgan. Her comrades called her Gelya. She was from the Galician west, educated, a young woman of intelligence and conviction who joined the UPA in the 1940s — when the choice was between the Soviet system that had already deported and murdered thousands of western Ukrainians, the German occupation doing the same by different methods, and a national resistance that was morally complicated but offered the one thing neither occupier would: the possibility of Ukrainian political independence.
Olena — Gelya — had a network of contacts that stretched across western Ukraine. She had a lover, a fellow partisan. She died in 1947, in a forest bunker encircled by Soviet forces, in circumstances that take painstaking care to reconstruct.
The Archives of Terror
The KGB files are the investigation's most harrowing material. The Soviet bureaucracy was meticulous about its record-keeping, even when the records documented atrocities. The files record in clinical detail the interrogations, the denunciations, the arrests of Olena's network — names extracted through torture, family members subsequently arrested, decades in the camps for those who survived. The interrogation transcripts carry a precision that makes the stomach clench: the questions, the answers, the silences that indicate where the interrogator applied pressure that the transcript does not specify.
The file on Olena herself is incomplete. Gaps correspond to things the KGB considered not worth recording, or things someone removed before the archive was opened, or things never committed to paper because even the bureaucracy of terror understood that some actions are better undocumented. These gaps are their own form of testimony — negative space that outlines what was done by the shape of what was omitted.
In western Ukraine in the 1940s, everything arrives in a different register — more compressed, more physical, less digressive. The partisan experience has the weight of lived testimony: the reality was not the heroic narrative that either side would make it. The fighters were young, mostly in their twenties, living in forest bunkers that were cold in winter and infested with lice, eating whatever the village networks could supply, moving constantly to avoid the Soviet troops hunting them. The couriers — many of them women, because women could move through checkpoints more easily — are described in operational detail: coded messages, safe houses, elaborate protocols for confirming identity when a stranger arrived at a village contact. Olena was part of this network, and her effectiveness — her ability to move through the landscape undetected, her capacity for the specific courage that undercover work requires — was what made her valuable and what eventually made her a target.
The villages that supported the resistance did so at enormous risk. Soviet counterinsurgency in western Ukraine in the late 1940s involved collective punishment: when a partisan unit was discovered to have received village support, the entire population could be deported to Siberia. The terror was systematic and effective. It broke the support networks, turned neighbour against neighbour, because the cost of solidarity was deportation and the reward for denunciation was survival. The informers who betrayed their neighbours were not simply villains — they were people making impossible choices under conditions that made every option catastrophic.
The corruption of the post-Soviet present runs parallel to the wartime terror, different in method but continuous in effect. The Kyiv of the early 2000s is a city of extraordinary corruption: oligarchs who emerged from the privatisations of the 1990s control the television stations, the newspapers, the political parties. The politicians who serve them rotate through office with the practised ease of professionals who understand that power in post-Soviet Ukraine is a matter of transaction rather than ideology. The documentary work puts a journalist in direct conflict with these systems. The stories she wants to tell — about suppressed history, about the gap between official narrative and lived experience, about the moral cost of collective amnesia — are not the stories that power wants told. She loses a television job. She does not know who ordered it. She does not need to know. The mechanism is the message: there are subjects that are not to be touched, and the punishment for touching them does not need to identify itself to be effective.
Dreams That Cross Time
Adrian begins to dream of the partisan period. Specific scenes from Olena's life that correspond, when checked against the archival record, to things that actually happened — details he could not have known, places he has never visited, conversations in a dialect he does not speak. He wakes with the taste of forest earth in his mouth, with the phantom cold of a bunker he has never entered, with the names of people dead before he was born pressing against the inside of his skull. The dreams arrive with the sensory authority of lived experience — not visions or symbols but memories, somebody else's memories, bleeding through the boundary that is supposed to separate one life from another.
The dreams are not explained. They arrive as facts about a relationship and about the way the past persists in a country that has tried to forget it. Whether the dreams are genetic memory, spiritual communication, or the unconscious reconstruction of suppressed history is left deliberately open. What matters is that they work — they provide access to the past that the archives, with their gaps and their official language, cannot provide. The past has found its own way through, because the official channels — the archives, the histories, the testimonies — were too damaged, too censored, too frightened to carry the full weight of what happened.
The intimacy between the two lovers becomes inseparable from the investigation. What they do together, what they say to each other in the dark, what they dream — all of it is saturated with the historical consciousness that is the condition of being Ukrainian in the early twenty-first century. You cannot love someone in this country without loving them through history, because history is not the past here. It is the present, the living tissue of daily life, the thing that determines what you can say and what you must keep secret and who you can trust.
What passes between them in their most intimate moments carries extraordinary political weight, because it enacts the possibility of genuine connection in a culture that totalitarianism taught to mistrust intimacy — to suspect every close relationship of containing an informer, every private moment of being potentially observed. Two people reaching each other through all that accumulated damage is not romance. It is an act of political defiance.
The Chorus of Contemporary Women
Her female friends appear as a chorus of what it means to be a Ukrainian woman in the early 2000s — educated, ambitious, navigating a society that has retained Soviet-era gender roles alongside post-Soviet economic chaos and the new pressures of consumer capitalism. Their conversations — long, digressive, conducted over wine in Kyiv apartments furnished with the specific mixture of Soviet-era items and new Western imports — carry the sharpest contemporary analysis of post-Soviet identity. Analytical minds working at full speed, following a thought from personal experience to political analysis to philosophical reflection and back, refusing to separate the private from the public because in Ukraine the two have never been separable.
Vlada, an artist friend who dies early in circumstances that may or may not be suicide, provides another thread. Her paintings — large, ambitious, formally innovative — represent the attempt to create work simultaneously Ukrainian and universal. The investigation of her death runs parallel to the investigation of Olena's life: both are stories of Ukrainian women destroyed by systems larger than themselves, and both require the same act of witness to be fully understood. Whether Vlada was murdered — connected to the same networks of corruption that threaten the documentary work — or whether she collapsed under the weight of trying to make art in a country that consumes its artists, the question itself is the answer. The system does not need to send an assassin when it has already created conditions in which brilliant women break.
The Kyiv that surrounds these women has the specificity of a native's eye. The Maidan — not yet the site of the revolution that would transform it, but already the symbolic centre of civic life. The Andriyivskyy Descent with its artists and tourist shops and its view of the Dnipro. The Podil district where the intellectual class lives in apartments renovated just enough to be comfortable without losing the traces of their Soviet past. The seasons press through the city — the brutal winter when snow piles up and Kyiv contracts into itself, the spring when the chestnut trees bloom along Khreshchatyk and the city opens, the summer when the asphalt softens and the Dnipro beaches fill. The old babushkas selling sunflower seeds at metro stations that have not changed since the Soviet period, the billboards advertising Western products alongside Soviet-era mosaics. The city is palimpsest: every surface carries layers of meaning.
The Museum Opens
The weight of the investigation accumulates with the slowness of real excavation — each fragment of testimony placed alongside the archival record, the wartime evidence set against the contemporary experience, the dream-knowledge checked against documented fact. There is no single revelation. There is only the patient labour of assembly, which mirrors the labour of the historical actors themselves: people who worked in fragments, who preserved what they could, who trusted that the act of keeping something real would mean something even if they could not see to whom or when.
Olena's last days arrive in fragments — from the archives, from the surviving testimony — the encirclement by Soviet forces, the narrowing of options, the decision of those trapped in the bunker to take cyanide rather than surrender. It was not heroic posturing. It was a calculation made with specific knowledge of what capture would involve: interrogation designed to extract the names and locations of the remaining network, followed by imprisonment or execution. Olena and the others chose death over the betrayal of those still living. These facts come without sentimentality, without nationalist framing — a choice made by specific people in specific circumstances with specific information about what the alternatives cost.
A museum of abandoned secrets is what this country has become — a country full of hidden histories, family secrets forced into invisibility by political terror, objects whose provenance cannot be stated because stating it would require acknowledging a past the state spent decades denying. The documentary work — the filming, the archival research, the interviews with people still trembling as they speak — is the act of opening this museum, of identifying the abandoned objects, of trying to restore to them the contexts and the human meanings they were stripped of.
The investigation transforms the relationship between the two lovers. They are drawn closer by the shared dream-experience, by the seriousness of what is being pursued, by the way that engaging with the past together creates a present with depth and consequence. They are also tested by it. The weight of what they are learning is real. The political risks are real. The question of whether their relationship can bear the weight of a national history is also the question of whether their nation can bear it.
The secrets are not fully recovered — they cannot be, because some of the people who knew them are dead and the documents that recorded them have been destroyed. But the work of recovery is ongoing, and the existence of people willing to do it means the museum is not permanently closed. The dead are still here, in the archives and in the dreams. The story is not finished. It was, in 2009, still being written — and the events that followed, the Euromaidan, the war, the further chapters of self-assertion and survival, would confirm that the secrets excavated here were not merely historical but prophetic. The silence held for decades. The silence was never consent. The silence was a museum waiting for someone brave enough to open the doors.
This post is part of the One Book Per Country series — 195 countries, one defining book each, working through the literary map of the world.
Zabuzhko's novel was first published in Ukrainian in 2009. One English edition is available.
The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (AmazonCrossing, translated by Nina Murray)
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