Perspektívák, emlékezet és az emberi/állati elbeszélés feszültségei. Selyem Zsuzsa: Moszkvában esik
Perspectives, Memory, and the Tensions Between Human and Animal Narratives

Summary/Abstract: The article by Bíborka Kűrti examines the narrative and conceptual differences between It’s Raining in Moscow, a novel by Zsuzsa Selyem, and the memoir of her grandfather, István Beczásy, with particular attention to their contrasting approaches to temporality and the representation of trauma. The study argues that the Beczásy memoir follows the conventions of classical autobiographical narration through a linear and coherent treatment of time, in which events of his deportation unfold according to a stable chronological sequence and traumatic experiences remain narratively identifiable and reconstructable. This structure reflects the traditional logic of memoir writing, where the retrospective organization of events seeks to establish continuity, causality, and interpretive coherence within personal and historical experience. In contrast, Selyem’s novel fundamentally disrupts this linear conception of time through the use of animal narration. The article demonstrates how the nonhuman perspective relativizes temporality by placing human existence alongside the lives of animals, trees, and other living beings characterized by radically different temporal scales. As a result, time no longer progresses as a unified historical trajectory, but instead emerges as a fragmented coexistence of multiple forms of life and duration. Unlike the conventional memoir form, the novel resists organizing events into a single comprehensive narrative, thereby destabilizing the notion of history as a coherent and closed sequence of past events, and as a result, trauma becomes dispersed across human and nonhuman perspectives, preventing its consolidation into a unified narrative structure or a stable interpretive model.

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