Deadline: April 30, 2018. International Conference Geneva, 13-14 December 2018 Divided Memories, Shared Memories Poland, Russia, Ukraine: History Mirrored in Literature and Cinema In Central and Eastern European countries, memorial questions appeared right after the demise of the communist regimes in 1989–1991, revealing long-denied processes. The phenomenon of the rise of repressed memories along with the rewriting of history, and the political uses of the past are noticeable in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine, three countries whose histories are as often shared as their memories are divided. The ‘memory wars’ in which these three states have sometimes been engaged since the end of the 1980s have been the subject of an abundant historiography. However, research has often focused on the analysis of memorial issues after 1989–91, while the paradigms of the communist era continue to be felt in these three countries. Above all, these works, no matter the field of study, be it political science, sociology, anthropology, or history – do not take enough advantage of the invaluable resources that are literature and cinema. Literature and cinema are powerful means of promoting representations of the past and play a central role in shaping national identities. At the time of Communism, the political authorities were well aware of the power of literature. This is evidenced by the political scandal that broke out in 1968 after the publication of the novel A Cathedral by Oles Honchar, even though the writer’s way of describing Ukrainian national traditions was limited to the Soviet canon and literary standards of ‘socialist realism’. It is also evidenced by the silence on Vasily Grossman’s texts, Life and Fate, as well as Everything Flows, a novel written between 1955 and 1963, in which a man just released from the Gulag mentions the Great Famine in Ukraine, a taboo subject in the USSR until the late 1980s. In socialist Poland, the war crimes of the Ukrainian nationalist underground against the Polish population were never silenced, but the largest-scale massacre that occurred in the Volhynia region in 1943 (that would become part of the Soviet Ukraine after the war) was hidden. The state’s attempt to impose an official version of history through literature explains the importance of both Soviet samizdat and Polish drugi obieg. In the same way as literature, cinema – ‘the most important of all’ according to the well-known...