Disbelief (Smokestack Books, 2023) and Dislocation: An Anthology of Poetic Response to Russia’s War in Ukraine (Slavica, 2024), ed. Julia Nemirovskaya and Anna Krushelnitskaya
Just as Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union saw a flowering of Russophone poetry supporting the Soviet war effort, so the current war has inspired a flowering of poetry opposing Putin’s warmongering. These two anthologies are both offshoots of the “Kopilka Project”, an online repository of anti-war poetry from Russophone poets now living in Russia, Ukraine, the US, Israel and many other countries. Kopilka means “coin bank”; the Russian-American poet Julia Nemirovskaya, the project’s initiator (see a newly translated piece of her writing below), has described it as “throwing a tiny copper coin into a bigger kopilka: the collective effort to defeat Putin.”
I have written about Disbelief in Literary Review. It is remarkably good value and readily available. Here I shall focus on the more recent anthology, Dislocation, which is equally important but harder to obtain.
One of the most striking of the 12 thematic sections, titled “spacetime is split”, provides a historical perspective. Sergey Shereshevsky, a Moscow poet and practising psychiatrist, dreams of his great-grandfather, who fought in both the First and Second World Wars. Sergey stumbles as he tries to explain to his great-grandfather that Kyiv is now being bombed by fascists who are not Germans; he cannot bring himself to spell out who these fascists are. Two other poets refer to the 16th-century doctrine of Moscow as a “Third Rome”, a successor to Rome and Byzantium, a holy city whose God-given destiny is to save and rule the world. A poem by Sergey Plotov begins:
Is it in our genome
That something always goes wrong?
We were building the Third Rome—
We built a Second Pyongyang.
A poem by Svetlana Mendeleva ends:
Between the Third Rome and the Third Reich,
The clock keeps its circular score.
The iron hand loops on itself, the clock strikes:
Crows. Bomb craters. War.
And the most arresting first line of any poem in the anthology is Vitaly Pukhanov’s:
Remember, Alyosha, the six-hundred-page anthology of anti-war poetry
published in the winter of forty-two in Berlin?
Pukhanov continues:
The anti-Fascist poets were trying to find a language to say “nicht,” “nein” to war,
They censured the fatherland-aggressor, they spurned Goethe, Heine, and Schiller,
They acknowledged their collective responsibility,
They felt choked by an inexpiable guilt.
“So why didn’t you stop Hitler?”—asked the Red Army soldiers, tearing the
pages for their hand-rolled cigarettes. […]
Unfortunately, not a single copy of this anthology remains […]
An earlier section, “life is better with a teddy”, records voices of childish bewilderment. Vadim Zhuk’s observation of a simple scene in a railway station is all the more jarringly vivid for being presented in a style more appropriate to a nursery rhyme:
The man is worn by grief. The man is only four, no older.
He’s on a bench. He’s like a skiff tied to a beachside boulder.
The busy station hums around like rapid river waters.
His little hand is clutching stuff on mama’s strictest orders.
A girl walks by. Her little backpack holds a fuzzy teddy.
All wheels and people whirr, and cry, and roll around, unsteady.
He’s worn to threads, and days go by—from home into this pickle.
He doesn’t have the strength to cry. Well, maybe just a trickle.
The trains are loud and everywhere. It’s cold and dark already.
He should have brought his teddy. Life is better with a teddy.
This seemingly simple vignette conjures up similar scenes in hundreds of railway stations all over Europe. The opening words are doubly effective. Not only do they convey that the four-year-old seems prematurely aged; they also hint at the likelihood that many of the adults present feel as helpless as four-year-olds.
A sense of helplessness, unsurprisingly, is a common theme throughout the anthology—as is a determination to overcome this feeling. A poem by Irina Evsa begins:
“Soon,” he said, “I shall be leaving this rickety boat.
Day by day, I feel my strength dwindle […]
The poem ends with the memorable lines:
And then he said: “When the judgment blast comes to blow it
all to pieces, to dust and fuzz,
Lord, put me back together, but not as a poet—
as a lighthouse keeper, because
he sees light and knows that darkness doesn’t control it,
it’s his hand that does.”
Both anthologies are democratic. They allow space for all possible emotions: from rage to bewilderment, from guilt to numbness. And they address the experience of all those affected by the war: refugees, fighters on both sides, horrified onlookers and those who prefer to avert their eyes. Sergey Plotov writes in the voice of an uncomprehending Russian mother:
And how can I? I am a simple person.
My work and home turned me into a drudge…
They say the world grows viler by the hour
and enemies surround us all about,
but we’re protected by the Holy Virgin.
I just don’t get why sugar costs so much…
Still, for all this, we’re a superpower,
and that’s a thing you just can’t doubt!
Anthologies addressing great traumas often contain all too many poems that are well-intentioned but painfully facile; the poet and/or translator wrongly believes that what matters is some easily-paraphrasable message—not a particular tone of voice or mysterious resonance. In this respect, these two anthologies may be unique—in part, perhaps, because of the unusual degree of collaboration that lies behind them.
Nemirovskaya and Anna Krushelnitskaya (the editors of Dislocation) write in their introduction, “The overarching goal of the group of translators… was to represent the voices of the poets, offer them a reach into a new linguistic space, and open a window into the poets’ worlds for the English-speaking reader. Meeting this task requires giving equal priority to the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of a poetic utterance, since the message, the tone, the vocabulary, the form, and the expressive devices are equally important in rendering the poetic voice.”
And Yana Kane, one of the seven main translators, has written elsewhere, “I observe the care with which each member of the Kopilka team treats both their own translations and the translations of their teammates. In the workshop-style email exchanges among us, a single line, a single word, is sometimes discussed for days until a translation conundrum is resolved. I sense how we support one another in our shared experiences and in our individual moments of joy and of loss.”
These claims are fully borne out. The deftness with which the translators have come up with convincing English equivalents to seemingly untranslatable aspects of the original—startling rhythms, important wordplay, allusions to popular Russian songs or children’s poems—is remarkable.
The two anthologies are proof that the Russian language can still serve to carry an antidote to the poisons disseminated by the Kremlin. Putin may claim that Russian literature and the Russian language belong to the Russian Federation alone—but it would be a tragic mistake if we were to accept his claims. There is no more reason to cede culture and language to Putin than to cede territory.
♦♦♦
During the last few years, there have been painful instances of Ukrainian poets refusing to appear at literary festival with Russian writers—even when the latter have spoken out against the war, in some cases endangering their lives. What follows is a tangential response to these occasions:
