Fall 2024

Since the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, contemporary Ukrainian poets have increasingly used Facebook as a forum for sharing their work. Unlike poets in the United States, where copyright law discourages writers from self-publishing their work, including on social media, Ukrainian poets use Facebook not only to share work in progress, but also to comment and even translate one anothers’ poems. We argue that by using the “distant reading” method of applying statistical tools to a large archive of contemporary poetry, scholars become better close readers. Having created an archive of a large sample of recent Ukrainian poetry posted to Facebook, our article models data-driven tools that help scholars to understand how poetry, written and shared to social media in a time of war, has changed between 2014 and 2022. This novel use of Facebook as a literary tool clearly shows how poetic language changes in a time of war. It also points to ways that the large community of readers on social media has influenced what poets write.

Social Media did not invent poetry. But in some ways, it reinvented it. Much like the explosion of small journals in the modernist period, social media platforms have created interconnected networks of writers who share their own and others’ work, in real time, sometimes writing poems directly onto their Facebook pages or in the comment thread. This article introduces the Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Archive, an interactive web platform, which catalogues Ukrainian poems posted to Facebook since 2013. The roughly 100 poets featured in this archive were either born in Ukraine or moved to Ukraine before 2014. The archive is multilingual, and organized by poet, theme, and language. It is also searchable by text string. This growing web resource enables and encourages scholars to engage with contemporary writing shared to social media.

The responses by Russian, Ukrainian, and other countries’ Russophone poets to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 constitute a unified artistic discourse, animated by recurring topics, motifs, and images. The article aims to open a discussion of this body of work by examining one of its major topics – the Russian language as both a weapon and victim of war – and by offering an overarching theoretical framework, based on the concept of witnessing, for the analysis of contemporary artistic modes generated by war, extremity, and crisis. The topic of language foregrounds the problem of the speaking subject, participating or implicated in ongoing traumatic events. I examine these poems as poetry of witnessing: verses that employ digital media to respond to traumas and atrocities from within the events and as they unfold, while questioning the moral parameters of their response and the adequacy of their artistic instruments.

Poetry has proven a productive aesthetic discourse for those working in Russian and in Ukrainian, documented by a huge outpouring of verse and by both the articles in this forum. This viewpoint piece zeroes in on the ways in which poems have become a means of resistance, particularly for those writing in Russian, and on the roles played by translation as its own ethical act and as a form of further resistance. It ends with the example of Igor’ Bulatovskii’s poetry and his broader actions as translator and editor.

In this essay, Rory Finnin reviews the interventions of poetry in Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and argues for more intellectual engagement with the concept of Russian genocide in the field of Slavic studies.

“Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry: Wartime and Poetic Time” raises questions about the significance of new technology, new media, and the concept of “real time” by showing how poetry, even the new forms of poetic reportage coming out of present-day Ukraine, makes its own time.

In responding to articles by Amelia Glaser and Paige Lee and by Lyudmila Parts, this essay considers both the historical contexts and the present-day challenges of studying contemporary poetry in times of war and other crises. It links Ukrainian poetic responses to the current war to other art forms and considers the imperatives the field of Slavic studies is facing from the perspective of epistemic injustice.

This article examines Yugoslav women’s transnational memories of state terror in two autobiographical texts bearing witness to the Holocaust and corrective labor camps on Goli otok and Sveti Grgur: Ženi Lebl’s White Violets (1990) and Eva Israel Grlić’s Memories (1997). I argue these texts recover disparate histories of state terror, coproducing shared strategies of memory and narration in the process. This article contextualizes how women’s testimonies maneuvered the patriarchal cult of silence that marginalized gendered experiences of the corrective labor camps until the 1990s and women’s erasure from Yugoslavia’s important legacies, such as the antifascist struggle within which Ženi Lebl and Eva Grlić were actively involved. Drawing attention to how the Yugoslav state terror apparatus negated the women’s revolutionary contributions and weaponized their biographies against them, this article argues that life writing reclaims their authorial agency and restores multilayered archives of the past.

Riga and Odesa (Odessa) rank among the Russian Empire’s foremost nineteenth-century ports. These port cities, respectively located on the Baltic and Black Seas, enabled Imperial Russia to trade huge amounts of goods, boosting its burgeoning economy in the second half of the nineteenth century. We argue that, despite the distance separating the two cities, it is only in relation to each other that their full significance emerges. This article explores the histories of Riga and Odesa, examining their situations within the Russian Empire’s economic geography and taking a closer look at the interrelationships between the two ports. In our view, this history is more than a narrative of competition for the premier position among the ports of the Russian Empire; it is also a tale of local initiatives, engagement with the imperial center, lobbying for imperial financial support, relationships of economic interdependence, and an example of the crucial role that ports at the supposed periphery of an empire played in a globalized economy.

This paper explores the relationship between elegy, national mourning, and the poetics of public grief by taking as an example Jaroslav Seifert’s sequence of elegies, Osm dní (Eight Days), written in the autumn of 1937 to mourn the death of Czechoslovakia’s first president, Tomáš Masaryk (1850-1937). An extraordinary work of poetry – exceptional both in its ambition and in the apparent speed with which it was composed and published – Seifert’s Eight Days has largely been forgotten today and remains little known outside of Czech literary criticism, despite the existence of an English translation and a bilingual edition. This article offers an interpretation of the sequence and a reassessment of Seifert’s achievement.

This essay suggests that there are three crucial contexts that have been overlooked in the scholarship on Andrei Zviagintsev’s film, Leviathan. First, there is the ecclesiastical history of the Russian Orthodox Church in the years following the election of Kirill (Gundiaev) as Patriarch of Moscow in 2009. The article demonstrates that Zviagintsev was keenly aware of Kirill’s growing partnership with the Putin regime and that he was especially dismayed by the patriarch’s response to the Bolotnaia protests and Pussy Riot affair. The second context is more theological and considerably lesser known. It concerns the notion of the church’s “dark double”, a concept developed in the mid-twentieth century by an obscure Gulag survivor and lay theologian named Sergei Fudel. My main contention in the essay is that Fudel’s conception of the “dark double” is the foundational theological idea in Leviathan—the idea that structures and underpins all of the film’s religious scenes. Finally, the third context recovered is the religious thinking of Andrei Zviagintsev himself. For it turns out that the celebrated auteur director is comfortable discussing not only scriptwriting or cinematography. He also has much to say, both onscreen and off, about the clerics and faithful of the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church.