“Anecdote in the Vein of Herodotus”: Shuttling between Particulars and the Universal in Boris Slutskii's and Ian Satunovskii's War Poetry (original) (raw)
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BORN OF WAR: THE RELUCTANT MODERNISM OF VLADISLAV CHODASEVIČ
Russian Literature, 2016
This paper contextualizes Khodasevich's poem 'Slezy Rakhili' ('Rachel's Tears'; 1916) and his article 'Voina i poeziia' ('War and Poetry'; 1938) as his responses to World War I and to the Munich agreement, respectively. I contend that the First World War provided the impetus to Khodasevich for starting to write modernist poetry, in which he explicitly opposed " then " and " now " , a contrast that lies at the core of modernist consciousness. In Khodasevich's case, this acute awareness of a break with previous values had a personal quality, as the birth of his modernist poetics evolved out of a personal crisis in the wake of the suicide of his closest friend, Samuil Kissin, on 22 March 1916. Khodasevich's poem 'Slezy Rakhili' recapitulates macro-and micro-histories, referring to the broader issue of refugees and deportees and to Kissin's tragic end. 'Slezy Rakhili' is also a self-referential war poem as it reflects on current war poetry and questions whether poetry can adequately negotiate modernity in its most extreme form of a modern war. It is a conscious exploration of the contrast between " established things " and the new catastrophic reality of war and postwar Russia and Europe that makes Khodasevich a modernist poet and unites him with other modernist poets, like Vladimir Maiakovskii, despite their personal and literary animosities.
«Academia Polonica» Vol. 65 № 4 / 2024. P. 84- 93, 2024
War poetry, beyond its significant self-descriptive component, aims to capture the memory of events, diverse individuals, and comrades, and convey the truth about the war to the broader public. As a result, realistic narrative often prevails over artistic fiction. Truthfulness, historical accuracy, and the clear prioritization in the fight against Russian aggression transform the narratives of war poetry into a crucial element of information warfare. This study explores the role of precedent phenomena as significant transmitters of historical and collective memory within the war poetry of Ukrainian poet Pavlo Vyshebaba. Through a close analysis of Vyshebaba's work, the article examines how references to notable figures and events function not merely as literary devices but as powerful tools for embedding cultural memory and national identity. This exploration situates Vyshebaba’s poetry within a broader framework of cultural semiotics, demonstrating how historical allusions foster a shared consciousness, reinforce collective resilience, and contribute to the evolving narrative of Ukrainian identity amidst contemporary challenges.
The Ideological Manifestations in War Poetry: A Critical Stylistic Perspective
Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2022
Ideologies can be traced back and extracted through formal aspect of language where the authors’ choices reflect the world view they construct in order to influence their receptors. This study aims at extracting ideologies of war in war poetry relying upon the model of critical stylistics proposed by Leslie Jeffries (2010). The model presents ten textual-conceptual tools of analysis; one of which, ‘negating’, has been adopted as a tool of analysis in this paper to extract the hidden ideologies. The study came to the conclusion that the textual conceptual tool of analysis, negating, as a formal textual aspect guides into manifesting the hidden ideologies of the text producer about war and this is achieved through creating a virtual positive world in receptor’s mind to be juxtaposed with the actual negated world in order to build expectations.
Anti-war Russophone Poetry after Feb. 24, 2022: Reinterpreting Russian History and Culture
2024
Since launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, 2022, Russian authorities have provided several narratives to justify their aggressive actions and war crimes. According to the first, their war is only a response to the actions of the "Nazis"; therefore, the current war is a continuation of the Great Patriotic War in which Russia defeated Hitler. The second asserts the superiority of Russian culture over Ukrainian and explains the attack on Ukraine by the desire to protect the Russian language and culture on Ukrainian territory. Both of these narratives can be categorized as ressentiment, a term coined by Nietzsche that refers to a feeling of hostility towards an individual who is deemed responsible for one's failures or hardships. This reaction involves glorifying an idealized past and vehemently opposing anything associated with the freedom and cultural values of another. Russophone anti-war poetry written after February 24th, both in Russia and abroad, deconstructs these propaganda narratives and offers its own narrative strategy for talking about Russian history, which I term the poetics of "de-ressentiment." This essay analyzes anti-war poems by Russian-speaking poets and identifies the principles and tasks of de-ressentiment in the context of Russia's catastrophic policies. The paper explores how Russian-language anti-war poetry tries to find the right language to discuss the most traumatic topics in Russian history and proposes a total revision of Russian history and culture. This de-ressentiment revision should break free modern Russia's destructive focus on its past that deprives it of any future.
Papers in Literature
The main thesis in the introductory part of the article argues that Tadeusz Borowski’s poems, written from the perspective of a DP camp inmate, involve the claim and show the image of reality after World War II in a grotesque way. The analysis of the selected poems of the post-war order grotesque covers three central issues: the personal feelings of a displaced person whose right to freedom has been taken away in a supposedly free world, the national concerns of Poles and the political situation after 1945. Borowski is shown as the creator of modern poetry, dominated by the grotesque, and he needs it in order to get to the hidden or concealed truth. The grotesque effect is achieved by using heterogeneity of the style, mixing a journalistic style and colloquial and vulgar expressions with highly sophisticated metaphors, mundane matters combined with national symbols and myths, and biologism opposing ideology. Moreover, the effect usually occurs in combination with the poetics of surp...
Review of Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky, editors. Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine
East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies
Book review of Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky, editors. Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine. Introduction by Ilya Kaminsky, afterword by Polina Barskova, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University / Borderlines Foundation for Academic Studies / Academic Studies Press, 2017. Ukrainian Studies, edited by Vitaly Chernetsky. xxvi, 246 pp. Illustrations. Glossary. Geographical Locations and Places of Significance. Notes to Poems. Index. $37.00, cloth.
Slavic Review, 2019
This paper analyses a poem by Osip Mandelstam, his 1932 “To the German Tongue”, as it explores and reveals the tensions and dangers of Soviet discursivity and subjectivity. Tracing its semantic unfolding shaped by ambiguities, nuances, and subtle transitions, and illuminating its evocations of the long-gone cultural past, I approach the poem as a consistent, if meaningfully opaque, reflection on the Soviet experience. Mandelstam built upon and self-consciously enacted theoretically informed conceptions of the lyric, the poetic subject, and poetic language developed in Formalist scholarship and adopted in some of his own critical writing. I argue that in the poem, as well as in the criticism which framed it, these Formalist concepts revealed an undercurrent of political signification, made even more evident in the reflections on Soviet political and aesthetic experience in the memoirist writing of a Lidiia Ginzburg or a Nadezhda Mandelstam.
Writing War, and the Politics of Poetic Conversation
Critical Asian Studies, 2022
The version of record has been published open-access by Critical Asian Studies, at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14672715.2022.2030776 This article's premise is that war is ontological devastation, which opens up questions as to how to write about it. The paper contends that even critiques of war, whether critical-geopolitical analyses of global structures or ethnographies of the everyday, center war in ways that underscore erasures of non-war life, and therefore risk participating in that same ontological devastation. Engagement with extra-academic conversational worlds, both their social lives and their intellectual ones, is ethically necessary in writing war. To that end, this article examines poetic production from one front in the US-led "Global War on Terror": Swat Valley, Pakistan. Poets in Swat have produced an analysis of war as ontological devastation, but also protest their reduction, in the minds of others and themselves, to the violence-stricken present. This intervention is not an intellectual critique alone. Focusing on a new genre of "resistance" poetry, this article shows how poets resist war by maintaining worlds partly beyond it. In this, the critical content and the social lives of poetry are inseparable.
" Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, "-Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind. The literature of war is a literature of paradoxes, the greatest of which is the fact that it comments continuously on its own failure. War writers often lament their incapacity to describe the realities of armed combat, the inexpressible nature of the subject matter, the inadequacy of language, and the inability of their audiences to understand. Tim O'Brien writes of the war he experienced in Vietnam: " There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity. " From ancient Nordic ballads to Masai folk songs or Red Indian sagas, war has always been a predominate theme in literature. Zafon in The Shadow of the Wind portrays a war ravaged Barcelona and comments, " There's something about that period that's epic and tragic " for like the Old English Elegiac poetries, the Arthurian Romances, Gorky's Mother or Tolstoy's War and Peace, the literature of the Great Wars have altered human perception and the very fabrics of literature. However, we witness a distinct line between the literature of both world wars. The Second Great War threatened the humankind like never before. It was a manmade crisis which threw us to the brink of extinction, and thus displaying the futility of human existence. As humanity experienced the terror of the 'absurdity' of reality, the philosophy if 'nothing to be done' surfaced in their consciousness. This paper aims to evaluate the marked change in the form of poetry written in the two Great Wars and how far the Second World War was responsible for the advent of Modernism.