Ukraine’s determined resistance in the face of Russia’s full-scale invasion after February 24, 2022, came as a surprise for many. Quite a few intellectuals who considered themselves socially conscious and well informed had to admit that they knew little about Ukraine, and that whatever knowledge they had likely included uncritically absorbed stereotypes and, quite possibly, ideological talking points of Russian imperialist origin. This realization prompted serious reflection, especially in the cultural sphere; literary critics, museum curators, artistic directors of theater companies and symphonies, and numerous others realized that they had been ignoring or marginalizing Ukrainian topics and ignoring or dismissing Ukrainian voices. In other words, the failure to understand Ukraine testified to the existence of an entrenched pattern of epistemic injustice toward Ukraine that extended from the political sphere to the cultural one.

Efforts to address and remedy this past epistemic injustice often led colleagues to surprising discoveries—namely, that they had encountered Ukrainian culture in the past but failed to recognize it. A telling example is provided by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, which in a moving gesture transformed one of its rooms into a special exhibition titled In Solidarity, featuring Ukrainian-born artists from its own collection.1 In a slightly embarrassing but necessary step, one of the artworks featured, Vasyl Yermilov’s Composition Number 3, was finally displayed right side up. Ukrainian art historians wrote to MoMA multiple times in the past to alert the museum that this work was hanging upside down in their collection; it took this tragic war to finally correct that error.

A similar change is happening in other cultural fields. Thus Dina Iordanova, a prominent film scholar, notes in a recent essay, “I wonder what would have been if the films of Ukrainian poetic cinema were seen internationally at the time of their making. . . . It is up to film scholars to now watch these films and assess them against the background of the great Eastern European new wave tradition of the 1960s, so that they can take up their due place in the annals of cinema.”2 Such an argument can also be made for other cultural forms, with equal or greater strength. In literary scholarship, Rory Finnin, from his early article on Taras Shevchenko’s 1845 poem “Caucasus” that articulates anti-colonial solidarity of the oppressed in ways that anticipate the writings of Frantz Fanon and others from a century later to his recent monograph Blood of Others, has been among the most powerful voices advocating the need to pay close attention to Ukrainian literature for its globally relevant insights.3 The ranks of scholars of Ukrainian literature have been steadily growing, and here I would like to comment on three very different essays that tackle the promises, challenges, and necessity of engaging with Ukrainian writing.

The title of Roman Ivashkiv’s essay could not be more transparent: “Translating Ukrainian War Poetry into English: Why It Is Relevant.” In it he focuses primarily on two anthologies of early Ukrainian poetic responses to the Russo-Ukrainian war that began in 2014, Letters from Ukraine and Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine. Both anthologies were a product of the enthusiasm and hard work of sizable teams of translators and editors; as is often the case, the results are occasionally uneven. One may quibble with some of Ivashkiv’s criticisms of individual translations, but his examination of the two volumes effectively showcases both the rapid evolution of Ukrainian poetic responses to the war and the diversity of their approaches. The framing of Ivashkiv’s central argument gives it additional potency: he engages with Jacques Derrida’s influential essay “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?,” which explores the “nothing is translatable/everything is translatable” dilemma and looks especially at the paradoxes of untranslatability and the potential power of counterintuitive choices made by a translator. For bilingual readers like himself, Ivashkiv concedes that “the debate about the quality of some translations . . . may never be completely resolved.”4 But then he pivots from an analysis of translation strategies and choices to what these translations do (or can do) within the context of the target culture. As Ivashkiv emphasizes, “The unprecedented political significance and relevance of the translations in both anthologies lie primarily in their giving voice to the formerly colonized, oppressed, marginalized, and underrepresented,” the courage to call this war a war already at that early stage and to give the decolonizing Ukraine a chance to speak to a global audience.5 The poems in these anthologies can be testimonial and cathartic, but they also are, as he notes, quoting Charles Bernstein, “poetry in the service of poetry.”6

Alessandro Achilli’s essay “Individual, Yet Collective Voices: Polyphonic Poetic Memories in Contemporary Ukrainian Literature” offers a nuanced and ambitious exploration of strategies of memory engagement in contemporary Ukrainian poetry. In it Achilli challenges the Bakhtinian view of lyric poetry as essentially monologic and engages with the distinctions between memory as a “body of knowledge” with remembering at “sites of contestation.” Achilli then asserts that the poetry projects he discusses help transcend the persistent opposition within the Ukrainian literary tradition between the populist, nation-building–oriented strand and the modernist camp that promoted the autonomy of art, its intrinsic value and international appeal, with the aim of greater integration in world literature.7

Achilli, like Ivashkiv, emphasizes 2014 as a turning point for Ukrainian culture. For him, thematization of memory is a strikingly persistent feature of Ukrainian poetry written since then—memory as a necessity and a challenge, something indispensable and painful as the country deals with rapid social transformation in the midst of the ongoing trauma of the war. He notes a tendency to move from a “strictly personal characterization of memory” to “an enlargement of its sphere to an interpersonal dimension”: the “initial individual impulse at the core of the act of remembering may lead to the rediscovery of a collective dimension” of memory (I, 10–11). This is true of poets whose texts favor the traditionally monologic implied authority of the lyrical subject, but alongside them several others develop a polyphonic aesthetic, focused on “the collection and juxtaposition of a multitude of individual voices” (I, 12). Achilli singles out two poets, Serhii Zhadan and Marianna Kiianovs’ka, for closer analysis.

Zhadan is now fairly well known to US readers, with three poetry collections and several prose volumes available in English. Born in the Luhansk region and based in Kharkiv since the 1990s, he is the leading voice of Ukraine’s postindustrial east and of the areas ravaged by the current war the longest. Zhadan’s approach to memory focuses on its individuality but sees it “as a fundamental basis for community” (I, 14). For Achilli, Zhadan seeks to strike a balance between a monologic and a polyphonic approach, through “openness to the voices of the community” and the impetus felt by the lyrical subject “to memorize and make eternal the voices, feelings, and distinctive traits of his peers” (I, 15). A bard of the hybrid frontier region, he does not provide the answer to identity’s question “Who am I?” but demonstrates that this is an ongoing quest balancing the impact of the community and the individual choices and destinies of people whose voices his writing presents (I, 13–14, 17).

Kiianovs’ka’s poetry volume The Voices of Babyn Yar presents an even more radical approach to polyphonic memory, through direct inclusion of multiple voices “without the visible mediation of a traditional lyrical subject.”8 It is a new chapter in the tradition of poetic responses to one of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust, the murder of tens of thousands of Jews in a ravine then on the outskirts of Kyiv in 1941. Her poems, Achilli emphasizes, reaffirm “not only the possibility, but also the urgent need, to use the power of poetry to resist oblivion and silence” (I, 18). While war and the death and destruction it brings challenge the very possibility of human interaction, Kiianovs’ka asserts “the explicitly divine character of the poetic word,” which thus makes the triumph of memory over amnesia possible (I, 20). In doing so, her book, as Achilli powerfully demonstrates, could be read as a monument (in Horace’s sense) to multiple traumas of modern Ukrainian history, linking the Holocaust and the current war and suggesting “the possibility of a further enlargement of the interpretational scope . . . to human suffering in its entirety and to the importance of memory for its management,” while respecting both the individual and the collective dimensions of trauma (I, 20).

Last but not least, Olena Palko provides us with an insightful historical perspective on Ukrainian literature struggling to shed its colonial status. In “Reading in Ukrainian: The Working Class and Mass Literature in Early Soviet Ukraine,” she explores the efforts to create new mass readership in 1920s Soviet Ukraine in the context of the short-lived Soviet indigenization policy and the rapid drive to industrialization and urbanization. Ukraine’s specificity has been largely ignored by scholars of “the Bolshevik reading revolution” who approached it on a pan-Soviet scale, almost entirely focusing on Russian-language material.9 Palko demonstrates how over a very short time (including a comparison of library requests in 1928 and 1929), Ukrainian cities rapidly became bilingual (previously, Russophone cities had been surrounded by majority Ukrainian-speaking rural populations). She also emphasizes the role of the then nascent and fast-developing Ukrainian literature for mass audiences, including the role of the journal Vsesvit, which showcased popular works of foreign literature in translation. It also allows us to trace patterns of bi- and multilingualism in Ukrainian literature and culture from the aborted renaissance of the 1920s to the more recent contexts (both Ivashkiv and Achilli include writings by Russophone Ukrainian authors among the texts they discuss). Ultimately, it provides us with a ray of optimism in dark times, as it shows the capacity of Ukrainian society for rapid constructive development and the importance of literature in creating a meaningful and strong civil society—a phenomenon for which Ukraine, both in the 1920s and in the last ten years, serves as one of the most impressive examples.

Notes

1

For more on this exhibition, as well as supporting and related materials, see https://www.moma.org/calendar/galleries/5454 (accessed March 1, 2024).

2

Iordanova, “Ukrainian Cinema in the Spotlight.”

8

Kiianovs’ka, Voices of Babyn Yar; I, 17.

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