There is, for instance, the poet Ostap Slyvynsky’s Dictionary of War. At the Lviv-Holovnyi railway station, people displaced by Russia’s war transport new meanings in their memories. Words themselves are displaced from orthodox dictionaries, transformed by trauma: apples slam to the ground like bombs; warehouses no longer store books, but bodies. Slyvynsky and his co-authors, co-lexicographers, gather these meanings from monologues and anecdotes they hear while volunteering at the station, or in Lviv’s streets. They call this dictionary a documentary project, translating some entries from Russian into Ukrainian and contributing fragments of their own; it has already been published in Poland in a bilingual edition, while further translations are hopefully forthcoming. Its compilation is ongoing.
There is now A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War: 20 Short Works by Ukrainian Playwrights. These twenty short works, like Slyvynsky’s dictionary, function as documentary sources of sorts, recording visceral responses to Russia’s full-blown invasion of Ukraine. They are honest, though not journalistic. They do not attempt to evince neutral facts and objectivity. They each testify, through form as much as content, to the turbulence and trauma of the Ukrainian experience. A veneer of fictionalization transforms them into works of intimacy on a universal scale. Andriy Bondarenko’s “Survivor’s Syndrome,” translated by John Freedman and Natalia Bratus, elevates the daily images of his life—“ . . . Like a laptop / suddenly disconnected from / an outlet [ . . . ] This is how worlds / disappear”—to a high poetic register, an elegy for the worlds that died when the war began.
But beyond bearing witness, these twenty texts manifest as addends to a centuries-old Ukrainian cultural consciousness, on whose repudiation rest the disingenuous Russian justifications for war. To amplify the collective consciousness, to remake it in Tetiana Kytsenko’s words as a “war-ning,” is to actively defend Ukrainianism against an enemy who rejects its existence and wages a campaign of annihilation against it. A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War is simultaneously a reaction to and a begetter of a new, postwar collective consciousness that assimilates this trauma in the history of being Ukrainian.
Under Freedman’s careful editing, the anthology draws its title from the first text in its collection: a “short story,” structured thematically, by Olena Astaseva. It gives the cue for the whole collection to unfold into the skin of a dictionary. Its twenty short works act as the dictionary’s entries, on hypocrisy, children, home, displacement, death, the Earth, and daily survival. Astaseva’s personal lexicon refuses the alphabetical, equalizing order of Slyvynsky’s Dictionary of War. Time exerts a mutating force on her speaker’s vocabulary, transubstantiating panic into fear into hatred; but Astaseva chooses to juxtapose “Hunger” and “Betrayal” against the agonies of seemingly more mundane topics, like the “wasted effort” of cleaning in the meaninglessness of war. The war also subverts her speaker’s experience of time: “As soon as war began we said: ‘It will last a few days . . . ’ [ . . . ] Two weeks passed.” Every day of war kills the future tense of hope. The contrast between the daily rituals of an ordinary, urban life and the pathos of “disillusionment” and “de-realization” is a recurring motif in the anthology, as is a pursuit of some kind of reasonable stability, of structure: of attempting to survive de-struction, down to the word.
Astaseva’s Dictionary of Emotions foregrounds the substance, form, and methods of many of the works that follow. Though the collection claims authorship by playwrights, the entire anthology is unique in dispensing with the generic signals of drama: only one piece, “In the Bowels of the Earth” by Olena Hapieieva, contains dramatis personae, and yet her piece tosses the strictures of direct dialogue up in the air, swiveling between dialogue, direct speech, and narration. With the exception of “In the Bowels of the Earth” and Ihor Bilyts’s “The Russian Soldier,” the twenty works discard stage directions, embedding setting and action in the narratives themselves. In “How to Talk to the Dead,” translated by Freedman and Brutus, Anastasiia Kosodii writes: “don’t waste your time searching for / the form / for words or speech”; the words will come, “suddenly[,] as [they] have never been.”
Just as the works belong to no generic repertoire, Astaseva’s speaker belongs to “no home,” referencing the song “У мене немає дому” (I have no home”) by the Ukrainian indie band Один в каное, One in a Canoe. Several texts in the anthology include URLs to YouTube videos that are no longer available. Lena Lagushonkova’s piece formats dialogue in the bubbles of SMS messages, and Pavlo Arie features images in his profoundly auto-fictive “Diary of Survival”—screenshots of media websites; photographs of otherwise banal scenes disrupted by empty supermarkets and Czech hedgehogs in the streets of Kyiv. These metatextual references to the digital dimension of wartime life, fragmenting even the narrative form, situate the anthology in a theater of exploration: How can one encode the plane of digital “matter” to a real, tangible audience, and does it become more urgent when this digital matter reflects the destruction of the physical? Melding drama and narrative, the physical and the immaterial, A Dictionary of Emotions' overall effect is that of an organic ecosystem animating each text, enlivening the structure of its own material. Recounting a war of obliteration in twenty-first-century circumstances calls for negating the formal parameters of predetermined modes, coalescing an endless strand of meaning where reality has none.
I began writing this review on Day 485—the day of the Wagner Group’s aborted march on Moscow—in a territory 7,500 kilometers southeast of Ukraine’s eastern border, on the coast of another continent. The first seed of the anthology also germinated here in Hong Kong, when a Hongkongese director, William Wong, contacted Freedman “no sooner” than the “invasion of Ukraine [had] begun” to pursue possibilities of support for Ukraine. The anthology is only a node in Maksym Kurochkin and Freedman’s Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings project, supported by Philip Arnoult’s Center for International Theater Development (CITD) and the Sputnik Theatre in London, England. The project underpins Kurochkin’s company, the Theater of Playwrights, whose official opening has been postponed by the war. Day 485 is also the anniversary of the first (unofficial) event ever hosted in the Theater of Playwrights, “A Public Evening of Readings,” as evinced on the anthology’s first page.
The anthology’s texts are only a handful among 105 plays that these twenty playwrights have written between February 2022 and June 2023 (the full selection of plays is available on Ukrainian Drama Translations’ website). Their translations into eleven European languages by a group of skilled and resolute translators, ranging from Finnish to Czech to Bulgarian, have been equally rapid. The dimension of language testifies to the project’s uniqueness: Kurochkin and the entire group of Ukrainian playwrights wrote their plays to be staged, read aloud, immediately, instantly, in all the languages of the world, threading audiences on the needle of language into the fabric of a free, independent Ukraine. According to the CITD’s website, 295 readings were performed in twenty-nine countries in the first eleven months of the war: 295 performances of the Ukrainian “I,” inhabiting the syntactical homes of foreign tongues, speaking through strange yet sympathetic vocal folds. When the worst atrocities and mass murders are digitally documented by the victims themselves, the language of expression picks up the pace.
Freedman’s meticulous preface brilliantly clarifies the Play Readings system within which A Dictionary of Emotions operates. For non-Ukrainian-speaking readers, he details the linguistic tension at work between the Ukrainian and Russian languages in some of the original texts. These linguistic discrepancies reinforce the structural fluidity of the original Ukrainian, abolishing even the constraint of a single language. They mimic the mechanics of verbal communication in Ukraine and recall, as Freedman briefly sketches out, the Ukrainian language’s history, which the Russian Empire has consistently suppressed through to Soviet times. For these bilingual playwrights, Russian is the language of hatred, and Ukrainian the language of sorrow. Russian is a “choir of death of imperial structures” in Olha Maciupa’s “Flowering,” a menacing chorus of tragedy and destruction against the “voice of a plant that doesn’t want to be uprooted from the earth.” The speaker in Oksana Savchenko’s “I Want to Go Home” begins in Russian, cursing out the “Ruscists” and “Russian Orcs” in the language of their violence, and ends in Ukrainian in a lament for повітря, “air,” the air of her “home ground.” To write and speak Ukrainian, especially when juxtaposed against Russian, is an entry in the dictionary of resistance.
Nearly three-quarters of the twenty short pieces are texts by women, and they rewrite the war from an “I” of flight, basements, motherhood, and nature. Nearly all recall “the man [they] love,” at the front line or unable to leave Ukraine. Maciupa’s spring imagery of “trees bloom[ing]” in “occupied Vovchansk, where the man [she] love[s] comes from,” mirrors the speaker’s desire for a child in Julia Gonchar’s ‘A Sense of War,’ couched in the language of desire: the same images of hope inhabit the space of romantic love. The female voices of this collection speak of these men rarely by name, often by epithet, and always in Ukrainian. Perhaps a loved one’s name is the ultimate irreplaceable word, refusing the imposition of a new dictionary. Though not a section in Astaseva’s opening story, perhaps love enables cultural survival.
This female “I” conjures the Ukrainian folk image of Alexander Dovzhenko’s seminal film, Земля (Earth, 1930), where the “crumbly black” soil of Hapieieva’s “Bowels of the Earth” yokes Ukrainianism to its literal root: the “graves of forebears” and the land their forebears lived on. Iryna Harets’s “Planting an Apple Tree” directly summons Earth’s historical context of forced collectivization and the subsequent Holodomor in the “huge apple orchard” her speaker’s grandmother was “supposed to inherit,” but never did. The Holodomor famine killed an estimated four million Ukrainian civilians at Moscow’s hands between 1932 and 1933. The roots of traditional Ukrainian identity in A Dictionary of Emotions permeate this history and spread into the soil of the future, where resistance against death and oppression fuses into new life.
Natalka Vorozhbyt, in contrast, brutally subverts the expectations of love and sexuality in the first section of “Three Rendezvous,” echoing a moment in Vitaliy Chenskiy’s “Robinson.” As Chenskiy puts it: “Not the most subtle plot twist, of course. [ . . . ] But in general, there will be nothing better in the coming years.” Vorozhbyt’s protagonist later participates in a silent demonstration, “naked from the waist down” and with “bloodstained crotches,” in front of a statue of a Soviet soldier in Vienna. Protests against the rape of Ukrainian women by Russian soldiers, while not as explicit, did occur in Vienna in April 2022. Her text brilliantly forces the non-Ukrainian reader into estrangement: the “pleasant-looking [Viennese] man” attracted to her protagonist embodies that certain Western outsider, unable or unwilling to engage with Ukrainian versions of history against Russia’s dominant narrative. To expose Vorozhbyt’s view of these hypocrisies, in texts intended for translation into foreign languages, compounds the irony of her voice, rendered in the languages of the societies she criticizes. Its bitterness resounds in A Dictionary of Emotions, again and again, from the scathing irony of the “exchange with a Russian girlfriend” in Astaseva’s opening piece, through to the cosmic scale of misfortune in Kurochkin’s closing text.
Chenskiy’s “Robinson” is amongst the more humorous pieces, more arch than sardonic: while his narrator summons his “beloved Dostoevsky” during air raids, “God forbid” that Ukrainian police officers glimpse his book. His authorial choice to evoke Dostoevsky at the forefront of the civilian’s experience of war, in such a context of national trauma, raises the polemic of cultural and ideological representation. Some perspectives have suggested that boycotting Russian literature and culture perpetuates the cycle of hatred and dehumanization that Russian soldiers engender by murdering, raping, and exiling Ukrainian civilians, condoned and encouraged by their political leaders and civilians. From a Ukrainian perspective, continuing to engage with Russian cultural exports might strengthen the imperial framework in which they sprouted and thrive. In A Dictionary of Emotions’ preface, Freedman eloquently and empathetically argues that to decentralize Russia’s place in the history of world literature is not to retaliate for their war in Ukraine —not to respond to destruction with destruction—but to “recover the names of writers . . . shuffled aside by politics,” whose places on pedestals and street signs have instead been subsumed by Pushkin. Such writers might include Vasyl Stus, Olha Kobylianska, and Mykola Khvylovy. Instead of Tchaikovsky, one might enjoy Mykola Lysenko. Where Chenskiy draws ambiguous circles around Dostoevsky, Savchenko’s speaker’s certitude is shrapnel embedded in her psyche: “I will make sure that no school in Ukraine ever again bears the name of a Russian poet or writer.”
On Day 488, the writer and war crimes researcher Victoria Amelina was in a restaurant in Kramatorsk when a missile cratered in. This Russian missile killed her on July 1, 2023. She had previously written an essay, “war-ning” that we might witness an echo of the 1930s Soviet executions of 223 Ukrainian intellectuals, the “Executed Renaissance.” She belonged to the 2020s ‘“Renaissance” of post-Euromaidan Ukrainian culture, as do Ostap Slyvynsky, Maksym Kurochkin, Natalka Vorozhbyt, and the twenty playwrights represented in A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War. Their work exists, to abstract Muriel Rukeyser’s words, as a “vital national resource.” They head the rush of change that revitalizes a culture under threat of death, and locate new forms and meanings to generate this change. A Dictionary of Emotions ends at the beginning, for the ones “who will be. / Who will live.” Bondarenko, who wrote the previous lines, and Kosodii, who writes that “invent[ing] stories” are “tasks for the future,” understand the oxygen their work provides for Ukrainian cultural life. These complex sequences are stories with new names. To read them, to hear them aloud, to speak them in your own voice and language, is to scratch a star into the global constellation of collective action sustaining the new meanings of Ukraine.
