In his State of the Union speech on March 7, 2024, President Joe Biden put the plight of Ukraine in its ongoing war with Russia front and center. Just minutes after beginning his speech, he called on the United States to continue its support for Ukraine in its efforts to stop the Russian invasion. This, he implied, was of the utmost importance for the sake not only of the Ukrainians but also of the rest of the world. “If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine,” the president said, “I assure you, he will not.” Ukraine, President Biden explained, had become central to the preservation of freedom and democracy around the globe. “But Ukraine,” Biden said, “can stop Putin if we stand with Ukraine and provide the weapons it needs to defend itself.”1
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and then again in 2022, Ukraine has gained on the world scene a prominence made all the more bittersweet by the simultaneous recognition of its long absence before. Before the war, as the three articles (Alessandro Achilli’s “Individual, Yet Collective Voices: Polyphonic Poetic Memories in Contemporary Ukrainian Literature” [Canadian Slavonic Papers 62, no. 1 (2020)]; Roman Ivashkiv’s “Translating Ukrainian War Poetry into English: Why It Is Relevant” [East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies 9, no. 1 (2022)]; and Olena Palko’s “Reading in Ukrainian: The Working Class and Mass Literature in Early Soviet Ukraine” [Social History 44, no. 3 (2019)]) under consideration here suggest, Ukraine existed largely in obscurity, a result of imperial Russian and Soviet policies that actively suppressed Ukrainian voices and the Ukrainian language as well as the disregard of an international community that made little to no effort to seek it out.
In this installment of “Of Note,” in which we join a worldwide effort to bring Ukrainian voices back into the light, we hear from two scholars, Alessandro Achilli, who does double duty as article author and commentator, and Vitaly Chernetsky, both active scholars in the field. Achilli and Chernetsky point out that, among the casualties of centuries of neglect, Ukrainian literature has struggled to emerge from the colonial domination of Russia and the binaries of a literary history that have cast it for too long as low culture compared to high or as vernacular compared to a more formal, ostensibly more literary tongue.
Achilli and Chernetsky comment on articles addressing recent literary output, including two anthologies of war poetry (Ivashkiv) and two contemporary poets—Serhii Zhadan and Marianna Kiianovs’ka (Achilli)—and the rise of a mass literature and mass readership in the 1920s (Palko). In reviewing these authors and their works, Achilli and Chernetsky argue that these articles bring a much-deserved attention to the process of Ukrainian authorship and translation and to the representation of Ukrainian voices and events that have shaped individual Ukrainians and Ukraine’s place in the history of world literature and culture overall. Attending to this literature, this “Of Note” installment suggests, is imperative not only because it rights some of the wrongs that have made it more or less inaccessible, but also because it informs us about a people who have been writing stories about themselves from which we cannot and, as President Biden put it even more forcefully, “will not walk away.”2
