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Writing within the Pain: Russophone Anti-War Poetry Of 2022
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2024
Abstract
This paper is focused on the growth of Russophone poetry after the beginning of the second phase of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (the first phase started in 2014). There have been many poetic publications by both those who support the war (in Russia) and those who oppose the war and the political repression of the current Kremlin regime; authors of the latter kind can live in Russia and in other countries. Speaking of the anti-war poetry, I write of the convergence of two movements that previously used to exist separately: poetry addressed to the widest audience (poetry-1) and aimed at analyzing language and ideology and addressed to the audience aware of complex forms of postmodern culture (poetry-2). Today the authors of these movements are developing tools not only to counter militaristic propaganda, but also to question the cultural and social conventions of contemporary Russia.
- Type
- Critical Forum: Trial by Fire—Russian Modernist Poetry Against War
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Footnotes
I would like to thank Yuri Leving for providing me with materials from the anthology he was preparing at the moment when I wrote this essay: Yuri Leving, ed., Poeziia poslednego vremeni: Khronika (St. Petersburg, 2022), and for valuable discussions of the works included in this anthology. Some works I took from the reviews of the Israel-based poet and critic Yevgenii Nikitin in the Metajournal Telegram channel, published between March and May of 2022. Nikitin's reviews were the first attempt to systematically analyze Russian poetry during the Russo-Ukrainian war. I relied on some of his ideas in my work.
References
1. The first stage of the current war began in February of 2014 with the annexation of Crimea.
2. On this cult in Putin’s Russia see, for example: Domańska, Maria, “The Myth of the Great Patriotic War and Russia’s Foreign Policy,” in: Legucka, Agnieszka, Kupiecki, Robert, eds., Disinformation, Narratives and Memory Politics in Russia and Belarus (New York, 2022)Google Scholar; Bakke, Kristin, Rickard, Kit and O’Loughlin, John, “Perceptions of the Past in the Post-Soviet space,” Post-Soviet Affairs 39, no. 4, (2023), 223–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3. “Stand, children, in ‘Z’ letter . . .,” 2022, cit. from https://syg.ma/@daria-sierienko/stikhi-nie-o-voinie.
4. See, for example, Natalya Gorbanevskaya’s poem “Eto ia ne spasla ni Varshavu togda i ni Pragu potom . . .” (It was I who did not save Warsaw then and Prague later, 1973).
5. Vremya Ch: Stikhi o Chechne i ne tol΄ko. Nikolay Vinnik, ed. (Moscow, 2001).
6. From an essay in the “Metajournal” Telegram channel: https://t.me/metajournal/2325.
7. The Võro language belongs to the Finno-Ugric languages and is spoken in southeastern Estonia.
8. Poeziia poslednego vremeni: Khronika, 103–104.
9. Ilya Kukulin, “‘The Long-Legged Time Is Fording the War’: The Postcolonial Condition of the Russian-Language Poetry of Ukraine” in “Postcolonial Slavic Literatures After Communism,” ed. Klavdia Smola and Dirk Uffelmann, special issue, Postcolonial Perspectives on Eastern Europe, no. 4. (2017): 161–90; Dirk Uffelmann, “Is There Any Such Thing as ‘Russophone Russophobia’? When Russian Speakers Speak out against Russia(n) in the Ukrainian Internet,” in Kevin M. F. Platt, ed., Global Russian Cultures (Madison, 2019), 207–29; Dirk Uffelmann, “iRhetoric: Metonymie als generative Trope von Selbstperformance im Social Web—mit Boris Chersonskijs Facebook als Testfall, in “Ich-Splitter. (Cross-)Mediale Selbstentwürfe in den Slawischen Kulturen,” Gernot Howanitz and Ingeborg Jandl, eds., Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Sonderband 96 (2019): 333–71; Dirk Uffelmann, “Self-Translation ‒ The Looming End of Russophone Literature in the CIS? Boris Khersonskii’s Anti-Hegemonic Code-Switching,” Russian Literature 127 (January-February 2022), 99–126.
10. Boris Khersonskii, Facebook post, August 7, 2022: https://www.facebook.com/borkhers/posts/5726703337364445 (accessed September 12, 2023).
11. On the Soviet roots of this androcentrism see: Kon, Igor΄, “‘Muskulistaia maskulinnost’: Atletizm ili militarizm?” Gendernye issledovaniia 6, (2001): 114–27Google Scholar.
12. One of the first publications of this cycle’s fragments on the internet portal Snob on June 12, 2017: https://snob.ru/selected/entry/125462/ (accessed September 12, 2023).
13. Fanailova uses some other hashtags for identifying publications of the poems from this huge project on social media. There are dozens of Fanailova’s poems published in a framework of this project.
14. Poeziia poslednego vremeni: Khronika, 448.
15. “Close the skies” is an appeal to NATO member countries by Ukrainian politicians in the first weeks of the war: in essence, they demanded that NATO ban Russian military aircraft from flying over Ukraine. The politicians of the NATO member countries refused, as they feared a direct military clash with Russia.
16. Poeziia poslednego vremeni. Khronika, 188.
17. “Freedom is the acknowledged necessity” is a phrase taken from Soviet textbooks of philosophy, primarily authored by the Marxist philosopher Georgy Plekhanov (1856–1918).
19. For more information about post-conceptualism, see: “Kuz’min K. Postkon ceptualizm (Kak by nabroski k monografii),” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. No. 50 (2001), 459–76.
20. Poeziia poslednego vremeni. Khronika, 89–90. Dekolonialʹnye gendernye epistemologii (Moscow, 2009) is a book by a postcolonial theorist Madina Tlostanova.