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On 10 April 2010, the plane carrying the Polish president to the commemoration of the seventieth anniversary of the Katyń massacre crashed near the Smolensk airport in Russia. The following article will not analyze the reasons for the catastrophe or its sequels. It will focus on the way in which the tragic death of Lech Kaczyński (along with ninety-five other people on board) and the subsequent national mourning were depicted in public discourse, bringing into focus key political concepts, such as community, national identity, and, above all, patriotism. It will focus on a number of questions: Did the perception and expression of patriotism change in this time of mourning? What was commonly perceived as patriotism during a national trauma? Was the national mourning symbolic? If yes, in what way? The current analysis presents the dynamics of public debate in the aftermath of the catastrophe and the major shifts the debate went through. First, it deals with the question of national mourning and the controversial decision to bury the presidential couple in the crypt of the Wawel Royal Castle in Kraków. Subsequently, the analysis focuses on references to Romanticism, religion, and the (de- and re-)construction of the concept of patriotism, drawing on insights concerning community and its alleged unity. While patriotism has been broadly discussed throughout the democratic transition, and new civic approaches have been offered, during the period of national mourning it was possible to detect a strong resurgence of Romantic language with its melodramatic and martyrological features.

SUMMARY: Alexander Etkind calls the essay by Xenia Cherkaev "somewhat confused," but welcomes the opportunity to engage in a serious discussion that the Russian field has been lacking so far. He sees one of the reasons for Cherkaev's criticism in a general trend negating Memory Studies as a field with its own objectives and research conventions. Etkind takes a stand against confusing the institutional history of the GULAG and Stalinism with the study of memory and mnemonic practices. He also discusses some moral and political issues involved in Cherkaev's reading of his book. Александр Эткинд характеризует эссе Ксении Черкаевой как "несколько путанное", однако приветствует возможность серьезной дискуссии, которой не хватает русистике в целом. Одно из возможных объяснений критической позиции Черкаевой он видит в тенденции отрицать исследования памяти как самостоятельную дисциплину с собственными задачами и исследовательскими конвенциями. Эткинд выступает против смешения институциональной истории ГУЛАГА или сталинизма с исследованиями памяти и мнемонических практик. В своем ответе Эткинд также обсуждает некоторые моральные и политические аспекты статьи Черкаевой.

Preliminary Material -- Designing a War Museum: Some Reflections on Representations of War and Combat /Jay Winter -- The Sacred Names of the Nation's Dead: War and Remembrance in Revolutionary France /Joseph Clarke -- Memory, Mourning, and Malvern Hill: Herman Melville and the Poetry of the American Civil War /Cynthia Wachtell -- Tabulating Loss, Entombing Memory: The Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial Centre /Sarah Wagner -- Lethean Landscapes: Forgetting in Late Modern Commemorative Spaces /Joel David Robinson -- Morbid Family Pride: Private Memorials and Scots Law /Hilary Hiram -- Memory, Mourning and Landscape in the Scottish Mountains: Discourses of Wilderness, Gender and Entitlement in Online Debates on Mountainside Memorials /Avril Maddrell -- Seder and Imagined Landscape /Alana M. Vincent -- Sailing Home: Boat-Graves, Migrant Identities and Funerary Practices on the Viking Frontier /Erin Halstad-McGuire -- The Lido in the Forest: Memory, Landscape, Painting /Judith Tucker -- Notes on Contributors.

Public mourning is not a spontaneous expression of grief but a symbolic and political practice. Sociologist Bin Xu examines a new trend in recent decades, the "democratization of public mourning," that celebrates our symbolic equality and individuality instead of affirming status hierarchies.

In the current context of pervasive loss and the absence of publicly commemorative rituals, this essay proposes a reading of Freud's 'Mourning and Melancholia' that questions the presupposition that mourning must come to an end as the completed work of memories recalled only to be sent off. While melancholia may be presented as the invention of an imaginary loss, would not the real pathology of mourning be the summary or precipitous declaration of its end? Whether we understand mourning as completable in itself or as impossibly seeking an asymptote it can never reach, whether the work of mourning is terminal or interminable, the name of the deceased stands as what is left, not only as what is inscribed on a gravestone and outlasting any living memory, but also as the very bounds of memory as sense. Not so much the end of mourning, then, as its reiterative reaffirmation, commemoration comes down to a practice of active mourning (like active forgetting), not an 'end' but its retreat, its appearing/disappearing as the incessant redrawing of its withdrawal. Not a self-deprecating melancholia, nor the indulgent luxury of nostalgia, but the endless inscription of a name whose loss we can never stop mourning.