AFTERWORD
On Decomposition and Rotten Plums:
Language of War in Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry
Polina Barskova
When watching Sergey Loznitsa’s astounding and difficult documentary “Maidan” (2014), one constantly faces a sense or even multiple senses of confusion: historical, spatial, and sonic. One wonders what is happening in the city of Kyiv. What is the perspective that camera offers to the audience, and what are all these strange sounds, where do they come from? One can discern fragments of popular folk songs and the national anthem, endlessly repeated “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to Heroes!”, sounds of steps—and starting from the middle of the film, terrifying sounds of shooting and explosions . . .
And together in all of this “music of Revolution,” to borrow from Alexander Blok’s famous poem about the world of the revolutionary sensory perceptions, we hear poetry. In his complex soundtrack, Loznitsa includes the first sounds and words of poetry that were being born by that huge emotional impulse called the Revolution of Dignity. We perceive a disembodied voice pronouncing: “It’s lies and slavery around / The humble folk forever silent / And on the throne of Ukraine / A greedy bandit keeps his reign.” 1 Thus emerged the popular, yet naïve-sounding poetry of the barricades; it expressed the hopes and despair of a people ready for fatal change.
The impulse to create poetry out of the spirit of political uproar organizes this anthology. It shows us developments of the original urge—to speak the Revolution—by exploring growth and changes in Ukrainian poetry in the years after the upheaval of the 2014 Euromaidan and during the Russo-Ukrainian “ hybrid-war” in Donbas. During these years, poetry writing in Ukraine acquired a new vitality, diversity, and strong national resonance—especially when it comes to political poetry.
I argue that Ukrainian literary identity is being shaped today within the realm of poetical expression. Following the idea of the Russian Formalist Yuri Tynianov on the significance of “smaller literary forms” for the dialogue between aesthetic and political discourses, 2 I suggest looking at the field of contemporary Ukrainian political poetry as a rhetorical laboratory where new forms of political expression and reaction are being worked out: and the present anthology gives us apt material for such exploration. What we see here is gradual development of certain tropes and devices, new kinds of collaboration between prose and poetry, new approaches to the task of representing experience of historical trauma: from the original impulse of Revolution, poetic language proceeds to the difficult and yet exhilarating work of mourning.
The Words for War anthology presents an extensive (even if not exhaustive) map of poetical utterances that emerged in Ukraine in reaction to political events: what I see as the anthology’s strength is its diversity—many and different voices are introduced here, a volatile, melancholic, cacophonous chorus of attempts to speak what cannot be spoken: horror, fear, disgust. In my afterword, I am not able, for the shortage of allotted space, to cover the whole territory of this poetry, so I would like to talk about some poems and some poetries that strike me as offering radical discoveries within that centuries-long tradition of writing poetry about political upheavals and wars.
War and language, and war and poetry, became connected in the Western canon starting from—at least—the Iliad (which curiously is mentioned in the volume in a poem by Aleksandr Kabanov). Writing poetry about wars has been one of the medium’s main jobs, unfortunately—mourning the dead and glorifying those who sent them to die. Each war brings its own knowledge, its own epiphany: thus the Great War of 1914–18, which resulted in the largest number of victims in human history, brought about the horror of a massive and “anonymous” destruction. The massacre left witnesses of this destruction (both in the military and among the civilians) without any hope of forgetting what happened to them—this trauma leading, among many other things, to the great literature of the “lost generation.” Later in the twentieth century, Soviet history alone (Soviet Union being the empire that devoured and attempted to conflux Russia and Ukraine) engendered very powerful ways to write about the War and the Revolution. Though Soviet revolutionary and war poetry is a voluminous topic, I am happy to reduce it here to a short and brilliantly unbearable poem by a Ukraine-born Jew Ion Degen:
My friend in the throes of agony,
Don’t call for your friends – it’s in vain:
Let me warm the palms of my hands
In your blood that is getting cold.
Don’t cry, don’t whine like a cry-baby,
You’re not wounded – you’ve been killed all right.
Let me instead take your felt boots off:
I have the whole war in front of me.
What makes the poetry in this anthology different from the previous waves and ways of war writing is, first, the subject matter—it describes a new kind of the military conflict—a so-called hybrid war—an undeclared murky political conflict without clear rules and borders, a war that touches everyone involved.
I speak here on several poetic strategies revealed by the anthology, covering poets of different generations and even different languages but who all write with an equal energy of indignation, abjection towards the war. If the task of the afterword is to arrive at some kind of conclusion, to summarize the newly occurred fact of literature that is represented by an anthology—then I am convinced that this anthology shows that the Ukrainian revolution and Russo- Ukrainian War has already led to the emergence of new poetics. Here are some of its major events.
The Case of Zhadan: Poetics of Witness
The literary works of Serhiy Zhadan, perhaps one of the most examined contemporary Ukrainian literary figures, underwent a significant change following the events in Maidan. As a resident of Kharkiv, which for the duration of the twentieth century was a hub for both Ukrainian and Russian poetry, Zhadan was equally interested in Ukrainian and Russian postmodernism and European modernism (Zhadan himself singles out the importance of Celan and Miłosz). Zhadan underwent a development from neoromanticism, a style which focused mostly on his creative self, towards a considerably less traditional, prosaic poetics of evidence and inter-subjectivity. In his 2015 collection of poetry and translations, “Life of Maria” (in Ukrainian, Zhyttia Marii), Zhadan recreates various voices and narratives of the participants of the political crisis on both sides of the conflict, aiming to explore varieties of the political agendas or lack thereof. This desire to dissect the conflict beyond right and wrong with a much more complex and individualistic approach led to the radical change of his style—what he’s been doing recently can be called journalistic poetry.
In his poetry about the Donbas war, Zhadan radically challenges our expectations as readers—this poetry strikes one as radically antipoetic: each of the texts in the cycle “Why I am Absent in the Social Media” presents a sketch-portrait (a traditionally popular form of war writing—but in prose) of an individual devastated and marginalized by the war. In its quasi-prosaic quality, Zhadan’s war poetry nevertheless does not fail to call our attention—like shadows in a drawing—to the presence of those whom the war events are ready to count as absent even before their death. Following the figurations of influential philosopher Giorgio Agamben, Zhadan is preoccupied with the ethnography of the bare life of this war: lives of those abandoned by the state, dolefully existing at its meager margins.
This new form of acute linguistic attention is connected to Zhadan’s work as a civil interlocutor—not only has he been reading to a variety of audiences all over Ukraine, but also he is known for actively voicing concerns about the Ukrainian population of Donbas and traveling there when possible. 3
The Younger Generation: Reconstructions of Language Shattered by War
Poets of the younger generation who are significantly interested in the works of Zhadan follow him in a desire to connect poetics and politics and to extend their literary experimentations into different directions. One of the most linguistically daring figures of the younger generation is Lyuba Yakimchuk. She has been exploring the potential of broken or “bad” language, language that bears aphatic traces of war, that shows destruction. In her book Apricots of Donbas (2015), which, among other things, narrates Yakimchuk’s and her family’s forced escape from the Donbas town of Luhansk that was shelled by separatists, Yakimchuk introduces elements of linguistic experimentation partially borrowed from Ukrainian futurists and repurposed to reconstruct the processes of apathetic destruction of language as a result of warfare. The outcome of her experiment is striking; as we can see in her emblematic poem “Decomposition” (“Rozkladannia”), she registers dislocation of the human psyche and speech undone by fear and pain.
And Yakimchuk is not the only author who seeks for a language to render the personal political. Anastasia Afanasieva and Oksana Lutsyshyna are only a few of the innovative voices that form a pleiad of the younger poets who strive to depict how the hybrid war intervenes with private life, and how the very idea of the private, “protected” human existence is shattered and undone by political aggression. In their poems in this volume we find various depictions of the destruction that enters the everyday existence of the Donbas civil population: these poets show how war enters and becomes a part of everyday life (byt), where the smell of the rotten fruit (one of the anthology’s popular and most disturbing images) of the abandoned crops becomes nauseatingly mixed with the smell of the rotten human flesh.
Pro-Ukrainian Poetry in Russian
Another exciting layer to this poetic multivoicedness is how poetry reflects the political tension of poets who identify themselves with Ukrainian political goals and the building of a national identity, but still write in Russian. 4
Arguably, the most developed political-cum-aesthetic angle here belongs to Boris Khersonsky, a Ukrainian Russian-language poet of Jewish origin residing in Odesa, who started to write poetry in Ukrainian after the outbreak of war, and whose recent writing has attracted much attention both in Ukraine and Russia. His poetry investigates the languages of Russian imperialist discourses and how they function today. Khersonsky might be the most observant and creative literary reader and critic of the Putin empire’s propagandistic language and its highly sophisticated and, alas, effective apparatus. Khersonsky’s poems in the anthology, translated by me and Ostap Kin, present a difficult yet exciting problem for a translator. Each of Khersonsky’s poems is a showcase, a tapestry of the relics of the Soviet empire (as such it might be compared to Loznitsa’s film soundtrack—yet while Loznitsa attempts to recreate the noise and fury of the barricades, Khersonsky records the noise of time, the seductive and yet nauseating noise of a nostalgic memory of the Soviet empire—and it is this nostalgic quality that the poet critiques).
In Khersonsky’s parodic attention to the workings of the propaganda apparatus is an argument for disturbing connections between the current Russian regime’s propaganda methods and those used in the previous wars of the Soviet Empire, especially during the so-called “Great Patriotic War,” which during the following decades became the foundation of Russian post-Soviet identity and still functions as such today under Putin’s regime.
* * *
In her programmatic poem, Afanasieva asks, openly following the desperate inquiry of Theodor Adorno:
Can there be poetry after:
Yasynuvata, Horlivka, Savur-Mohyla, Novoazovsk
After:
Krasnyi-Luch, Donetsk, Luhansk
After
Sorting bodies in repose from the dying . . .
In a twist of macabre irony, this anthology testifies that if anything is possible after the war—it is poetry. Maybe because it is the medium most reactive to the traumas and changes within the human means of expression, within language. While the other means and modes of literature need time and concentrated effort of attention to pronounce their observation, poetry has the capacity to react urgently and uses the fact of shattered language as its tragic building material.
Notes
1 The poem recited in Sergey Loznitsa's documentary is an adaptation of Taras Shevchenko's poem Ieretyk (1845). See Taras Shevchenko, Zibrannia Tvoriv, Tom 1: Poeziia 1837-1847 (Kyiv: Naukova Dumka, 2003), 290.
2 This idea is inspired by argumentation by Mark Lipovetsky, “The Formal As Political,” lecture given as an AATSEEL keynote address, Austin, Texas, January 9, 2016.
3 On poetry about contemporary events in Donbas, see Yuliya Ilchuk, “Hearing the Voice of Donbas: Art and Literature as Forms of Cultural Protest During the War," Nationalities Papers, 45.2 (2017): 256-273.
4 The richest reading of the recent poetry about the war in Donbas, can be found in Vasyl Lozynsky, “Poetic Reflection at the Time of War and Peace,” Krytyka, March 2014. For another important reading, see Yuri Andrukhovych, “An Emergency Bag with Letters,” in Letters from Ukraine (Krok, 2016), 4-17.