Аннотация
Historical memory is defined as the culturally mediated capacity of a community to preserve, transmit, and reinterpret representations of the past through institutions, rituals, and symbolic forms, including literature that converts collective experience into narratively organized meaning. Its mechanism in fiction operates through selection, emplotment, and focalization, whereby individual recollection and public history are fused into a legible storyline that legitimizes certain values while marginalizing others. A concrete example is the recurrent motif of maternal remembrance in Uzbek prose, where family genealogies, neighborhood ethics, and ritual speech encode national trauma, while in American fiction the archive, testimony, and courtroom record often structure memory as an evidentiary practice. Empirically, memory scholarship frequently notes that modern societies experience accelerated “memory work” under conditions of rapid change, and comparative cultural studies often cite the twentieth century’s mass wars and political repression as key drivers of memorial discourse; for instance, historians estimate that World War II caused more than 60 million deaths globally, intensifying public memorialization across continents and reshaping women’s narrative positions as mourners, survivors, and transmitters of continuity. Scientifically, this indicates that memory in literature is not a passive mirror of history but a complex semiotic system in which textual strategies—repetition, symbolic objects, and temporal fragmentation—become cognitive tools that stabilize identity while acknowledging loss and discontinuity.