Abstract:
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, the novel and the film demonstrate, albeit with different accents, the ambivalence of the past, which creates continuity of subject’s memory, but also takes away his or her life, holds it back and haunts it with bloody specters. This grip of death, theorized by Sigmund Freud as a death drive inherent to life, is emphasized in the film: from his early childhood Ivan, the main character, finds himself in the tenacious embrace of death from which he cannot break away during all his life until at the end when he finds in it the higher joy of merging with loved one – in nothingness. But in the novel, and more so in the film, death drive is sublimated and released in the beyond of aesthetic.
