A year ago, the poet Borys Humenyuk sent a final message. For 24 hours, he and two fellow Ukrainian soldiers had been under relentless Russian fire. Shells rained down on their trench outside the eastern city of Bakhmut. “We’re running out of ammo. Down to the last bullet,” Humenyuk said over a crackling radio. Those were his last words.
Humenyuk had volunteered to relieve a group of exhausted service personnel at “zero”, the hottest part of the frontline. Now, he explained, he was wounded in the shoulder and unable to drag his injured comrade to safety. “We are stuck,” he reported. By the time an evacuation team reached the trench in the village of Klishchiivka, Humenyuk had disappeared.
“There was no sign of him,” said Serhii Pantiuk, another poet and soldier. “We didn’t find a body.” Pantiuk said he believed the Russians had captured his friend. Using an artillery barrage as cover, they had overrun his company’s forward position, stealing across an open field with a few small, bare trees. Such were the vicissitudes of war, he said.
“I believe Borys is alive. He is an adventurous spirit and a clever, artistic guy,” Pantiuk said. “The Russians don’t retrieve the corpses of their own soldiers. We have never seen them pick up the bodies of dead Ukrainians. So Borys must be in a Russian prison.” He conceded there was no proof of this, since Moscow refuses to release a list of those it has captured.
Humenyuk was 57 when he vanished on 27 December 2022. He had been fighting as a volunteer since 2014, soon after Russia began its covert takeover of the Donbas region. Last year, he rejoined the military and became a deputy commander, in charge of a machine-gun unit. In his last interview, Humenyuk said he had been preparing for a war with Russia “my whole life”.
“I don’t expect to come back from it. If I do, it will be a miracle,” he said.
Amid booms and explosions, Humenyuk wrote poetry and posted it regularly on Facebook.
Pantiuk said he composed his own verse on a smartphone during breaks from active duty. He scribbled one haiku on the back of a Winston cigarette packet. “You can’t sleep for the first day. Your brain whirs,” he said. He emailed his material via a Starlink satellite connection to his wife in Kyiv.
Pantiuk’s latest volume of poetry, his 19th, is titled The Disappearing Winter. He described Humenyuk as one of his country’s best modern poets. “Borys’s work superficially resembles prose. But when you read word by word, you realise it’s like a sacred text. Each poem is a mini-novel,” he reflected. Before last year’s full-scale invasion, Humenyuk had published two collections from the trenches, one of them called Poems from War.
The experience of conflict has changed Ukrainian poets and their use of language. “It’s crisper, sharper and with the potential to turn toxic,” observed Oksana Maksymchuk, a poet and translator based in Chicago, writing in an anthology of recent Ukrainian poetry called Words for War. It features several pieces by Humenyuk, and other notable writers including the novelist and poet Serhiy Zhadan.
“Borys’s was a remarkable voice. Despite its complexity, it spoke to so many. He was far more widely read than most other poets in the volume. He also loved painting and was very prolific,” Maksymchuk said. Divorced, Humenyuk had adult daughters and looked after a number of cats.
Maksymchuk said Ukrainian poets had abandoned conventional Russian literary devices such as metre and alliteration. There was a new emphasis on storytelling and narrative, often expressed via the medium of free verse. Maksymchuk’s co-editor and fellow poet Max Rosochinsky said there was a move against embellishment and musicality in favour of plainer poems similar to diaries or memoirs.
“The aestheticising of war experience is seen as suspect and morally problematic,” Rosochinsky explained. “There is resistance to the idea that war poetry should be beautiful.” Instead, the new forms of Ukrainian poetry stressed the importance of truth, and experimented with the “decomposition” of words during a period when Russian bombs were turning Ukrainian homes and cities into rubble and ripping apart soldiers and civilians.
Humenyuk’s life and possible death invite comparison with Wilfred Owen and other English poets who fought in the trenches of the first world war. Maksymchuk, however, said contemporary Ukrainian poetry included more civilian voices, especially those of women watching the war unfold from afar. Videos and news reports allowed them to reflect on what was happening in a way that was rare in the 20th century.
Against a backdrop of daily missile attacks, poetry readings are extremely popular. In October, hundreds of people crowded into the basement of Lviv’s puppet theatre to hear the poet and scholar Halyna Kruk recite her work. Zhadan and other writers have toured the front, giving readings to combatants. In Kherson, the southern city recaptured by Ukraine last year, a poetry festival was held in an anonymous building.
#Kherson: The most unusual poetry reading.
— Zarina Zabrisky 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@ZarinaZabrisky) November 7, 2023
The place couldn't be named. Invitations couldn't be sent. The basement was full. It was in the morning. Sirens and artillery strikes never stopped. pic.twitter.com/xqJDQUUYbj
“It was mind-blowing. You could hear sirens and explosions going on,” said Zarina Zabrisky, a journalist and poet. She posted video of the event on social media. There were regular Kherson open mic readingswhose locations were shared at the last minute by word of mouth. Local poets read lyrics, as well as prose and humorous stories. “Everyone laughs. About 10 to 20 people come. It’s very sweet,” Zabrisky said, adding that Russia had targeted venues afterwards.
Maksymchuk said: “Poetry readings are a good way of feeling solidarity. You feel disoriented and confused and want to be attuned to a collective feeling. The poems are an emotional discharge. That’s why people come in such big numbers.” There were similarities with Greek tragedies, performed at a moment of tension, when ancient Athens and other city states were under threat from Persian invasion, she said.
There are also Russophone poets writing from the other side of the frontline. Until 2022, there was dialogue between pro-Ukrainian writers and their counterparts in the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in the east of the country. This stopped last year. “They unfriended us,” Maksymchuk said, and added that the LNR and DNR poets became ideological cheerleaders for Putin’s war, and these days mostly wrote propaganda.
Europe’s biggest conflict since 1945 has boosted the international market for Ukrainian writing and verse. It is easier for poets to get their work published in journals and magazines. “It’s a golden age. We don’t know how long it will last,” Rosochinsky said. In February, Jonathan Cape will publish Food for the Dead by Charlotte Shevchenko Knight, a British-Ukrainian poet. Her book is described as “an eloquent, moving counter-song against Russian totalitarianism”.
This flourishing has come at a terrible price. In July, a Russian missile strike killed the Ukrainian novelist Victoria Amelina in the eastern city of Kramatorsk. She had started writing poetry in response to the war. A few months earlier, Russian soldiers abducted and executed Volodymyr Vakulenko, a poet and children’s writer. His diary of occupation was found hidden under a cherry tree at his home in Izium when the city was liberated.
In a Facebook post, Humenyuk said he hated meeting new people on the frontline because when he called them a few weeks later, nobody picked up. If he is still alive and in prison, he will not have access to books or paper, Pantiuk posited. But he added: “I have no doubt Borys is writing poems in his head.”
From Not a Poem in 40 Days … by Borys Humenyuk
Translated from the Ukrainian by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky.
Poetry saw people die.
Poetry put spent bullet shells in its ears.
Poetry would rather go blind
Than see corpses every day.
Poetry is the shortcut to heaven.
Poetry sees into the void.
When you fall
It lets you remember your way back.
Poetry went places
Where there isn’t place for poetry.
Poetry witnessed it all.
Poetry witnessed it all.
