“There is so much poetry coming out of Ukraine now that I’m barely keeping up with it,” the Ukrainian translator and scholar Oksana Maksymchuk tells me. It is hardly the first thing that one would expect of a country at war. But poetry’s ability to, as she says, “crystallise a particular moment in time, or an emotion that is fleeting”, has led to an outpouring of poems – not so much emotion recollected in tranquillity, as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. Often these poems are posted by their authors on social media; the literary journal Chytomo has been gathering up and publishing examples, some by established poets, many by those new to the form, including soldiers. There is even a Ukrainian government website that encourages members of the public to upload their work. “Every poem, every line, every word is part of Ukrainian history,” the site says. “We know for sure that wars end, but poetry does not.” At the time of writing, more than 24,000 poems had been added to the site.
It is true that when Russia’s full-scale invasion started on 24 February, literature was the last thing on people’s minds – “you could not protect your family from a rifle with your poems”, as the writer Oleksandr Mykhed put it. But as the conflict has continued, the power of writing to record, to testify and to witness has seemed more and more important. Many Ukrainians started to keep diaries, the “first responder”, perhaps, among literary genres, able to gather experience and emotion in its rawest form. But in surprising numbers, Ukrainians are also turning to poetry, while setting aside for the time being that time-greedy literary form, the novel. “It’s the condensation, the density of it, the way that you can arrange words so that they carry a lot,” explains Max Rosochinsky who, with Maksymchuk, is co-editor of an anthology of Ukrainian poems, Words for War, born from the conflict that began in 2014 with Russian annexations in the Donbas and Crimea.
