Dislocation: An Anthology of Poetic Response to Russia’s War in Ukraine, edited by J. Nemirovskaya & A. Krushelnitskaya, Slavica Publishers, 2024
In the second year of the war in Ukraine, even the title of this bilingual tome confirms my observation that recent anthologies may remind one of diagnostic manuals. Thankfully, there is no need to diagnose a breakage; while Russian aggressors have persisted in their assault, Ukrainian resistance is relentless. Ukrainians are still fighting for their land, and the land is more than territory; it means real people and individual stories. Yet, as such stories demonstrate, dislocations—occurring in the wake of global trauma—take a long time to heal. There is a palpable incompatibility between realities past and present, pain amounting to chronic, and ruptures shaping both local and international discourses into liminalities. Beyond the battlefield, injuries beyond broken bones proliferate in the form of shifted responsibilities, wounded memories, betrayed values, and faulty beliefs; at the end of the day, even the mysterious “Russian soul” has turned out to be an inflamed spirit of contradiction.
Dislocation is edited in a way that critics of different disciplines can equally appreciate its logic, reminding one that when life’s plot betrays us in its twists, we are still left with words. In the last days of February of 2022, the Moscow-born author, director, and Russian culture scholar Julia Nemirovskaya announced through social media that she would be collecting poetic responses to the war in a kopilka—a “piggy bank” in Russian—for safekeeping; this resulting collection has slowly turned into a historical document. Moved by the incessant thought that “the world must be made aware,” volunteer translators began working on poems that they found poignant, and by the end of that year, the first bilingual collection, Disbelief, was published in London. In the nearly two years that followed, the geographies and demographics of contributing authors continued to widen, and two new translators—Yana Kane and Josephine von Zitzewitz—joined the original team of Dmitry Manin, Maria Bloshteyn, Anna Krushelnitskaya, Andrei Burago, and Richard Coombes. Their work proves to be precise and emotionally relevant, and Dislocation houses 117 authors in translation, ranging from Russian citizens and expats to Ukrainian poets who write in Russian (their native albeit traitorous language), featuring a stunning cover with art by Maria Kazanskaya.
After another year of the disastrous Russian war against Ukraine, the idealized, heroic phase of “all we want is peace” has morphed into disillusionment. Dislocation illustrates this phase well, approaching the sense of malaise from its variously themed sections. Generally speaking, the anthology can be analyzed from different perspectives, semantic or symphonic. It starts with the words “silence” and “numbness,” before progressing to incessant chiming, as in this piece from M. Gronas, translated by Manin:
What carries me to war
Aren’t tanks or horse carts,
Or an army heli,
But taxis, subway, elevators.
There, can you hear? It starts
Chiming, the urgent silver
Of my unfreedom’s horns. . .
Better get the umbrella
Hence the music of the relentless war begins. Entering its darkness after the light of daily life, one slowly attempts to orient oneself among the voices of witnesses and victims. The derealization, which occurs in the second part of the anthology, is quick and sharp—as is fitting for trauma. It spells out losses routinely, without pathos, exposing mundane and sinister war errands. In a poem by N. Kossman, also translated by Manin, some leave behind the burned frames of their homes, and others leave bodies:
Over the smoldering ruins
she became an old woman,
fell silent, bit her children,
she’d get up and fall back down,
she’d whisper, “blood, blood,”
and hide her face in her hands,
she’d repeat, “again! again!”
and forget what she had said
The disturbances in the rhythms of existence are striking, but familiar names and objects anchor the poets, keeping them connected and grounded, whether in reality or in metaphor. Let’s examine the ritual of jam making by Valery Zemskikh, translated by Coombes:
Let’s peel some apples
And sod the war
The jam is bubbling nicely
And it’s time to skim the foam
They all deserve it; it’s their fault
We’ll scald the jars with boiling water
And fill them with thick amber
And sod the war—
Or a poem by Irina, translated by von Zitzewitz:
i remember a paper doll from my childhood
when i cut it out i accidentally lopped off half the head
now hammers are shrilly gargling knocking
in the remaining half of my head: who had the right
to whittle down my life like this
to whittle down all the lives around me
Another marker of time is that some authors have chosen to use only their first names or newly invented pseudonyms, evincing that in today’s Russia, poetry can kill its creator. But even the most murky, nauseating fear does not stop those who feel the need to resist the regime—even when their only armor is their silence, such as in Natalya Klyuchareva’s untitled poem, translated by Burago. Describing women “shaking in horror,” the piece renders a scene in a city square in which a few individuals have gathered to voice their protest. One “has in her backpack a crumpled blank sheet. Not a poster, there aren’t any words on it, / But even that’s hard to unroll. . .” A crumpled sheet of societal silence. A crumpled, tossed life under the dictatorship. The entirety of the section wherein this poem appears, “I didn’t know how to save this world,” is dedicated to the feeling of guilt, powerfully iterated too by Ksenia Kazantseva’s piece, translated by von Zitzewitz:
Do Russians fancy guilt?
Of course, that’s all they want
They are tired, they are pale
And soon they will be banned
Also present is another type of guilt, seen in this poem by Alena Maksakova, translated by von Zitzewitz: that of the “survivors,” people who had left Ukraine years ago, long before the war:
My deserted city
Was calling me
I kept forgetting
Streets
Houses
The theater’s ziggurat
Started disappearing later
I found out
The city is being bombed
The city is burning
The color of my guilt
The black letters of Russian Cyrillic
Throughout the collection, the poetic toolbox changes. Free verse is claiming its territory along with the ancient tradition of lament poetry, and songs—particularly of protest—are not as representative as they had once been, though they have now become a trademark of anti-war poetry. And now that a previously shared tongue has been broken down, the poet’s own language betrays and bites. Sergey Leibgrad, in Kane’s translation, sees a disintegrating semantics marking the new epoch:
in a half-delirious dream I call my wife mama
mama has been gone from this world for eighteen years
need it or not I keep uttering the word “ukraine”
but I am not insane not insane
isn’t it so my children but they stay silent
in a tongue I don’t know
While in Alexey Tarasov’s piece, translated by Krushelnitskaya, Russian is disowned, indicating the many painful acts of self-annihilation that come with having one’s language associated with the aggressor. The poem sees language disintegrated, narrowed down and paralyzed, breaking down into linguistic units, into morphemes:
Night settles stray dogs on your shoulders, a dog on each.
Your sleepless fridge gives a garbled whispered speech.
It rumbles and grumbles, it buzzes, it tosses and kicks:
“Gee-whiz ze houz-z-z and ze duck-duck-dicks.”
Flee with your spouse and your kids”
In its wide-ranging and singular selections, Dislocation successfully relays the nature of the ethnocultural rift, which occupies the minds of the citizens no less than the shelling. The mental health of the entire nation has shifted, and poets are responding with descriptions of psychological defense mechanisms—from Katia Kapovich’s dissociation to Segey Leibgrad’s hallucinating character, who no longer distinguishes his lost past from present. They mark the multiple stages of grief in their unpredictability, and in some cases, it is an anticipatory loss. Dislocations heal slower than broken bones.
The section entitled “spacetime is split” explores the phenomenon of time, changing direction as a result of unresolved, chronic trauma. Those who have lived through bombing, torture, or captivity will confirm that one’s perception of time changes in the midst of unimaginable stress; knowing this, poetic interpretation allows for looking beyond the immediate present, as if poetry is a crystal ball for deciphering the future. Roman Osminkin, in Krushelnikaya’s translation, iterates this with sorrowful illusions:
till the stack of cause and effect becomes unstacked
and the creaky gate opens into another time
another tribe and your grandpa Levko and grandma Anya
will crawl out of their death pits to dance
through the minefields like a groom and a bride in raiments of light
While Vitaly Pukhanov in Bloshteyn’s translation creates a place for sad self-irony:
Remember, Alyosha, the six-hundred-page anthology of anti-war poetry
published in the winter of forty-two in Berlin?
The anti-Fascist poets were trying to find a language to say “nicht,” “nein” to war,
They censured the fatherland-aggressor, they spurned Goethe, Heine, and Schiller,
The acknowledged their collective responsibility,
They felt choked by an inexpiable guilt. “So why didn’t you stop Hitler?”
At times, there is overwhelming despair. Maybe it’s all for nothing. Maybe. . . while we’re busy planning our little lives, History is not somewhere ahead of us—and nor is it far behind. We’re right inside of it, being already chewed on. One wakes up in the morning just to confirm that History is before us.
Yet, the final, twelfth section is “but everything comes to an end and this too will end,” one of the largest in the book. I won’t cite here any beautiful poems of hope and love, or of belief in divine intervention; the salient truth is that we want rules and values, for some semblance of normalcy—but who knows what’s in store for Ukrainians as a bigger community, or for all of us as a species. For now, our role is to document and to treat this total, global dislocation. Don’t let it slide, don’t get used to pain, and one day we’ll read together all these poems as self-fulfilled prophecies. I would like that very much.
Galina Itskovich was born and raised in Odesa, Ukraine, and has lived in New York City since 1991. She holds a Master’s degree from the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College. In addition to teaching and practicing psychotherapy, she writes poetry, prose, and nonfiction in Russian and English. Her work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Nashville Review, Poet Lore, Asymptote, EastWest Literary Forum, Punctured Lines, ROAR and elsewhere.
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