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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 February 2025
Since the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, contemporary Ukrainian poets have increasingly used Facebook as a forum for sharing their work. Unlike poets in the United States, where copyright law discourages writers from self-publishing their work, including on social media, Ukrainian poets use Facebook not only to share work in progress, but also to comment and even translate one another's poems. We argue that by using the “distant reading” method of applying statistical tools to a large archive of contemporary poetry, scholars become better close readers. Having created an archive of a large sample of recent Ukrainian poetry posted to Facebook, our article models data-driven tools that help scholars to understand how poetry, written and shared to social media in a time of war, has changed between 2014 and 2022. This novel use of Facebook as a literary tool clearly shows how poetic language changes in a time of war. It also points to ways that the large community of readers on social media has influenced what poets write.
We have benefitted from sharing this research with several colleagues. Eran Mukamel, in particular, has advised us in our data visualizations and statistical analysis. We also thank Anna Ivanova, Stephanie Sandler, Margaret Litvin, Elena Glassman, Martin Wattenberg, Yuliya Ilchuk, Marci Shore, Ilya Kaminsky, Will Styler, Lera Boroditsky, and Roger Levy. Several researchers have contributed directly to building this archive. These include Olga Kiyan, James Quillen, Polina Galouchko, Reem Tasyakan, Neon Mashurov, Wayne Lee, Maria Torpey, Xian Winfrey Kong, Jack Hohn, and Gohar Gevorgyan. We are grateful to Eugene Avrutin, Harriet Murav, Dmitry Tartakovsky, and two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading.
Note on Transliteration: In our transliteration of names and toponyms from Cyrillic into Latin characters for both Ukrainian and Russian, we have generally used the modified Library of Congress system. However, where an author has specified a preferred spelling of their name in their Facebook profile, we have used this spelling.
1 For a brief discussion of poetry and social media in eastern Europe, see Glaser, Amelia, “There’s No There There: Political Poetry from Eastern Europe on Facebook,” Times Literary Supplement 6127 (September 4, 2020): 26Google Scholar.
2 Moretti, Franco, “Conjectures on World Literature and More Conjectures (2000/2003),” in World Literature: A Reader, eds. D’Haen, Theo, Domínguez, César, and Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl (London, 2013), 161–70Google Scholar.
3 Users can access the Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Archive directly at https://ukrpoetry.org/ (accessed August 7, 2024)
4 Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 163.
5 Todd Kontje, for example, reminds us that literature should, at least in part, “introduce the Shibboleth of a close reading that plunges into the hermeneutic depths rather than remaining on the surface or at a distance…” Kontje, Todd, “The Case for Close Reading after the Descriptive Turn,” in eds. Erlin, Matt and Tatlock, Lynne, Distant Readings: Topologies of German Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century (Rochester, 2014), 133–52, 138CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Hancher, Michael, “Re: Search and Close Reading,” in eds. Gold, Matthew K. and Klein, Lauren E., Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, (Minneapolis, 2016), 118–38, 128CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Poets and translators have increasingly turned to new media as a way of understanding their art. Take, for example, the collection by Juhasz, Alexandra, ed., My Phone Lies to Me: Fake News Poetry Workshops as Radical Digital Media Literacy Given the Facts of Fake News (Goleta, CA, 2022)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Haleta, Olena, “Mined Words: An Un-Imaginable Reality and the Search for a New Language in the Poetry of Maidan,” in eds. Achilli, Alessandro, Yekelchyk, Serhy, and Yesypenko, Dmytro, Cossacks in Jamaica, Ukraine at the Antipodes: Essays in Honor of Marko Pavlyshyn (Boston, 2020), 618–38, 618Google Scholar.
8 Pennebaker, James W. and Ireland, Molly E., “Using Literature to Understand Authors: The Case for Computerized Text Analysis,” Scientific Study of Literature 1, no. 1 (2011): 34–48, 46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Pennebaker and Ireland have used language style matching (LSM), to observe that poets who are couples tend to be “stylistically in sync during happier and more peaceful periods of their lives together,” ibid., 44; and Shutova, Ekaterina, Sun, Lin, Gutiérrez, Elkin Darío, Lichtenstein, Patricia, and Narayanan, Srini, “Multilingual Metaphor Processing: Experiments with Semi-Supervised and Unsupervised Learning,” Computational Linguistics 43, no. 1 (2017): 71–123CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at direct.mit.edu/coli/article/43/1/71/1565/Multilingual-Metaphor-Processing-Experiments-with (accessed August 7, 2024); see also Ireland, Molly E. and Pennebaker, James W., “Language Style Matching in Writing: Synchrony in Essays, Correspondence, and Poetry,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 99, no. 3 (2010): 549–71CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
9 Shutova, Sun, Darío Gutiérrez, Lichtenstein, Narayanan, “Multilingual Metaphor Processing,” 71–123.
10 Mustafa Nayyem, “Ladno, davaite ser΄ezno. Vot kto segodnia do polunochi gotov vyiti na Maidan? Laiki ne schitaiutsia. Tol΄ko kommentarii pod etim postom so slovami ‘Ia gotov.’ Kak tol΄ko naberetsia bol΄she tysiachi, budem organizovyvat΄sia,” Facebook post, November 21, 2013, at www.facebook.com/Mustafanayyem/posts/pfbid02U19cNzezUe6SZ8X9GEfX11HZUG7xkCc1jNZePkocSDakyuLqPsEAbihch3mfwUq2l (accessed on August 7, 2024). Arsenii Iatseniuk, who would later become the provisional president of Ukraine, also tweeted, in Ukrainian, “Everyone to the #Euromaidan! Yanukovych doesn’t understand any language, other than the Maidan. We also have to show that WE are in power!” Arsenii Iatseniuk, “Usi na #Ievromaidan! Ianukovych ne rozumiie inshoi movy, okrim Maidanu. Tozh maiemo pokazaty, shcho vlada—tse MY!” X (formerly known as Twitter) post, November 21, 2013, 4:22 a.m., at x.com/Yatsenyuk_AP/status/403453433648148481 (accessed on August 7, 2024).
11 Ievhen Rudenko and El΄dar Sarakhman, “Kul΄turnyi kod Maidanu. Khto prydumav ‘Nebesnu Sotniu,’ ‘Revoliutsiiu Hidnosti,’ i iak ‘Plyne kacha’ stala druhym himnom,” in Ukrainska Pravda, February 21, 2020, at www.pravda.com.ua/articles/2020/02/21/7241172/ (accessed on August 7, 2024).
12 Soldatov, Andrei and Borogan, Irina, The Red Web: The Struggle between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries (New York, 2015), 153Google Scholar.
13 Ibid., 276.
14 Armando Salvatore notes that the Arab Spring’s many monikers included the revolution of the “street,” and the revolution of al-Jazeera. Armando Salvatore, “Before (and after) the ‘Arab Spring’: From Connectedness to Mobilization in the Public Sphere,” Oriente Moderno, Nuova serie, Anno 91, Nr. 1, Between Everyday Life and Political Revolution: The Social Web in the Middle East (2011): 5–12, here 5, 11.
15 Pippa Norris cautions readers against the assumption that social media is a radicalizing tool in the Middle East, noting that it plays very different roles in different countries, and that studies have not concluded that social media users are generally not radical in their politics. Pippa Norris, “Political Mobilization and Social Networks: The Example of the Arab Spring,” in ed. Norbert Kersting, Electronic Democracy (Opladen, Leverkusen, Germany, 2012), 55–76, 73.
16 Soldatov and Borogan, The Red Web, 153.
17 Josephine von Zitzewitz, in an interview with Ksenia Zheludova, notes that “In the Russophone literary world, self-publication is no impediment to publishing the same text again in online journals or in print… The recent flurry of new international editions by feminist poets who publish prolifically on social media, like Oksana Vasyakina, Lida Yusupova, and Galina Rymbu, corroborates this thesis.” Olga Zilberbourg, “Publishing Poetry on Social Media: Interview with Ksenia Zheludova by Josephine von Zitzewitz,” Punctured Lines: Post-Soviet Literature in and Outside the Former Soviet Union, March 31, 2021, at (https://puncturedlines.wordpress.com/2021/03/31/publishing-poetry-on-social-media-interview-with-ksenia-zheludova-by-josephine-von-zitzewitz/ (accessed August 7, 2024).
18 Reuters, “Ukraine bans Russian TV channels for airing war ‘propaganda,’” Reuters, August 19, 2024, at www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-television/ukraine-bans-russian-tv-channels-for-airing-war-propaganda-idUSKBN0GJ1QM20140819 (accessed on August 7, 2024); Peter Dickinson, “Analysis: Ukraine bans Kremlin-linked TV channels,” Atlantic Council, February 5, 2021, at www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/analysis-ukraine-bans-kremlin-linked-tv-channels/ (accessed on August 7, 2024); and Carly Olson, “Ukraine bans some Russian music and books,” New York Times, June 19, 2022, at www.nytimes.com/2022/06/19/world/europe/ukraine-bans-russian-music-books.html (accessed August 7, 2024, behind paywall).
19 See Sarah Steffen, “Russia tightens Internet controls,” DW, February 9, 2024, at www.dw.com/en/russia-tightens-internet-controls-makes-it-easier-to-spy-on-citizens-critics-say/a-18690498 (accessed on August 7, 2024).
20 See “Russia: Growing Internet Isolation, Control, Censorship,” Human Rights Watch, June 18, 2020, at www.hrw.org/news/2020/06/18/russia-growing-internet-isolation-control-censorship (accessed on August 7, 2024); “Federal΄nyi zakon ot 29 iiulia 2017 goda No. 276-FZ ‘O vnesenii izmenenii v Federalʹnyi zakon ‘Ob informatsii, informatsionnykh tekhnologiiakh i o zashchite informatsii,’” Rossiiskaia Gazeta, July 30, 2017, at rg.ru/2017/07/30/fz276-site-dok.html (accessed on August 7, 2024); “Federal΄nyi zakon ot 29.07.2017 N. 241-FZ ‘O vnesenii izmenenii v stat΄-i 10–1 i 15–4 Federal-nogo zakona ‘Ob informatsii, informatsionnykh tekhnologiiax i o zashchite informatsii,” Portal Obespecheniia gradostroitel΄noi deiatel΄nosti g. Kemerovo, at https://mgis42.ru/node/8375 (accessed on August 7, 2024); “Putin Signs ‘Fake News,’ ‘Internet Insults’ Bills Into Law,” The Moscow Times, March 18, 2019, at www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/03/18/putin-signs-fake-news-internet-insults-bills-into-law-a64850 (accessed on August 7, 2024); and “Putin podpisal zakony o feikn΄ius i neuvazhenii k vlasti,” Vedomosti, March 18, 2019, at www.vedomosti.ru/politics/news/2019/03/18/796652-putin-feiknyus-neuvazhenii (accessed on August 7, 2024).
21 A Human Rights Watch report views these laws as a means of suppressing protests, noting that the law includes “calls for youth to participate in unsanctioned protests, exaggerating the number of protesters, and spreading false information about police violence at these gatherings.” See “Russia: Social Media Pressured to Censor Posts,” Human Rights Watch, February 5, 2021, at www.hrw.org/news/2021/02/05/russia-social-media-pressured-censor-posts# (accessed on August 7, 2024); and a Freedom House report categorized the Russian internet as “not free.” See “Russia: Freedom on the Net 2020 Country Report,” Freedom House, at freedomhouse.org/country/russia/freedom-net/2020 (accessed on August 7, 2024).
22 Steffen, “Russia tightens Internet controls.”
23 Digital Forensic Research Lab, “Russian War Report: Meta officially declared ‘extremist organization’ in Russia,” Atlantic Council, March 21, 2022, at www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/russian-war-report-meta-officially-declared-extremist-organization-in-russia/ (accessed on August 7, 2024). Russian courts had already fined Facebook and Twitter for non-compliance in 2020 and 2021. “Russian court fines Twitter and Facebook 62,840 dollars each for refusing to localize user data,” Meduza, February 13, 2020, at https://meduza.io/en/news/2020/02/13/russian-court-fines-twitter-62-840-dollars-for-refusing-to-localize-user-data (accessed on August 7, 2024); and “Sotsial΄nye Seti Facebook, WhatsApp i Twitter obzhalovali shtrafy na desiatki millionov rublei,” Ekho Moskvy, Sept. 24, 2021, at echo.msk.ru/news/2909064-echo.html.
24 Halyna Kruk, “nasha strichka novyn,” (our newsfeed), Facebook post, October 23, 2022, at www.facebook.com/halyna.kruk/posts/pfbid02mgRRS5qPZywftdbAa3xhMdwpbH2xVUfYBYcrSgUFfuJvjejgECWT7o93A11Gmewfl (accessed on August 7, 2024). Original and English translation in Kruk, A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails, eds. and trans., Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk (Medford, 2023), 32–33.
25 Ibid.
26 Natalia Tykholoz, “Pro nas s′ohodni…” Facebook post, October 23, 2022, at www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid02fu38qh3WYhFRjQWfGWKZBPmSoTo5SqkdXUUadqaDDd8xFwMv1hvJfWgUiRSYzTsxl&id=100010685056067 (accessed on August 7, 2024).
27 In 2022, the Center for Countering Digital Hate released a report linking mental illness to social media use. See Imran Ahmed, “Deadly by Design: TikTok pushes harmful content promoting eating disorders and self-harm into users’ feeds,” Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), December 15, 2022, at counterhate.com/research/deadly-by-design/ (accessed on August 7, 2024).
28 See, for example, Douglas Yeung, “Terror and the Secondary Trauma of Social Media,” The Rand Blog, November 4, 2023, at www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2023/11/terror-and-the-secondary-trauma-of-social-media.html (accessed on August 7, 2024).
29 Matthew Rosenberg, Nicholas Confessore, and Carole Cadwalladr, “How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions,” New York Times, March 17, 2018, at www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-trump-campaign.html (accessed on August 7, 2024, behind paywall).
30 The analyses in this article are limited to roughly 1500 poems sampled from PEN’s early 2024 membership and their close contacts.
31 Pope, Alexander, “The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated,” in Butt, John Everett, ed., The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope (London, 1954)Google Scholar, line 55, IV 199; cited in Terry, Richard, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past, 1660–1781 (Oxford, 2001), 306CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
32 Patricia Waugh, “Value: Criticism, Canons, and Evaluation” in Patricia Waugh, ed., Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide (Oxford, 2006), 70–81, 75.
33 Pavlo Korobchuk, “Tse mih buty ty tse mih buty ia,” Facebook post, March 9, 2022, at www.facebook.com/korobchuk/posts/pfbid0VzVjYHctiwcDJveLvoufmhNHufzbxmdrwgJXdQrnNQEHkpXNhGt9E61VnB6jB2VWl (accessed on August 7, 2024).
34 Olena Haleta, “Mines Words,” 622. Haleta cites Cathy Caruth, Literature in the Ashes of History (Baltimore, 2013), 88.
35 Olena Haleta, “Mined Words,” 634.
36 Vasyl Makhno, “Liutova elehiia,” (February elegy), Facebook post, February 21, 2014, at www.facebook.com/vasyl.makhno/posts/pfbid0GMhtfkA71RcT2TfYnJQhGJ6ayQs7VKwhj7aSukQVCsQtnc69jXSALfWMd4gicvz7l (accessed August 7, 2024). A version is cited in Olena Haleta, “Mined Words,” 634.
37 Serhiy Zhadan, “Holka,” Facebook post, August 9, 2014, at www.facebook.com/serhiy.zhadan/posts/pfbid02j8D1s38jWLLbM5DNAaWVd7SJffQ9soTAfvL3ugfZMnF5aAwCT6CV1cX2LwfCTXfzl (accessed on August 7, 2024).
38 Boris Khersonsky, “Akh, Lesen΄ko,” Facebook post, February 25, 2022, at www.facebook.com/borkhers/posts/5269703036397813 (accessed on August 7, 2024).
39 Kateryna Kalytko, “Nikoly uzhe ne bude tykho i temno,” Facebook post, March 15, 2022, at www.facebook.com/kateryna.kalytko/posts/pfbid02qLq3TkCXew5xD6XFKcqVMyKWWCcNBSVtnGKRDmMwB7JdntJfozJcNDFDNWdq1uKbl (accessed on August 7, 2024).
40 Ibid.
41 Lesyk Panasiuk, “Abetka iak palata dlia poranenykh,” Facebook post, March 16, 2022, at www.facebook.com/lesyk.panasiuk/posts/5399862896704904 (accessed on August 7, 2024).
42 Paul Ricouer, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language (London, 1986), 13.
43 Ludmila Khersonskaia, “Strana kak luzha,” Facebook post, March 2, 2022 at, www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=5320987374602573&id=100000740888997 (accessed on August 7, 2024).
44 Serhiy Zhadan, “Chakaiut vechora liudy,” Facebook post, August 9, 2022, at www.facebook.com/serhiy.zhadan/posts/pfbid02GKxym1QGuYQDkZFenwFA17XGEL4MZpkFJQaaXwzifrbRXycophL5ZPRQAmgRSCEil (accessed on August 7, 2024).
45 Serhiy Zhadan, “Tak nezvichno i priemno,” Facebook post, August 29, 2022, at www.facebook.com/serhiy.zhadan/posts/pfbid0cppXBymQE2ARxoV9ZbD2ZWSYhS2Gp66UaKVFaoDzSeaCL8Ju5bgvdAPGiQaRvwkwl (accessed on August 7, 2024)
46 Ostap Slyvynsky, “A War Vocabulary: Displaced Ukrainians share fragmented stories of loss, trauma, and absurdity,” Document, June 9, 2022, at www.documentjournal.com/2022/06/a-war-vocabulary-aaron-hicklin-ukraine-lviv-kyiv-ostap-slyvynsky/ (accessed on August 7, 2024). See also, Ostap Slyvynsky, Slovnyk viiny (Kharkiv, 2023).
47 Borys Humeniuk, “Stara shovkovytsia pid Mariupolem” (An old mulberry outside Mariupol΄), Facebook post, June 28, 2014, at www.facebook.com/borys.humenyuk/posts/pfbid02Bqntp4PX3vKNKQphurB2ESjk3Po9Eri1yXZD4zRKxTfc8dWgH9Q6usuoMUhtfabjl (accessed on August 7, 2024).
48 Julia Musakovska, “Vona pryvodyt΄ ioho za ruku dodomu,” (She’s leading him home by the hand), Facebook post, April 24, 2022, at www.facebook.com/jmusakovska/posts/10159920345479493 (accessed on August 7, 2024). (The emphasis is ours.)
49 Shutova, Sun, Darío Gutiérrez, Lichtenstein, Narayanan, “Multilingual Metaphor Processing,” 71–123. Shutova et al cite Michael Mohler, David Bracewell, Marc Tomlinson, and David Hinote, “Semantic Signatures for Example-based Linguistic Metaphor Detection,” in eds. Ekaterina Shutova, Beata Beigman Klebanov, Joel Tetreault, Zornitsa Kozareva, Proceedings of the First Workshop on Metaphor in NLP, (Atlanta, 2013), 27–35; and Dirk Hovy, Shashank Shrivastava, Sujay Kumar Jauhar, Mrinmaya Sachan, Kartik Goyal, Huiying Li, Whitney Sanders, and Eduard Hovy, “Identifying Metaphorical Word Use with Tree Kernels,” in Proceedings of the First Workshop on Metaphor in NLP, 52–57.
50 Halyna Kruk, “Staryty vid novyn…” Facebook post, March 19, 2022, at www.facebook.com/halyna.kruk/posts/pfbid02uhxhPoEKq5E6ENUMt2XvjzPSuJP1Aj9x9WPaBAQMYDTX7QVJTWCbMHYhTqNgBoLJl (accessed on August 7, 2024). Poem appears as “z Evroppoiu v tli” (with Europe in the background) in Kruk, A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails, 60–61.
