The full-scale invasion of Putin’s army into Ukraine ended a long period in the two countries’ histories, as well as in European and world history as a whole. The Russian government, acting through its military, intelligence agencies, and affiliated paramilitary formations (for some reason referred to as “separatists” and “volunteer fighters”), has waged a hybrid war since 2014. For many, however, the beginning of a full-scale war was a huge shock. One of the manifestations of this shock has been a highly critical reevaluation of the political, cultural, and existential conditions that had formed on one-eighth of the earth’s surface, not only in the last eight-ten years but throughout the entire post-Soviet period.

The following notes do not claim to be a response to the debates around these reevaluations. Rather, they are an attempt to reflect and problematize the anthropological and political conditions of the Russophone sphere in the last 30, maybe even 50 years through the poetry of the 1980–2010s. I am particularly interested in texts that feature real or symbolic images of war. In almost every one of these texts, the theme of war is tied to the overcoming of social and cultural antagonisms that could not and cannot be overcome in reality. Some authors surveyed may disagree with this description. Comprehensive readings of their texts, however, repeatedly reveal the same throughline: the intention to characterize and investigate the conflict-ridden nature of Russian society.

1980s: “But we didn’t know…”

At the end of 1979, a “limited contingent” of Soviet troops was directed to the capital of Afghanistan. According to state propaganda, these troops were said to have nearly a peacemaking mission. In actuality, they fully took part in military actions. Information about their true mission, however, was revealed only piecemeal, even to their relatives.

The very next year Joseph Brodsky responded to the events in his “Lines on the Winter Campaign, 1980.” This lengthy text does not represent the conflict between the “limited contingent” of Soviet troops and the mujahideen as the result of ideological manipulation that lead to ten years of bloody war. Rather, the situation exists outside of time, erasing “families, private thoughts” from the face of the earth and stripping a person down to elementary reflexes stemming from a fear of unavoidable death. This perception of war by a writer of Brodsky’s generation is completely understandable, but his characteristic optics are nonetheless defined by Orientalist stereotypes about “the East.” The poet projects the geography of the Caucasus regions of the Russian empire as depicted in 19^th-century literature onto the Afghanistan of his contemporary moment. No wonder Brodsky chooses the first line of Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “Dream” as his epigraph.

Though Brodsky advocated for personal experience above all else, his poetic vision often surpassed the limits of this aesthetic and political orientation. Mikhail Aizenberg’s texts about the war in Afghanistan more consistently operate with the optics of an individualist. He aimed to depict the way a specific late Soviet individual creates an existential support pillar literally out of thin air, out of nothing (“only to squeeze out a stone from the air/and dig my heel in” — as he writes in one poem). Aizenberg’s speaker stoically strives to dislodge himself from a space of ideological intoxication into his private sphere, where he has no choice but to continue being himself. For Aizenberg, the private sphere remains one of barely noticeable conflicts, which dully but persistently reflect historical events:

Translated by Venya Gushchin

This poem is dated 1984 (i.e., the fifth year of the Afghanistan invasion) and illustrates Aizenberg’s view of the private sphere as an organic space of social outsideness. Only in private can individual persons (including unofficial writers and artists) feel themselves relatively safe and comfortable. Here, the poet’s frequent motif of unfitness comes to the forefront. Aizenberg frequently returns to this theme in his texts from the 1980s, aiming to record the discrepancy between a person’s emotional and intellectual world and the static environment of Soviet society. In the given example, the “unfitness” of a person from unofficial culture is superimposed on “another’s woe, rattled off into canvas”: the news of the landlady’s stepson killed in Afghanistan. Metaphorically placing himself into a spiderweb, the poem’s speaker is given information he doesn’t know how to respond to beyond a self-conscious “we didn’t know.”

Twenty years after Mikhail Aizenberg’s text, in a completely different media situation, Elena Fanailova, one of the most important civic poets of the early 2000s, returns to the topic of the war in Afghanistan.

… Again they’re off for their Afghanistan,
And black roses in Grozny, big as fists,
On the plaza, as they form a square
On their way to being smashed to bits.
When they go to get sworn in,
She flies to give it up to him,
Like a new-fangled Tristan and Isolde
(Special dispatch to all posts)
And there’s a strange strain of Hep in Ashkhabad

He drinks magnesia from the common trough,
Making a racket with the metal chain
While she recites Our Father at the doctor’s
Counting the days of menstrual delays.
The cure proceeds at its own pace,
And meanwhile he carouses like a boy
Bored and jerking away his days

Corporal N., a bit older than the rest,
Who are still wet behind the ears,
Is an expert in the vulgar furlough arts,
He pours black wine for them,
Remembering, not from the authorized
Sections, but something along these lines:
The diseases of dirty hands are
Swallowed bullets made of shit

Common myth and communal hell.
She’s off to the abortion clinic,
Exactly as the doctor has prescribed,
Like a soldier marching the familiar march,
According to the commander’s drill.
And there she is, surrounded by her friends,
Slender and skittish fauns and dryads all—
Cattle at an abattoir.
There’s no free will,
Just chance, the luck to simply stay alive.

And there in ‘Ghanistan were beer-soaked moustaches,
Fucking beautiful Uzbek girls
Unbraiding bridles with their tongues.
They got to ride on armor metal,
Fast and crude.
Later, to keep the whole affair from leaking out,
The colonel himself shot them dead
In front of the regiment—or more precisely,
Had them shot, the ones who dragged
The girls into the bushes by their braids
And those who raped them in the bushes,
The Afghan girls who looked about sixteen,
But weren’t any older than twelve, and barely.
The rapists weren’t more than twenty.
Their families heard nothing of it.
And the ceiling bore down slowly like
A chopper to the sound of women wailing

Now they’re at the river getting soused
And reminiscing about the good old days.
And it’s as though a strange chill tugs
Against their corporeal flesh.
Now the lovers are both forty.
Or, more precisely, the husband and the wife.
The kid is ten, they had him late by Soviet standards.
Their scars speak for themselves.

I’ll never find another country such as this.

Translated by Stephanie Sandler and Genia Turovskaya

In this poem, we hear a soldier who fought in Afghanistan tell a shocking story of his experience (in a commentary on this poem, Fanailova provides its real-life basis: a conversation she overheard on a beach near Voronezh). In an informal setting, the man begins to recall, it would appear, the beginning of his love story with his wife. This story then becomes intermixed with humiliation, sexual violence, and cynicism. However, the poetess does not pass judgment on her speaker, aiming to preserve the natural intonation of his speech, an intonation that frays the fabric of the poetic text.

As a reporter, Fanailova is at the same location as her characters as she strives to convey with maximal accuracy their speech and the motility of their traumatized bodies. Memories of the shocking events the poem’s speaker took part in are interwoven with the everyday, never cutting across its calm flow. Fanialova records how war (both Afghan and Chechen: she writes this poem in the midst of the Second Chechen War) becomes a part of culture, uniting populations through violence. But there is no denying that the Soviet “limited contingent” invasion of Afghanistan remains not fully reflected upon: the moment for public discourse on this tragic event was missed, leaving the participants of the war and their families alone with their negative experiences in private.

1990s: “Poems about the First Chechen Campaign” and others

The early 1990s were marked by radical changes not only in the metropole capitals of the former USSR but in all parts of the now post-Soviet sphere. In some regions the change in social structure was followed by bloody collisions between various groups (typically between different ethnic groups, to a lesser extent between different religious identities). Key examples included the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict (which erupted over the course of 30 years in various military actions); the separation of Transnistria from Moldova (with the help of Russian troops); and the clashes between Uzbeks and Meskhetian Turks in the Fergana Valley etc. The lattermost of these is the subject of a poem by the Russophone Uzbek writer Shamshad Abdullaev, “Voices”:

That evening I was reading ‘The Revolting of the Masses’,
just as they were in those very hours
setting houses on fire. They say
an old woman ran out in flames, trying
to get out of the room (on her back — a starving red beast —
the fire as though feeding) but someone shot her in the head
and raced on further after human meat,
and this wound — like a third eye — reproachfully
gazed at this evil glow of the sky, already not discerning
the threat of the moaning redness, in which she herself
is rapidly dissolving, as though such were possible:
look upon this and forget yourself. And the earth, covered with asphalt,
rushed off, running away in a panic from the enraged crowd.
We had come across something similar in films,
either Vajda’s, or perhaps Rocha’s, and someone said:
he is trying to prove that History does not cleanse,
that it repeats itself and thirsts for blood, a flood of blood,
which does alas cleanse us, but only temporarily.
History — for this time, an undistracted and yawning bookishness,
gallingly descends from the screen and crumples our earthly Eden.
Now I know more about this than I would want to. I stood,
you stood off to the side, but in the neighborhood barely
even a single side remained, delineated by death.
The corners of the houses and the streets were killed, badmouthed,
by their own betrayally precisely respectable-trustworthiness.
The semis and buses screamed desperately, exactly as though being led to slaughter.
And only the streetlight was blinding without cease, nearly beside himself,
pretending to be a streetlight, and everyone
left him alone.
Was it always so? Who would say? Well, wise men.
‘Here I am, my Lord, standing before you.’
We, we who daydream about the second, about the third Woodstock, of the kingdom of love…
Be silent.
There lay cremated scarves, fragments of dishes, scraps from carved lumber,
a maimed doll, a bra, dental implants,
a canary, dried to ashes, orphanhood, silence.
He (they) spoke very softly, as though speaking
caused him pain. When a ghost appears
it is immediately clear: it does not exist, it flickers. But this is something else,
here ghosts do not lie.

Translated by Alex Cigale

The sophistication of his intellectual constructions notwithstanding, Abdullaev’s lyric subject is placed on the same level as the “revolting masses,” testing his deep knowledge and youthful hope in extraordinary circumstances. The poet’s perspective in this poem brought close to the point of view of a traumatized eyewitness unable to influence the unfolding of disastrous events and equally unable to stop thinking and talking about them.

At the same time, “Voices” is significantly different from other texts by Abdullaev. His signature impartial intonation clashes with the uncontrollable fear and subsequent frustration brought on by the bloody civil war. Adbullaev records the historical fault line that cannot be overcome with the help of high culture: the “voices” in his poem turn out to be something dangerous, extrinsic, and inauthentic, unceremoniously storming into the slow world of the suburbs.

In discussing the problematics of war in poetry from the 1990s, it is important to emphasize a significant change in writers’ views of World War II and the Great Patriotic War. In the 1990s, these once foundational events for all Soviet citizen lost their cultural weight. Myths about them began to be reexamined in literature and film. The Great Patriotic War was no longer depicted as entirely heroic. Rather it appeared as a dehumanizing event (see the late novels of Viktor Astafiev) or as a liminal experience testing not one’s political loyalties but rather one’s vitality as a human being (the novellas of Vasily Bykov). I take both my examples from an article by Ilya Kukulin “The Regulation of Pain.” Alongside the already mentioned demythologization of memory about the war, the article highlights another key element relevant to contemporary poetry. In Kukulin’s words, for the young poets who debuted in the 1990s, war became “one of the most significant and capacious metaphors of existential unease.”

What does this mean? The metaphorics of war, found in texts by authors without personal military experience, become a means of resolving existential contradictions. These are contradictions stemming from both fundamental questions of coming-of-age, love and death etc. as well as the radical changes in social relations brought about by the collapse of the Soviet Union (a crisis of identity, an increase in the complexity of social structure, emigration etc.).

A poem from the gone-too-soon Anna Gorenko (1972-1999) is a poignant illustration of this dynamic.

Translating from the European

to A. G.

As if some England some France
Our country at the hour of dawn
The birds go blind, flowers and trees go deaf
And today the Lord himself told me something scabrous

Either I’m holy
or else, more likely
our Lord is like unto a taxi driver
He whispers such a word to every maiden
who comes out on a Sunday morning
to feed a sparrow an ant and a lame cat from a motley bowl

But on good days our Lord’s a great commander
And to a square full of clerks, uhlans, bartenders
In a language foreign, heavenly and splendid,
he utters such a word that their ears burn

Lord, give me not forever but from now on
a soft suit, ordered in the summer in Warsaw
there are small sweets, bypassing rhyme
a raisin, for example, from the pockets, and other crumbs.

Theresienstadt, April 1943

Translated by Sibelan Forrester

It would appear that this poem was the last completed poem by Anna Karp, who had taken Anna Akhmatova’s real surname Gorenko as a pseudonym. The text is written from the perspective of a young woman who shares her impressions of a sunny morning in an unnamed European city. However, the location and date of “composition” prevent the reader from treating the text as an unmediated utterance. This paratext casts an anxious shadow, as does the line “The birds go blind, flowers and trees go deaf.” As a result, the text becomes the monologue of a young woman who doesn’t know what awaits her in the near future.

In a commentary on this poem, the poet Vladimir Tarasov, a close friend of Gorenko, notes that Theresienstadt is the site of the Nazi extermination camp where one of Gorenko’s older relatives died. Giving the text a fictive location and date of composition “Theresienstadt, April 1943,” Gorenko inscribes this deceptively simple poem into several significant historical narratives. These include the memory of World War II and, more specifically, the memory of tragic family narratives as pages in the history of the Shoah. Through this memory, Gorenko looks at her patchwork identity as a person making an intervention in a different language and culture.

Mikhail Sukhotin’s long poem “Verses on the First Chechen Campaign” is a key entry in Russophone poetry about war from the 1990s. Completed in 2000, this unique text joins together literary language and everyday speech to an extreme degree.

Sukhotin’s long poem is an extended commentary on real documents and eyewitness accounts of the First Cheche War, given to the International Non-Governmental Tribunal and collected by the “Memorial” group. Sukhotin does not hide his emotional involvement in the unfolding catastrophe. He becomes an intermediary between the reader and the images of unspeakable violence committed against the citizens of Chechnya. Sukhotin became one of the first poets to analyze the images of the war as shown on television. These images were often filted through a misunderstanding of the war’s goals and an omission of its victims (though to dismiss the honesty and dedication of several NTV journalists from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s would be unfair). Significantly, Sukhotin’s poem about the First Chechen War was written in the midst of the Second. The return of federation troops to Chechnya became an important part of Putin’s pre-electoral campaign, an action met with approval from intellectuals across multiple generations. Sukhotin addresses these intellectuals directly, uniting his aesthetic aims and social analysis in his poetry. Behind this unity lie grief and compassion for the un-mourned victims of this terrible slaughter.

Thousands of people were deliberately tortured in the ‘filters’:
they were beaten, pretend-executed, had dogs set on them,
were given electric shocks,
this was not done accidentally but systematically and methodically,
imagine — systematically and methodically.
Dogs just ate chunks out of people,
and with the electricity it would go like this: they’d blindfold you
and sit you in a chair,
apply the electrodes and give the order: ‘Throw the switch!’,
a switch would be thrown and a powerful burst of electricity
would flow.
People like this, blindfolded and with their hands tied,
would be thrown into common graves,
every night in Karpinskii Kurgan they would bury
50–80 people minus their golden teeth, minus their heads, nails
would be sticking out of the bodies, here’s another way they’d
cover their tracks:
they’d burn the bodies, then pour acid over them, gather up
the bones
(what they lacked, actually, were the ovens of Auschwitz),
then they’d crush up the bones and pack them into artillery
shell-casings.
The film director Govorukhin inspected one such casing
and declared before the ‘Russia he lost’
that they were dog’s bones, the dog, and the matter was
hushed up.

Translated by Kirill Medvedev

Another poetic text by Sukhotin about Chechnya “One minute” was written at the century of the millennium and was published in the anthology The Time of Ch.: Poems about Chechnya and others. Sukhotin uses the minute-long pause of an ailing Boris Yelstin during the signing of the Treaty on the Creation of a Union State of Russia and Belarus on December 8, 1999 as an aesthetic frame. He sees this silence as a silence of omission for the violence perpetrated by the government every minute. At the epicenter of this violence is Minute Square in Grozny, which, as a result of awful bombings, had become a symbol for both Chechen campaigns.

2000s: “Among the ruins of Grozny”

From the mid-1990s, Viktor Krivulin, another classic of Soviet unofficial literature, similarly inscribes his work into the frame of contemporary military and political catastrophes. The subheading of one of his programmatic collections Bathing in the Jordan (“…new texts from the time of the Chechen Campaign”) points to this new orientation. The last collection to be published in Krivulin’s lifetime Poems from a Jubilee Year (2001) reads as an account of the failures of the historiosophical and culturological concepts developed by the poet and his likeminded peers in the second half of the 20^th century. These poems depict the leaden one-dimensionality of the current moment.

Sergei Stratanovsky, Kruvilin’s closest friend from the Leningrad literary underground, turns to the epic perspective of the chronicler. In his 2002 collection Next to Chechnya, Stratanovsky writes a chronicle of senseless violence that reduces all participants to biological bodies. The dehumanized characters of Stratanovsky are incapable of personal witness. As a result, their speech, devoid of individualized traits, is appropriated by the poet-historian for his tragic chronicle. The poet, overcoming both disgust and compassion, records the collapse of elementary life structures during war. The collection opens with this terrifying poem:

The dogs of Grozny
abandoned and evil,
Among the ruins of Grozny
with their teeth tear at the dead,
Yesterday’s kings
of courtyards and discos.

Translated by Boris Dralyuk

The last line adds touching details from peacetime life with naturalistic depictions of dogs devouring the dead to shock the reader. But the method employed by Stratanovsky as he writes a poetic chronicle of both Chechen wars is not limited to shock value. The poet aims to create a stereoscopic picture of war, in which the document stands next to mythology. In his texts from the early 2000s, there is some chthonic “we” striving to suppress and destroy all things foreign and unfamiliar it encounters.

At some points, war in Stratanovsky’s poetry practically loses all concrete details, becoming an endless conflict, where one fatal battle is nearly indistinguishable from another.

Military metaphors are refracted differently in the poetry of Damian Kudryavtsev. He began writing poems in the early 1990s, but started actively publishing as a poet in the 2000s. Kudryavtsev’s interests lie not in fractured identity, but in heroic subjectivity, involved in actively changing the world. Conflict and strife are foundational elements in his world:

in the evening when devils drive up
from the outskirts to meet death
in order not to die in khasavyurt
in order not to die in Stepanakert

Translated by Venya Gushchin

The text opens with references to two urban centers, forever tied to the post-Soviet history of war. Khasavyurt was the city in which the peace treaty formally ending the First Chechen War was signed. Stepanakert was one of the centers of the military conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The second stanza, staging a confrontation between the “skinheads” (i.e., radical nationalists) and “devils” (a derogatory term for Caucasian migrants used in nationalist circles) shows that the conflict can never be resolved. This conflict is itself the “endless” “fatherland” (nowadays, we know the dangers of this formulation through Vladimir Putin’s odious expression “the borders of Russia know no end”). In his poems, Kudryavstev strives to resolve through literary means the fundamentally unresolvable antagonism between past and future (between war and peace etc.), an antagonism defining post-Soviet society throughout its existence.

Stanislvav Lvovsky’s long poem In the Words of Others is an integral entry in the civic poetry of the 2000s. Lvovsky composed this montaged text shortly after the five-day war between Russia and Georgia. The text presents this war as a media event, woven from the words of various “others,” from quotes from Friedrich Hölderlin to selections from conversations overheard in bars. One of the threads of this informational spool leads back to the prehistory of the war, when imperialist and fascist aggression was directed towards this small region and political society. It is doomed to be defeated, but keeps fighting to the end.

it has already become clear to many today, — says Klement Gottwald in his speech before the deputies
of the National Assembly of CSR on November 30, 1937, — that giving free
rein to the fascist invaders in Abyssinia, Spain and China
essentially means inviting them
to venture their pillager’s luck elsewhere,
including Czechoslovakia

in this moment of hope, albeit hope still threatened, we appeal to you. — this is just
thirteen out of two thousand words. the forests of Borjomi and Kiketi continue to burn. we are now at a loss
as to where truth stands and what’s more, truth itself, as we once knew it, is there no more.
there is only the International Committee for Non-intervention in Spanish affairs, there’s a talking maggot
Djadan, sketching (in the spirit of the old RAND corp.) one after another outline proposals
of nuclear strikes now on Batumi, now on Pripyat, now on the Gdańsk corridor,
now on his own
children.

truth, then, is not prevailing. truth is merely what remains when everything else has been frittered away.

Translated by Stanislav Lvovsky

Lvovsky highlights the difficulty of representing his contemporary war through literary (poetic) means. His text is defined by a despair that “there is not one who could capture the situation in human language.” This impossibility of expression is not only a consequence of shock at military barbarity. It also stems from the contradictory facts and toxic information about the war. The facts do not make the situation any clearer. On the contrary, they corrode the actual events, transforming them into an aggregate of media images.

2010s: “Mortal fear ”

The beginning of the second decade of the 21^st century was marked by mass protests against the Russian Federation’s path of political development. The triggering event of the protests was the so-called “castling move,” when, as the result of backroom deals and falsified elections, Putin once more became president, replacing Dmitry Medvedev. This was a step towards the gradual ramp-up of conservative political tendencies and legal initiatives from 2013 onwards. First came the laws targeting the adoption of children by foreign citizens as well as the LGBT community (on November 30, 2023, the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation deemed the “international LGBT movement” an extremist organization, effectively criminalizing non-heterosexual individuals). From today’s perspective, these initiatives, along with the increase in military spending and the infection of various social strata with different strains of “patriotism,” were clear signs of the formation of a ideological and legal basis for the future full-scale invasion.

Between 2011 and 2013, when the ideological and repressive apparatuses of the Russian state were beginning to adapt to the new situation, some potential alternative forms of political and cultural activity did emerge. Many projects and initiatives were founded at the intersection of activism and contemporary art, with the aim of imagining a collective future. Most famous among them was the Pussy Riot “punk prayer” in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The poetry of these years saw the emergence of a new politicized generation of authors who converted protest energy into aesthetic form. This critical impulse at times took on a sophisticated shape, as in this poem by Eduard Lukoyanov, for instance:

syria is a gel for the soul with a wild hazel scent
congo is a whitening toothpaste with a higher concentration of fluorine
somalia is soft as velvet
we will never cross over the “uaz patriot”

because the “uaz patriot” is eternity itself
the impossibility of a corner
the impossibility of kodori valley golan heights and lays chips

we have no more civic duty 

Translated by Venya Gushchin

At first, the text may appear to be a rather predictable poem, in which brand names are combined with tragic events and protests. What is the price paid for a carefree life with cozy shop signs and carbohydrates to be endlessly consumed as essential parts of modern life? This appears to be the question posed by the author.

But things are not so simple: Lukoyanov’s critique is directed not so much at the world of consumerism, but more so at the “politically engaged consciousness” that offers this critique but can nonetheless comfortably survive within this world. Thus, Lukoyanov makes a paradoxical move in the second stanza, recalling the “uaz patriot,” a vehicle widely used by police and military forces. When does Lukoyanov break the mold, departing from the structure of a typical politically engaged poem? The aim is to cut the ground from under the reader’s feet, to remind them that military conflicts all over the world, much like the long dark history of Russia itself, drown in the words and deeds of the comfortable and intellectually lazy.

Russia’s conservative turn after 2013 also affected the politics of historical memory. The foundation of this national memory became the state narrative about the Soviet Union’s complete and total victory in the Great Patriotic War. One of the central historical narratives to be revised in opposition to the state became the blockade of Leningrad. The tragedy was the subject of numerous studies and artistic works from the late 2000s to the early 2010s. Authors aimed to uncover the unarticulated aspects of blockade life and to recast 20^th-century history through the prism of this catastrophe. For instance, Polina Barskova turns to the realities of daily Leningrad life under the blockade with an approach that can justifiably called anthropological. In her poetic texts, she examines the “shameful” life of degrading bodies and minds, hidden from the eyes of researchers and outsiders. Often, her characters are real-life artists of the Silver Age or avant-garde intellectuals. Both are fused with history to the point of physiological non-differentiability.

Barskova’s cycle “Handbook of Leningrad Veteran Writers, 1941-1945” opens with a particular poem. In essence, the text is a monologue of the official Soviet writer Leonid Panteleev, the author of a novella known to every Soviet primary school student “The Republic of ShKID” along with several other books for children and young adults. Like many writers unable to leave the besieged Leningrad, Panteleev found himself in a devasting situation. Left without ration tickets, he was doomed to die of hunger (he was later evacuated in 1942).

Barskova captures Panteleev in a liminal state between life and death, in a state of mind warped by hunger. The day-to-day realities of the blockade are intermingled with visions from the past and the distant future. The poem ends with a desperate plea to the creator, unexpected coming from the devout, yet reserved Panteleev. The Soviet writer identifies with the tragic consciousness of the 20^th century in a state of constant self-redefinition. Barskova doesn’t limit herself to historical-literary aims and implements received knowledge of human nature to create an anthropological portrait of our contemporaries.

The blockade is once again “point of entry” into revisionist takes on Soviet history as in Vitaly Pukhanov’s poem “In Leningrad, on Marata Street”:

In Leningrad, on Marata Street
In 1943
Somebody ate a plate of soup.
Thus the order of things was broken.

Two cars of militia men emerged:
You shouldn’t eat!
You’ve broken the rules!
We don’t eat meat here.

We are here in defense.
We are here counting the days of war.
We have no interest anymore
For some cat or some crow.

Terrific hunger — the murderer
Defends Leningrad today.
Terrific city — the grave-digger
Scares the enemy away.

Leningrad is disappearing
From the enemy’s vision.
Where’s the Hermitage? Where’s the Summer Garden?
Welcome to a different dimension.

Neither awake, nor dreaming
Can you be here alive?
We will win
Because we won’t eat! 

At the end of time,
Our flesh will turn into stone.
Our enemy will remember
Our transfiguration.

Translated by Polina Barskova

Vitaly Pukhanov is perhaps the most traditional poet of those presented here. He considers the problematics of war and other Soviet myths, deconstructing the language of Soviet poetry by forcing it to speak about traumatic topics, e.g., the implicit and explicit references to cannibalism during the blockade of Leningrad in the poem quoted above. Unlike the revanchism of so-called Z-poets (those who after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine supported and justified the war in their texts), he shows the potential of violence hidden within Soviet and contemporary imperialist fantasies of Russian history.

Dmitry Garichev is another author who directly addresses the problematics of war in his poetry. Conflicts and confrontations erupt in virtually every single one of his poetic texts. His poems unite two tendencies: he uses the image of war as a space of poignant existential conflict and, at the same time, places this existential situation into Russian history of the late 20^th-early 21^st century. This space of war is a space of confrontation between two opposing forces, variously referred to as “us” and “them,” “old” and “young,” “men” and “women” and so on. At the heart of this conflict lies the drama of those who were not written into the sharp turns of Russian history, especially in the 1990s. Garichev gives these voices left behind in the past a chance to speak. Though it is not always pleasant, hearing these voices is necessary. Here is, for instance, a poem where the images of unremitting war emerge amid the coming-of-age of teenagers from the suburbs of Moscow.

they took the russian school, but we remained
in control of the adjacent inconvenient field.

[…]

only the teachers will survive, i say;
obey them, they’re more afraid than anyone out here

Translated by Venya Gushchin

In February-March of 2014, the Russian Federation annexed and occupied Crimea. In addition to brutally violating international law, this action began Russia’s hybrid way against Ukraine. One of the first pieces addressing the annexation and its archeology was Maria Stepanova’s long poem War of the Beasts and the Animals. In an attempt to fixate and gather the new cultural-historical situation, Stepanova maintains two perspectives on the fact of war: on the one hand, war is a constant running throughout all historical time; on the other, it is a catastrophe unfolding in the here and now, framed by the background of the post-Soviet subject and incorporated into the media-logic of the current moment.

Also in 2014, Galina Rymbu offered an alternative method of writing about the war:

“This isn’t war,” said a guy with a half-shaved head in the metro
to another guy, who was shaved all the way.
“No, not war,” say the analysts, “just some kind of action.”
“The territory of the occurrence isn’t completely clear,” comrades affirm in the dark.
“War is different,” you said, embracing me. “You don’t have to worry,”
the government officials say with confidence on the live feed
on all the remaining channels, but the blood
is already breaking out, quietly, on their foreheads, near their auditory canals—
thin streams, until a fountain pours forth from their mouths.

We agreed
to sit quietly, until we understand what’s going on. No additional clarity
and seventy years later, no additional clarity.

Anxiety, anxiety, circulating as drive. Multiple military conflicts
inside, in the mouth, in bed; just one touch and you collapse.

The streetlights blink with an insistent red, pushy-red flags
fill the streets of an unknown country. Dim corpses,
wrapped in St. George ribbons, sweet mummies in empty bars and restaurants
having a nice talk — about the possibilities of independent art and new forms,
about the posthuman world, about cheese and wine, which melt
our hearts, the hearts of the “backward.” While the virus of outskirts, the virus of borders
is already destroying their common sense, dear reason. Here’s a question —

How many sides are there in this war?
No more no less, no more no less. A jetliner with a glass bottom
crosses the borders of several countries. The leaders inside, bloated with fat and fear
look down, over black clouds — hatred and wrath —
finishing their final cruise. These demands raised against us
fall, humming, into a dark empty gullet.

Artillery pointed inside yourself. Foreign conflicts — in the myriad
incisions, failures, paralysis of memory, fear of birth — all collecting in a single moment.
They’ve brought in the dead birds of Russia and Ukraine on damp boards.

Currency skeletons on the death exchange, matter, a thick sediment in the world night . . .
Again I hear familiar songs,
Again the spring streets are filled with antifa militants.
Again I can love you,
Again and again, until the world night fills with peace,
And our victory is laid open.

Translated by Joan Brooks

Here Rymbu seeks to excise the revolutionary elements of collective action from the space electrified by conflict. These elements could potentially launch a movement towards the destruction of an order founded on inequality.

Exactly eight years later, the hybrid war grew into a full-scale invasion. The unfolded brutality generated numerous poetic texts, many of which are of a reactive or, perhaps, a communitarian character. Russophone authors who are against the war and support Ukraine have attempted and continue to strive to inform colleagues and readers they are not alone. Reading these texts is a task for the future if such a future arrives.

The article was translated by Venya Gushchin