In memory of Ilya Rissenberg

The new stage of Russia's aggression against Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022, created a fundamentally new, unprecedented situation in Russian culture.Footnote ¹ Those within Russia who refused to support Russia's political establishment and the actions of the Russian army not only put themselves at personal risk, but also experienced an acute loss of agency. Poets, like many other Russian intellectuals, have found themselves in a situation in which, as citizens of an aggressor country, they feel responsibility for “their” state's actions, distinguished by rare cruelty and cynicism, and, simultaneously, an inability to stop the violence.

Undermining, and even ridiculing, the normative ways that the war is discussed in Russian culture has become critically important. The reason for this shift is that anti-war poets need to overtly call into question post-Soviet cultural and political mythology of World War II.Footnote ² Until 2022, for Soviet and post-Soviet culture, in its various iterations, there remained the vitally important conception of fascism/Nazism as an absolute evil and of art as an important tool to counter this evil. These days, however, media outlets and social media users have begun to associate the violation of all standards of humanity and the demonstrative cynicism expressed by the Russian army and leadership with the actions of the Wehrmacht, the SS, and the leadership of Nazi Germany. This association is not entirely accurate, but, psychologically, it is almost inevitable. Therefore, the interpretive “framework” used for understanding current events is provided by a poem of activist and poet Daria Serenko:

Footnote ³That is why in the new (anti-)war poetry, the foundations of all the cultural conventions developed in Soviet society since the WWII era, and even, to some extent, in Russia's society since the turn of the twentieth century, are now under scrutiny. Poetry has turned out to be vitally important for this scrutiny, as it is distinguished by two distinctive features: a poem can be written relatively quickly, published easily on social media (that is, it does not require a special room for its exhibition, as does visual art), and spread with the help of the same social media channels (during a time of war and increased censorship in Russia, the speed of publication and distribution becomes crucial). Therefore, it can reflect changes in cultural self-consciousness “in real time” and possibly play a role in guiding the direction of such changes.

The current situation is also made exceptional by the volume of poetic works written in light of the new war. In the post-war period, the Soviet Union invaded at least Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan. The post-Soviet Russian army fought in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and, since 2014, in Ukraine. As a rule, the poetic response to these wars was small in scope. In the Soviet era, authors understood that poems criticizing the actions of the army or of the country's leadership could not be published in the USSR. The invasion of the countries of the Warsaw Pact, like Czechoslovakia in 1968 was written about only by a few dissidents.Footnote ⁴

The single important exception to this rule was the First and Second Chechen Wars in 1994—1996 and 1999–2000, respectively (although armed clashes occurred in the Northern Caucasus until approximately 2009). These events triggered the creation of dozens of anti-war poems that sought to reflect the violence carried out by the Russian army and special services in Chechnya, where, throughout the 1990s, leaders had struggled to transform it into an independent state. The poetic responses to the First and Second Chechen Wars resisting the state-backed jingoistic propaganda were so numerous that in 2001, poet Nikolai Vinnik published them in an anthology titled The Time of Ch: Poetry of Chechnya and Beyond. Footnote ⁵ However, the number of poems produced in response to the Russian-Ukrainian war and resisting the Kremlin's aggression and its ideological justifications is even greater than those produced in the late 1990s-early 2000s.

Today's events are perhaps the first large-scale war in the history of Europe during which the atrocities of the aggressor army, the mass killings of the civilian population, and the mass looting are continuously broadcast through social networks and Telegram—and these atrocities are presented not so much through television reports as through personal videos taken on phones. The socio-aesthetic effect of the relentless onslaught of “living within the pain of others” (to paraphrase Susan Sontag) might most accurately be described in the words of Nikitin, who writes, “. . . the concept of ‘anti-war poetry’ loses its meaning because no other poetry is possible right now. Rather, it is possible, but it is perceived as skullduggery.”Footnote ⁶

2

Russophone poets living and working in other countries (not as emigres but belonging to the multilingual literatures of these countries) are also involved in this process of radical political self-determination. For example, Igor Kotyukh, who lives in Estonia, wrote a poem in which he declares himself to be a multilingual state in which all languages, including Russian, are equal. Thus, he responds simultaneously to the stigmatization of Russians in Estonia and to political repressions in Russia and Belorussia:

Whether it is possible to speak of Russophone Ukrainian poetry in the same context is a complicated question. Certainly, Ukrainian literature contains literatures written in the different languages of the country's people—Ukrainian, Russian, Crimean Tatar. Some Ukrainian poets who wrote in two languages before the war (Iya Kiva) or only in Russian (Dmitry Kazakov) have switched to using Ukrainian during the war. Nevertheless, Ukrainian Russophone poetry continues to exist and, in my opinion, can be read both in the context of Ukraine's multilingual literature and in juxtaposition with the Russophone works of authors affiliated with Russia. Here, I will discuss only the latter of the aforementioned contexts.

On the one hand, Ukrainian Russophone poets regularly depict the whole of Ukrainian society as patriotically mobilizing in the name of a military struggle with the enemy. On the other, in addition to describing this mobilization, they also attempt to portray the state of society on the other side of the front lines. Boris Khersonskii, who, in his poetry, even in the first stage of the war between 2014 and 2022, sharply criticized the Kremlin's war machine,Footnote ⁹ writes today about the social catastrophe of a Russian society that agrees to take part in the militaristic “rallying around the flag”:

Ukrainian Russophone poetry spreads through Facebook and Telegram and can therefore be read by Russophone authors living in Russia and in the diaspora. Consequently, even under wartime conditions, a space for dialogue, or polylogue, between the Russophone poetry of different nations still exists—however, it is deeply charged with psychological tension, often hostility, and Ukrainian poets’ aspiration to defend their separate cultural space.

3

Making sense of the war significantly reduced the distance between the two different types of poetry that have developed in Russia in the 2000s–20s. Oddly enough, they are still not exactly defined, so I will have to provide brief descriptions. The first type of poetry (though I do not mean to indicate its primacy; the order of the list is interchangeable) consists of works that are addressed to the widest possible audience, and which tend to use idioms that the audience recognizes as “its own” and understands implicitly. The second type consists of works addressed to a primed audience and problematizes existing poetic discourses. Let's call them Poetry-1 and Poetry-2. Generally speaking, this distinction between “ideal types” exists in any national literature, but in the Russophone literature of Russia at the start of the twenty-first century, there was a particular rift between them, as each had a different aesthetic origin. Poetry-2 was founded on the traditions of the radical, uncensored poetry of the Soviet period (the “Lianozovo school,” the Leningrad underground, conceptualism . . .) and their synthesis with the foreign, primarily Anglophone style of postmodern poetry. Poetry-1 was founded on the tradition of loyal but unofficial Soviet poetry of the 1940s–70s (from David Samoilov to the children's poetry of Yunna Moritz), with small “grafts” taken from Poetry-2 that gave—and continue to give—these poems a new look.

In contemporary Russian poetry, the question of gender also takes on great political importance. A notable element of media propaganda is the valorization of a hegemonic masculinity, consisting of a set of qualities—which now necessarily includes a willingness to go to war—that make a “real man.” Ukraine, on the contrary, has been repeatedly portrayed in Russian propaganda as an “errant woman.”Footnote ¹¹

In response to the propaganda situating aggression as a manifestation of “real” masculinity, a lot of anti-war poetry is not only written by women but opposes violence from the point of view of those who defend the weak and vulnerable, which can be associated with “feminine” in patriarchal society. Its authors, or heroines, appear as mourners for the dead and helpers of the living, opposing the killing wrought by maddened men.

The tradition of condemning senseless (from the author's perspective) violence through this lens has been around in literature from the time of Aristophanes’ comedies Lysistrata (Λυσιστράτη, 411 BCE) and Assemblywomen (Ἐκκλησιάζουσαι, 392 BCE). However, it was updated in different eras in accordance with different tasks, sometimes with a direct eye toward the examples set by the ancients. Thus, soon after the start of the war's first stage in 2014, the poet Elena Fanailova began writing a monumental, still ongoing cycle of poems called Troy vs. Lysistrata,Footnote ¹² and today publishes new poetry on Facebook under the hashtag #LysistrataWrites (#Лисистратапишет).Footnote ¹³

4

Elena Fanailova belongs to Poetry-2. However, the strategy of describing war in terms of protecting all the weak and vulnerable is even more characteristic of Poetry-1. One of the most acknowledged authors of contemporary Russophone social media is Alia (short for “Alina”) Khaitlina currently living in Germany. Khaitlina has long been a popular author, mostly thanks to the Internet: in the 2000s, her blog, where she published new poems, had several thousand subscribers. Since the start of the war, she has begun working as a volunteer helping Ukrainian refugees who have recently arrived in Germany and has written poetry every day. Beginning in March of 2022, each of her poems is titled with a number and the word “day” (such-and-such day of the war).

Khaitlina's current poems have two major motivations (to introduce an oversimplified dichotomy): to record a diary of the work of a volunteer and to describe, to use the expression of Spanish painter Francisco Goya, the “disasters of war,” such as looting, violence, and the killing of civilians, through a markedly feminine lens. The following poem, in which the soldiers of the Russian army are depicted primarily as sexually preoccupied rapists, provides an example of the “feminine”—and feminist—optics in poetry:

Khaitlina is a significant author of anti-war “Poetry-1,” but she is far from the only one. The poet and journalist Tatyana Voltskaya, for example, follows a quite similar strategy. The general premise of the abovementioned approach might be described as follows: the point of view marked as “feminine” is, together with the stable associations that surround it (that the woman is the one who takes on the emotional labor and supporting others) is perceived as a foundation for interpreting Russia's political and social order as absurd and dangerous to humanity. From this perspective, war is the collapse of a familiar life, while overcoming this horror necessitates a return to the “natural” order of things.

Such resistance to the absurdity of war from a “natural” point of view is a socially effective response to the current cultural and political situation, but it is not the only possible one. On February 14, ten days before the start of the current state of the war, during a period of intensive tightening of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border, the poet, critic, historian, and social analyst Stanislav Lvovsky posted a poem to his Facebook which offered an explication of the intentions behind the then-rhetoric of the Russian authorities:

In this poem, Russian authorities appear not so much as the bearers of hegemonic masculinity, but as complete cynics who deprive others of subjectivity simply because they have—they believe—sufficient military prowess and the conviction that they have the logic of events on their side. To agree with “them” (the Russian authorities) means to be convinced that their point of view is “natural,” and all others are illusory. Lvovsky's poem exposes the illusion of this “naturalness.”

In their poetry, the authors of Poetry-2 present the moral and cultural catastrophe of Russian society as the basis for deconstructing any preconceived identity. Poetry-2 has its roots in the aesthetic traditions of the uncensored poetry of the Soviet age. Particularly important among these traditions is Moscow Conceptualism, which, as Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov, a prominent representative of this movement, wrote and said many times, undermines any language's claim to a coherent explanation of all reality. Today, post-conceptualist strategies turn out to be very politically significant.Footnote ¹⁹ Here, I should first mention the names of such poets as Yuly Gugolev, Dmitry Gerchikov, and Alexander Skidan. In one way or another, they all demonstrate that both the discourse of military propaganda and the discourse of the Russian liberals and leftists that criticize it are not “blameless.” Any subsequent discourses, these authors show in their poems, are discourses of normalization, morally unacceptable in conditions when Russia continues its aggression. The ubiquity of war, mentioned above, and the moral crisis of Russian culture call into question all forms of self-perception, include those that were characteristic of Russian intellectuals before the war. Such questioning cannot be psychologically comfortable.

Russian anti-war poetry, it can be said, by its very formation realizes the end of the post-Soviet stage in the development of Russian culture but, at the same time, demonstrates how the languages of Soviet and post-Soviet literature survive and transform. In other words, works which protest the war of aggression launched by the Russian regime answer the question of how poetry in Russia may be possible after and during the collapse of the post-Soviet cultural order and the collapse of (post)-Soviet identities.