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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 February 2025
The responses by Russian, Ukrainian, and other countries’ Russophone poets to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 constitute a unified artistic discourse, animated by recurring topics, motifs, and images. This article aims to open a discussion of this body of work by examining one of its major topics—the Russian language as both a weapon and victim of war—and by offering an overarching theoretical framework, based on the concept of witnessing, for the analysis of contemporary artistic modes generated by war, extremity, and crisis. The topic of language foregrounds the problem of the speaking subject, participating or implicated in ongoing traumatic events. I examine these poems as poetry of witnessing: verses that employ digital media to respond to traumas and atrocities from within the events and as they unfold, while questioning the moral parameters of their response and the adequacy of their artistic instruments.
1 Linor Goralik, “Ot redaktora,” Russian Oppositional Arts Review (ROAR) 1, at roar-review.com/ROAR-58ff1e7b138249688cd0df96fcd18c42?p=4dfdbe7ff2094d42b1dd719b3cbd22e7&pm=c (accessed July 30, 2024). Starting with the sixth issue, the name has been changed to Resistance and Opposition Arts Review, with the language indicated as “Ukrainian/Russian.”
2 “No War – Poety Protiv Voiny,” at nowarpoetry.com/about-the-project (accessed July 30, 2024).
3 These include: Golovinskaia, Irina, ed., Poniatye i svideteli: Khroniki voennogo vremeni: Vtoraia kniga (Tel-Aviv, 2022)Google Scholar; Machina, Liubov, ed., Voina stikhotvreniia 24.02.2022–24.05.2022 (Berlin, 2022)Google Scholar; Nemirovskaya, Julia, ed., Disbelief: 100 Russian Anti-War Poems (Ripon, 2023)Google Scholar; Leving, Yuri, ed., Poeziia poslednego vremeni: Khronika (St. Petersburg, 2022)Google Scholar; and Forché, Carolyn and Kaminsky, Ilya, eds., In the Hour of War: Poetry from Ukraine (Medford, 2023)Google Scholar. These volumes’ introductions and early reviews offer valuable contributions to the study of war poetry. Several important volumes of Ukrainian poetry came out since the war started in 2014, including the bilingual Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine edited by Oksana Maksymchuk and Maz Rosochinsky (Boston, 2018), at www.wordsforwar.com (accessed July 30, 2024); and Boris and Lyudmila Khersonsky in Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky, eds., The Country Where Everyone's Name Is Fear (Washington, 2022).
4 Peters, John Durham, “Witnessing,” Media, Culture & Society 23, no. 6 (November 2001): 708CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Mortensen, Mette, “Connective Witnessing: Reconfiguring the Relationship between the Individual and the Collective,” Information, Communication & Society 18, no. 11 (July 2015): 1393–1406CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jones, Sara, “Mediated Immediacy: Constructing Authentic Testimony in Audio-visual Media,” Rethinking History 21, no. 2 (2017): 135–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Peters, “Witnessing,” 707–8.
7 Zaharchenko, Tanya, “The Synchronous War Novel: Ordeal of the Unarmed Person in Serhiy Zhadan's Internat,” Slavic Review 78, no. 2 (Summer 2019): 420CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Haleta, Olena, “Mined Words: An Un-imaginable Reality and the Search for a New Language in the Poetry of Maidan,” in Cossacks in Jamaica, Ukraine at the Antipodes: Essays in Honor of Marko Pavlyshyn, eds. Achilli, Alessandro, Yekelchyk, Serhy, and Yesypenko, Dmytro (Boston, 2020), 618–38Google Scholar.
8 Carolyn Forché, “Not Persuasion, But Transport: The Poetry of Witness.” The Blaney Lecture transcript and video, 45:58, October 25, 2013, at Poets Forum in New York City at poets.org/text/not-persuasion-transport-poetry-witness (accessed July 30, 2024).
9 Carolyn Forché, ed., Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (New York, 1993), 31.
10 Yuliya Pikalova, “Ruiny rechi,” at nowarpoetry.com/authors/julia-pikalova/ (accessed July 30, 2024). Going forward, I cite the title or the first line of a poem rather than the “postcard.” Most but not all poems in the “collections” are unnamed.
11 Olga Anikina, “Ei, kuda ushli vse slova,” at litpoint.org/2022/07/16/3265/ (accessed July 30, 2024).
12 Ada Kordon, “Lishili golosa . . .” ROAR 1, at https://roar-review.com/afa1301ac1c447c4a0c8877b8928a127 (accessed July 30, 2024).
13 Polina Barskova, “Itogi goda,” Facebook, December 22, 2022, at www.facebook.com/polina.barskova.3/posts/pfbid0po7NKPJa9bMyLUykBWxKd4rtLDyxtThdL484QS5agMLp6nssbrVBdo1T3zGWpbmel (accessed July 30, 2024).
14 Nemirovskaya, ed., Disbelief, 124.
15 Vladimir Ermolaev, “Z,” ROAR 5, at roar-review.com/ROAR-14410d5fbf6a43dca95dd4b957c9d269?p=a48e395f64b1475b9f3d89d4af28ade4&pm=c (accessed July 30, 2024).
16 Ekaterina Ageeva, “Vybor,” ROAR 2, at roar-review.com/ROAR-c92634e7b7ba48dbb90a17f01b431b35?p=cd06a4e3f6404b61a377d8259f614083&pm=c (accessed July 30, 2024).
17 Kseniia Pravkina, “Kak pisat΄ posle Mariupolia,” ROAR 2, at https://roar-review.com/4957fd69c59849f4b0e67f325bdedf84 (accessed July 31. 2024).
18 Aleksandr Pushkin, “Prorok/The Prophet” in From the Ends to the Beginning: A Bilingual Anthology of Russian Poetry, eds. Ilya Kutik and Andrew Wachtel (Evanston, 2001), at max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/mdenner/Demo/texts/prophet.htm (accessed July 30, 2024).
19 Igor Bulatovsky, “From the cycle ‘Na kontse iazyka,’” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 177, no. 5 (2022): 10.
20 Vera Pavlova, “Ia grazhdanka mira.” ROAR 6, at roar-review.com/ROAR-ad4362991ffd42b3ac5b3e17fc608f02?p=5f2c11926af644abb270fa844962278a&pm=c (accessed July 30, 2024).
21 Anonimno (Anonymous), “Granitsa,” ROAR 1, at https://roar-review.com/0def9229801c43cdb013aee4685d20a6 (accessed July 31, 2024).
22 Aleksandr Viktorovich Markov, “Sovremennaia russkaia poeziia v period intensivnykh sobytii,” Filosophiia. Zhurnal Vyshei shkoly ekonomiki 6, no. 3 (2022): 256–88.
23 The heated discussion takes place on multiple platforms. See, for instance, Maria Stepanova's essay “The Russian Question: Reflections on the Collective ‘Russian’ Guilt and Responsibility,” Public Seminar, March 20, 2023, at publicseminar.org/essays/the-russian-question/ (accessed July 30, 2024). See also a column in the Russian oppositional news outlet Meduza published in March 2022: “Rossiiane vinovny v voine protiv Ukrainy? Ili otvetstvenny, no ne vinovny? Nikolai Epple razbiraet eti kategorii – i napominaet, v chem raznitsa,” Meduza, 18 March, 2022, meduza.io/feature/2022/03/18/rossiyane-vinovny-v-voyne-protiv-ukrainy-ili-otvetstvenny-no-ne-vinovny (accessed July 30, 2024).
24 Aleksey Oleinikov, “Letit ves΄ mir ko vsem chertiam,” ROAR 1, at https://roar-review.com/b5fb317478d0458680c07cf2d13163a7 (accessed July 31, 2024).
25 Cited in Dmitry Kuzmin, “Oni vyzhivaiut. Ekho voennykh deistvii v russkoi poezii 2022 goda,” Radio Svoboda, December 30, 2022, at www.svoboda.org/a/oni-vyzhivayut-eho-voennyh-deystviy-v-russkoy-poezii-2022-goda/32195546.html (accessed July 30, 20243).
26 Bulatovsky, “Na kontse iazyka,” 7.
27 Aleksandr Kabanov, “Kak chelovek bol΄shogo sroka godnosti,” at nowarpoetry.com/authors/aleksandr-kabanov/ (accessed July 30, 2024). Vitaly Chernetsky characterizes Kabanov's writing as “melancholic replaying of trauma resulting from continuing self-identification with the corpus of cultural and political realia associated with Russophone discourse in Ukraine as ‘creole’ or (post-)imperial, and the ideological baggage he sees it as carrying, even if against the poet's wishes, in contemporary Ukraine.” Chernetsky, “Russophone Writing in Ukraine: Historical Contexts and Post-Euromaidan Changes,” in Global Russian Cultures, ed. Kevin Platt (Madison, 2019), 64.
28 Vadim Fomin, “Molchashchie vmeste,” at litpoint.org/2023/03/21/gosudarstvo-stanovitsya-rodinoy/ (accessed July 30, 2024).
29 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis, 1984), 61.
30 Pravkina, “Kak pisat΄”
31 Ivan Klinovoi, “Tam bombiat Ukrainu,” ROAR 5, at https://roar-review.com/d73f86f2c8494e0ab1b1f11a44361f80 (accessed July 31, 2024).
32 Alex Danchev, “Our Brothers’ Keeper: Moral Witness,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 40, nos. 3–4 (2015): 191–200; and Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York, 2012).
33 Antony Rowland, Holocaust Poetry: Awkward Poetics in the Work of Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison and Ted Hughes (Edinburgh, 2022), 1.
34 Glasha Koshenbek, “Khochetsia ubivat΄ no v forme,” at litpoint.org/2022/12/13/4686/ (accessed July 30, 2024).
35 Aleksandr Gabriel, “Zalit΄ v sebia vina,” at litpoint.org/2022/08/23/2322/ (accessed December 4, 2023).
36 Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford, 2020), 21.
37 Ibid., 6.
38 Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, Mass, 2021), 148–57.
39 Vera Pavlova, “Bog pokaraet kesaria,” Facebook, February 20, 2023, at www.facebook.com/vera.pavlova.522/posts/pfbid0jWSzqXeX8CrW3XEPMXdpAJjuya34V1HxyLDPLJGhG4yZH7DrzmVvNzzouHuQ5gzDl (accessed July 30, 2024).
40 Vera Pavlova, “V skladchinu—khleb izgnaniia,” ROAR 3, at roar-review.com/747c014b288d480fa4eaf9ca982d5492 (accessed July 30, 2024).
41 Rowland, Holocaust Poetry, 11–12.
42 Nemirovskaya, ed. Disbelief, 188.
43 Two of the more striking instances on a long list: Mikhail Piotrovskii, the director of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, stating in an interview: “Our recent exhibitions abroad are just a powerful cultural offensive. If you want, a kind of ‘special operation,’ which a lot of people don't like. But we are coming. And no one can be allowed to interfere with our offensive.” In “Pochemu neobkhodimo byt<ʹ> so svoei stranoi, kogda ona sovershaet istoricheskii povorot i vybor. Otvechaet Mikhail Piotrovskii.” Rossiyskaia Gazeta, June 22, 2022 at rg.ru/2022/06/22/kartina-mira.html (accessed July 30, 2024); and for billboards erected by the occupiers on the streets of Ukrainian cities with portraits of the Russian classics, see Anna Narinskaia, “Pushkin, chto li?” The Moscow Times, July 13, 2022, at www.moscowtimes.eu/2022/07/13/pushkin-chto-li-a22221 (accessed July 30, 2024).
44 Valdimir Druk, “belye flagi nad goriashchim gorodom,” ROAR 5, at roar-review.com/f179188ead6e417f943c517305cd10d1 (accessed July 30, 2024).
45 Kseniia Pravkina, “Kak pisat΄”
46 Olga Bragina. “25 June 2022,” in Shest΄ stikhotvorenii o voine. Asymptote, at www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/six-poems-about-war-olga-bragina/russian/ (accessed July 30, 2024).
47 See for instance, Anastasia Afanasieva's 2014 poem “Can there be poetry after . . .” (“Vozmozhna li poeziia posle . . .”), in Maksymchuk and Rosochinsky, eds. Words for War, 17.
48 Olena Maksakowa, “Eti slova v stolbik,” at nowarpoetry.com/authors/maksakowa-olena/ (accessed July 30, 2024).
49 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, 2009), 6.
50 Ibid., 9
51 See Tamara Hundorova's discussion of Chernobyl as word-symbol, in which she relies on Jean-François Lyotard's use of “Auschwitz” in illustrating the failure of western civilization. Tamara Hundorova, Tranzytna Kultura: Symptomy postkolonialnoi travmy (Kyiv, 2013), 387.
52 Zaharchenko, “The Synchronous War Novel,” 420.
53 This aspect of trauma theory has seen numerous challenges in light of the more recent developments in psychology and aesthetics; see, respectively, Michelle Balaev, ed., Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory (New York, 2014), and Anna-Lena Werner, Let Them Haunt Us: How Contemporary Aesthetics Challenge Trauma as the Unrepresentable (Bielefeld, 2020); and in studies of the postcolonial trauma representations that eschew “the Western discourse of unspeakability,” see Stef Craps and Gert Buelens, “Introduction: Postcolonial Trauma Novels,” Studies in the Novel 40, no. 1–2 (2008): 1–12.
54 Cited in Marita Nadal, Mónica Calvo, eds., Trauma in Contemporary Literature. Narrative and Representation (New York, 2014), 3–4.
55 Kerstin Schankweiler, Verena Straub, and Tobias Wendl, Image Testimonies. Witnessing in Times of Social Media (London, 2018); Mette Mortensen, “Connective Witnessing.”
56 Stacey Peebles, Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier's Experience in Iraq (Ithaca, 2011), 9.
57 Roger Luckhurst, “Not Now, Not Yet: Polytemporality and Fictions of the Iraq War,” in Marita Nadal, Mónica Calvo, eds., Trauma in Contemporary Literature (New York, 2014), 52.
58 Theodor W Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, 1997), 322.
59 Vera Pavlova, “Vzletaiut krasnye rakety,” ROAR 6, at roar-review.com/5f2c11926af644abb270fa844962278a (accessed July 30, 2024).
60 In another poem in this cycle, Pavlova refers to her poetic practice as stenography.
61 Maria Stepanova comments on the importance of Celan to the Russophone poetry of resistance but does not allow Russian poets the right to this affinity because that would equal a claim to victimhood, whereas they are “neither victim nor aggressor.” Kevin M. F. Platt and Mark Lipovetsky, “A Conversation with Maria Stepanova,” trans. Kevin M. F. Platt, World Literature Today, March 2023, at www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2023/march/conversation-maria-stepanova-kevin-m-f-platt-mark-lipovetsky (accessed July 30, 2024).
62 Igor Bulatovsky, “slishkom mnogo prirody v adu . . .” Facebook, March 5, 2022, at www.facebook.com/igor.bulatovsky/posts/pfbid0TfLTieAA8JjAS9QkX7vDgguMeZaAZdtcx4A9VYR5uM1y26kXjfy6dqUQmuKK7Zx8l (accessed July 30, 2024). Leyb Kvitko, a Soviet-Yiddish poet from Ukraine, was executed in 1952 along with other members of the so-called “Kiev group” of Jewish poets and members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Bulatovsky refers to Kvitko's children's poem “Violin” (Skripka) about a violin made of tree branches and “four strands of hair.” For a study of Kvitko's poetry see Harriet Murav, As the Dust of the Earth: The Literature of Abandonment in Revolutionary Russia and Ukraine (Bloomington, 2024).
63 Igor Bulatovsky, “accepting the Andrei Belyi prize in literature in January of 2023,” Facebook. January 22, 2023, at www.facebook.com/igor.bulatovsky/posts/pfbid023yh1LGCjfQ2aBE33WuDxXHuXJoxnNEfqG889z42YmoHsxUKuvGaNv1JjiZ9Eqq4Xl (accessed July 30, 2024).
64 Paul Celan, “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen,” in Paul Celan, Collected Prose, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Riverdale-on-Hudson, 1986), 34.
65 Vera Pavlova, “Otkroesh΄ dver΄ — ot skvozniaka . . . ,” Facebook, June 5, 2022, at www.facebook.com/vera.pavlova.522/posts/pfbid02GsTCqAWi3oHanCnMaXdVRzHJVMhz5BH2iraGbGDTxMm2f9d4GmZsnXNNmYm3mB9ol (accessed July 30, 2024).
66 Leona Toker, “Toward a Poetics of Documentary Prose—From the Perspective of Gulag Testimonies,” Poetics Today 18, no. 2 (1997): 188.
67 Kseniia Pravkina, “Zavtra byla vesna,” ROAR 2, at roar-review.com/4957fd69c59849f4b0e67f325bdedf84?pvs=25 (accessed July 30, 2024).
68 Polina Barskova, “Den΄ porazheniia,” Facebook, January 26, 2023, at www.facebook.com/polina.barskova.3/posts/pfbid0227nq82XQS8BcLbvnN4Gqg367oh9wFXjxg8UC5T3iKkCKFs5veN1Zq7XdnLeWXDJKl (accessed July 30, 2024).
69 Viktor Fet, “Mir izmenilsia,” at https://litpoint.org/2022/08/21/2496/ (accessed December 4, 2023).
70 Anikina, “Ei, kuda ushli vse slova?”
71 At least two Ukrainian poets, Volodymyr Vakulenko and Victoria Amelina, were killed since the start of the full-scale war.
72 Marco Puleri, “Ukraïns΄kyi, Rosiis΄komovnyi, Rosiis΄kyi: Self-Identification in Post-Soviet Ukrainian Literature in Russian,” Ab Imperio no. 2 (2014): 379.
73 See for instance Vitaly Chernetsky, “Russophone Writing in Ukraine,” 48–68; Dirk Uffelmann, “Is There Any Such Thing as ‘Russophone Russophobia’? When Russian Speakers Speak Out against Russia(n) in the Ukrainian Internet,” in Global Russian Cultures, ed. Kevin Platt (Madison, 2029), 207–29; and Volodymyr Kulyk, “Between the Self and the Other: Representations of Russian-speakers in Social Media Discourse,” East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies 5, no. 2 (2018): 65–88.
74 This is what Svyatoslav Vakarchuk, the lead vocalist of the immensely popular rock band Okean Elzy, means when he writes of how his loathing for the aggressor left him with no other thoughts or feelings, made him one-dimensional: “You've made me black and white, / You've made me simple, without gradient or shade” (Ty zrobyla mene cherno-bilym. / Ty zrobyla mene prostym). Svyatoslav Vakarchuk, “Where'd you come from, my loathing?” trans. Alexandra Kutovoy, https://quote.ucsd.edu/alchemy/whered-you-come-from-my-loathing/ (accessed August 1, 2024).
75 See Marko Puleri, Ukrainian, Russophone, (Other) Russian Hybrid Identities and Narratives in Post-Soviet Culture and Politics (Frankfurt-am-Main, 2020). For an illuminating discussion of hybrid identity in earlier literature, see Yuliya Ilchuk, Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity (Toronto, 2021).
76 In Forché and Kaminsky, eds., In the Hour of War, 91–93.
77 See Alex Averbuch, “Russophone Literature of Ukraine: Self-decolonization, Deterritorialization, Reclamation,” Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue Canadienne des Slavistes 65, no. 2 (2023): 149.
78 Ibid.
79 Dominic LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca, 2018), 37.
80 Kulyk, “Between the Self and the Other,” 76.
81 Cited in Martin Schmitz, “#Ves΄MirZaMir (5): Khroniki agressii (Berlin, 2022),” at litpoint.org/2022/11/01/vesymirzamir-5-hroniki-agressii-berlin-2022/ (accessed July 30, 2024).
82 Ibid.
83 Olena Maksakowa, “Istoriia literatury,” ROAR 3, roar-review.com/37d6d03727994a029ec6fade2c0a5f95 (accessed July 30, 2024).
84 Andrei Kostinsky, “Pilot Chekhov podnial v nebo samolet,” at litpoint.org/2023/02/25/kostinskiy/ (accessed July 30, 2024).
85 Vitaly Kovalchuk, “On prikhodit pod vecher,” at litpoint.org/2022/11/02/4285/ (accessed July 30, 2024).
86 Averbuch, “Russophone literature of Ukraine,” 149, 151.
87 Ibid., 159.
88 Olena Maksakowa, “Kazhdyi novyi den΄,” ROAR 3, at roar-review.com/37d6d03727994a029ec6fade2c0a5f95 (accessed July 30, 2024).
89 Irina Ivanchenko, “Otgudela sirena,” in “God voiny: Stikhi poetov Ukrainy na russkom iazyke,” Novaya Gazeta, February 22, 2023, at novayagazeta.eu/articles/2023/02/22/god-voiny-russkie-stikhi-poetov-ukrainy (accessed December 4, 2023).
90 Alessandro Achili, “The Body of the Poet, the Body of the Nation: Corporeality in Recent Revolution Poetry from Belarus,” Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue Canadienne des Slavistes 64, nos. 2–3 (2022): 247–73.
91 Dmitrii Volchek, “German Lukhomnikov: Neofitsial΄naia kul΄tura vyzhivet v podpol΄e,” interview Radio Svoboda, January 1, 2023, at www.svoboda.org/a/german-lukomnikov-neofitsialjnaya-kuljtura-vyzhivet-v-podpolje-/32237402.html?fbclid=IwAR00yX-dfYQJsYoGC5KR14w3hHsp6IsY7XI4khryYunGYSq07sGCi_V1CLM (accessed July 30, 2024).