Poetry has turned out to be a canary in the coal mine during the Russia-Ukraine war.Footnote 1 Poems short and long, traditional and formally radical, in Russian and in Ukrainian are registering the harms and risks of all utterance with astonishing speed and vividness. Reactions to the poems are an early measure of the war's effect on Slavic studies, too. The war has sped up processes of decolonization in academic departments, editorial boards, and prize juries; it has revealed obstacles to genuine dialogue but also forged some provisional pathways toward needed conversations. The material in these two important essays presses us to think about what poetry can do and why it matters, and about the implications of our own scholarship as well.
The essays prove, if we needed proof, that the war has stimulated poetry writing and sharing. The numbers alone should get our attention: Lyudmila Parts refers to a corpus that is hundreds of poems, and Amelia Glaser and Paige Lee work with a data set encompassing more than 1000 poems. It may surprise those who associate poetry with private emotions and rarified aesthetic expression that it would have so risen to this occasion. But in the Slavic world, poetry has a well-known tradition of cultural prestige, so perhaps we should not be surprised. The means of production and distribution are just as important here. Poetry does not have the costly, cumbersome infrastructure of theater or filmmaking and it does not require the longer temporal view of the novel. Sir Walter Scott recommended two generations’ distance for historical novels, and while our own era has sped up our reaction time, Scott's appreciation for the value of looking back dispassionately still rings true. So, poetry may lose its priority over time: fiction and memoir will give us new ways to think about our nightmarish present, surely sooner than Scott predicted.Footnote 2
But for now, poetry is what we have, and this forum assesses its immediate impact. Those caught up in this war can begin to understand their disorientation and rage as a shared experience: as Ilya Kukulin put it, writing about Russian-language poets, “poetry helps opponents of the war weave their individual painful experience into a larger historical narrative.”Footnote 3 And understanding the present as history in the making is clearly one of poetry's affordances.Footnote 4 Amelia Glaser and Paige Lee demonstrate via word frequency patterns that probing the meanings of history is a self-conscious task undertaken by Ukrainian poets, whether they write in Ukrainian or in Russian.
In the age of the internet, poetry has a further advantage in being so immediately available—no need to wait for editors to accept or promote the work. Of course earlier poets circulated their work through private letters or samizdat, but the internet's dispersal is wider and quicker. Poets are reaching readers directly across social media platforms, particularly Facebook and Telegram, the apps most used in Slavic literary communities.Footnote 5 Both essays here analyze work from these platforms, and Glaser and Lee argue convincingly that using Facebook posts long before a “test of time” standard can be applied shows us the contours of emergent canons.Footnote 6
Facebook has another affordance, since users can also post more formal statements that show the community of poetry readers, including us as scholars, new ways to assess the poem's responsibilities and potential in wartime. It was on Facebook in March 2022 that Dmitrii Kuz΄min and Evgenii Nikitin posted two statements, each signed by nearly 100 Russian poets. The first addressed the people of Ukraine, wishing them victory. The second spoke to Russians, advising them to read Ukrainian poetry: “Right on our doorstep, another nation at this very moment is demonstrating the kind of courage, fortitude, and unity of political leaders with poets, intellectuals, and the military, with public figures and the most ordinary of people—the very qualities that we can only dream of for our own nation.”Footnote 7
Kuz΄min, Nikitin, and their signatories were saying two things here, one about the ethical responsibility of poetry, the other about the exemplary writing by Ukrainian poets. Disseminating that poetry further is work that Russians can and are doing, and translating Ukrainian poetry into Russian is its own form of ethical act.Footnote 8 Kuz΄min himself has long engaged in that translation work, as have others, with the results posted to social media and published in book form.Footnote 9 Particularly notable is the Telegram channel Metazhurnal, with extensive translation work by Stanislav Bel΄skii, who lives in Ukraine and also publishes on his own Telegram channel. Another striking example was posted on Facebook by Ol΄ga Sedakova. She translates from many languages but not usually Ukrainian, yet she translated the gut-wrenching poem by Maksym Kryvtsov about the mass killings in Bucha quickly when it appeared; her translation reached several thousand Facebook readers within days.Footnote 10
Translation of Ukrainian poetry has gone far beyond these examples and far beyond Russian versions. Glaser and Lee assess the rapid sharing of Ukrainian poetry in translation between 2014 and 2022, finding that both the number of translations and the number of languages into which poems were translated grew. The translations became a way of expressing “solidarity across borders and languages,” they write.Footnote 11 And under the circumstances, translation into Russian carries a special affective charge.
As Gayatri Spivak observed, there is no more intimate form of reading than translation.Footnote 12 And for now, intimacy on the page may need to stand in for connections person-to-person. To judge from public statements and actions, Ukrainian poets and other public figures are finding in-person encounters with Russians highly objectionable. There have been high-profile refusals to appear in any event that lists Russians elsewhere on the program.Footnote 13 Pulling back from mixing or comparing work by poets of Russian and Ukrainian nationality feels like an extreme conclusion to draw from these refusals, but proceeding with caution is surely in order. It is too early to say what the rules of engagement should be for the Slavic community in analyzing cultural production arising during this war. Or perhaps it is not for me, as a scholar of Russian poetry, to set out such rules at any time. The key thing, to say the obvious, is to keep exchanging work, learning from one another as we find our ways forward. I admire those who are intrepidly and provisionally forging pathways for the scholarship we all very much need.Footnote 14 These two articles are modeling that for us.
Both press us to ask challenging questions, particularly across two kinds of boundaries, one geographic, one linguistic: how to compare the writings of those who live on the territory of Ukraine, which is to say, in the zone of war, with those who are in Russia or who have emigrated? And how to compare the work of poets living in Ukraine who write in Ukrainian with those writing in Russian? Perhaps few of us would say that the work of people in any of these groups could only be studied on its own terms, but which comparisons are we ready to make with any confidence? And there are bigger questions that will take longer to resolve: what is the relationship between Ukrainian and Russian poetry, given the longer history of colonialist violence we are still needing to document fully and analyze? How to untangle the threads of poets’ identifications as Russian or Ukrainian, or the ways in which bilingual poets choose a language of expression?
As both essays demonstrate, none of these questions is answered simply. Yes, some formerly Russian-language poets, particularly those living in Ukraine, are now writing in Ukrainian, rejecting the language of the aggressor.Footnote 15 Mariia Galina's 2024 Ukrainian-language book of poems Nineviia stands as a signal example, coming as it does after her many books of poetry and prose in Russian. But Galina published a version of the book in Russian within months. Those, and they are many, who continue to write in Russian act on a strong ethical impulse not to cede the language to a tyrannical, evil regime. A strong assertion of that logic opened the 2024 book Post Printum by Boris Khersonskii, like Galina a poet who identifies as Ukrainian (and who lived in Odesa until 2022). He wrote:
Russia's aggression has changed my relationship to my native language. For a short time, I moved entirely into Ukrainian. I wrote experimental poems in both languages, and sometimes even adding in a third or fourth language. But in the end, I made a firm decision: neither putin nor the putinists hold a monopoly on my first language, my native language. I understood that the enemies of the regime are my allies and my friends.
Concluding that Post Printum was therefore written in Russian, Khersonskii added, “I remain a citizen and patriot of my country”—his country being Ukraine.Footnote 16 A prolific poet (he appears in Glaser and Lee's essay), and one whose investigations of ethics and religion make him an especially important exemplar of contemporary Russian-language poetry, Khersonskii shows in such gestures as his refusal to use a capital letter for the authoritarian ruler's name that a political stand can underlay all aspects of one's work.
Khersonskii's position is one way to understand the outpouring of poetry in Russian, as a reclamation of authority and of a shared mission of resistance. Lyudmila Parts tells us that “anti-war poets assert that they, too, are victimized by the war” and, although I do not read Khersonskii and other like-minded poets as taking up the position of victim, I do see the wisdom in her observation that Russian poets “attempt to establish solidarity with the Ukrainian victims of Russian aggression.”Footnote 17 Yet it is not clear that many Ukrainians are ready to welcome gestures of solidarity, and perhaps we should not call this poetry of war a “unified artistic discourse.” But surely it is a single discursive field, albeit vast and variegated, populated by poets in disparate positions and facing different physical and psychological risks. And by poets working in a wide range of genres and styles.
None of these distinctions, my own especially, feel quite right to me, I confess, and perhaps no set of terms can be final or fully clarifying so long as the war goes on. What we can see are the workings of this discourse of poetry and war as it evolves, and Parts presses us to notice one of its vivid aspects when she traces the ambiguous subject positions of Russian poets writing in opposition to the violence in Ukraine. She wisely keeps her gaze steadily on the material itself, citing the lines of famous and little-known poets, treating them all as legible signs of the moment in which we find ourselves. Her readings direct our attention to “pronouns of responsibility,” using the critical tools of rhetorical analysis to recognize the underlying ethical principles of poetry written during this war. The first-person pronoun, when it turns up, is seen as denoting resistance, and there are more possibilities besides. It can signify grief—think of the eruption of the first-person in Aleksandr Skidan's poem which begins with the word “pozdno” (it's too late, 2022), with its endless string of impersonal infinitives transforming themselves into a stirring declaration: “verni nam nashikh mertvykh / ia khochu ikh oplakat΄” (return our dead / I want to mourn them).Footnote 18 The jarring rhetorical shifts in Skidan's poem demonstrate another of poetry's affordances: a readiness to weave conflicting strands of emotion into a single verbal fabric, to jolt us as readers with emotions that do not go together easily.
The potential for resistance in the poetry goes beyond its rhetorical elements, although that is an effective place to start, as Parts shows us. Glaser and Lee, amid their canny analysis of social media practices, focus on the language and thematics of the poetry. They observe that in Ukraine, “poetry became a way of amplifying the cultural values behind the protest movement,” and something similar happened in the Russian context, for example in the critical poetry practice of the [Translit] group, with which Skidan was affiliated, and in the work of a broader circle of feminist and queer poets.Footnote 19 Such movements did more than teach poets to use poems as mobilizing forces against oppression (no small matter, actually): they also learned to embed political argument into their diction and syntax. It is not so much a matter of writing programmatic poems as enacting a search for the language of politics. That search—that desire, like Skidan's saying that he “wants” to mourn—holds a recognition that even a provisional poetics can be effectively political and salient ethically.
A final thought. In, one hopes, a not-so-distant future, when Ukraine is at peace and a more objective assessment of how poetry responded to this war can commence, we may want to shift our gaze beyond those who wrote about the war directly. In poems where the theme of war's violence barely flickers if it appears at all, the consequences for language and for poetry itself will be registered just as indelibly. One place to begin will be the poetry of Igor΄ Bulatovskii. An outstanding example of his work is discussed in Lyudmila Parts's essay, two passages from the 43-poem cycle “Na kontse iazyka” (At the End of Language, or On the Tip of the Tongue). The cycle appears in full in his book Avram-trava (Hedge Hyssop). That book includes work from 2018 to 2023, which is to say before the full-scale invasion but when creeping authoritarian rule in Russia and the hybrid war on Ukraine were already keenly felt. Some poems, including those cited by Parts, write directly about language and its ruptures, its failures. The poet can seem repelled by his own utterances, and more than any poet since Osip Mandel΄shtam, Bulatovskii presents the imagery of lips and mouth as laden with emotion, including an uncomfortable sense of the way words feel in the mouth. He registers the physical sensation of what it means to make the sounds of Russian words, which struggle to form in the poet's mouth. A heavy judgment hangs on every utterance. The final poem in the cycle “Na kontse iazyka” begins: “ia khoroshii russkii / u menia vo rtu slova” (I am a good Russian / with words in my mouth)—but the words are gnawed bits of a primer, as if the punishment for thinking of oneself as a “good” Russian is to have to eat words.Footnote 20 And the words are associated with decay and death. As Bulatovskii writes in another poem:
что-то нас заглинило something turns us into clay
что-то высушило рот something dries out the mouth
что-то стало именем something becomes a name
но из горла не идет.Footnote 21but it can't get out of the throat
The power of Bulatovskii's poetry rests in its combination of revolting imagery and breathtaking formal dexterity.Footnote 22 The smooth rhythms, syntactic patterns, and often glowing rhymes clash with the poems’ grotesque mental pictures, so that the reader's affective state is a kind of nauseated attraction to poem after poem after poem. Repeatedly, the poems record a barrier to enunciation or testify to a sense of linguistic blockage, but the poetry itself seems to gush forth compulsively to enact historical catastrophe at the level of emotion.
Bulatovskii's every poem is worth our close attention, and his overall poetic practice also feels like an exemplary model of what poets can do in a time of war. In his poems, in his extensive work as a translator, in his steadfast presence on Facebook (where, as I was writing this essay, he was posting his remarkable remixes of Paul Celan's Mandel΄shtam translations), and as the editor and publisher of Jaromír Hladík Press, Bulatovskii unites the themes of ethics, resistance, and translation found across the many texts treated in this forum.Footnote 23 In Petersburg, unbowed, he is doing the work of resistance—which, in the end, is what we can most hope for from poets in a time of war. Can they stop a war? Bulatovskii, a peerless ironist on top of all else, has an answer for that: Jaromír Hladík Press takes its name from the hero of a Borges short story, a Czech Jewish writer condemned to death by the Nazis.Footnote 24 In Borges's story, Hladík dreams that God might redeem him, might save him from death just long enough to finish his last work, a play. The story ends in an unreal execution scene. The writer finishes his play, but only in his head—between the time that the executioner's bullet left its gun and the moment, which seems to him the year granted by God, when the bullet kills him. To create art is to stop time, but the creative act cannot stop a bullet. Still, if what you are writing tells the truth—and the play Hladík is writing is called The Enemies—then your story will be told.
