Oksana Zabuzhko: on Ukraine’s past and present

Much of Ukrainian history has been misunderstood or overlooked. In conversation with Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko about her historical novel The Museum of Abandoned Secrets. How are traumatic events in Ukraine’s past remembered – or deliberately silenced? And how do unresolved histories continue to shape lives and identities decades later?

With the Dutch translation of The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, we revisited this monumental family saga spanning six decades of Ukrainian history — from its Soviet past to its hesitant steps towards independence and democracy in the 1990s. Written in 2009, at a time when the future of Ukraine looked bright, but with the war in its 5th year and Russia’s continuing effort to erase Ukrainian culture, The Museum of Abandoned Secrets has never been as urgent.

Oksana Zabuzhko , Ukraine’s leading contemporary author, was born in 1960. She graduated from the department of philosophy of Kyiv Shevchenko University in1982, and obtained her PhD in philosophy of arts in 1987. After the publication of her novel Field Work in Ukrainian Sex (1996), later named ’the most influential Ukrainian book for the 15 years of independence’, she has been living as a free-lance author. She is Vice-President of the Ukrainian PEN. Zabuzhko lives in Kyiv.

About The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Television producer Daryna accidentally discovers a 1940s photograph of a woman in uniform among four resistance fighters of the Ukrainian partisan army. Her investigation into the story behind the photo grows into a gripping panoramic portrait of over sixty years of Ukrainian history. Along the way, Daryna discovers that many documents have disappeared from the archives. Even in the present, much remains concealed. Was the death of her artist friend truly an accident? And where have her missing paintings gone?

Secrets—facts suppressed by official history, such as falsified election results and Kremlin deals—shape the country’s past. Oksana Zabuzhko spares no one, critiquing both the decades under Russian rule and the subsequent period of independence, in which machismo, cynicism, and corruption continue to thrive.

The Museum of Abandoned Secrets is a family saga with all the hallmarks of a detective story, yet at the same time a moving, passionate love story that makes you wonder: is it wise to unearth the abandoned secrets of history, or are some better left undisturbed?