From 21st-century trenches, Ukraine’s war poets write acclaimed verse for their times
By day, Yaryna Chornohuz is a Marine paramedic on Ukraine’s eastern front line, where artillery duels have been rumbling with Russian proxy forces since 2014. For sixteen months, even before the full-scale Russian invasion, she has treated shrapnel wounds and arterial bleeding, severed limbs and brain injuries. She sleeps with her unit in an earth trench, or in the remains of broken and abandoned villages. There, on the screen of her mobile phone, with the sound of artillery in the background, she writes poetry.
Her poems are about the loss of friends, the loneliness of being a soldier and the pressure on a woman in fighting units dominated by men. Her intense, introverted verse has won acclaim — her second collection will be published in Ukrainian next year; poems from her first book, How The Military Circle Bends, have been translated into English.
“Poetry is very natural for me — it’s like the way I get some relief,” Chornohuz, 27, says. “I have a feeling, an inspiration, and I think about a poem for a week or two. One evening the text comes to me — it’s a very intimate process.” Across the front lines, Ukrainian soldiers like Chornohuz are doing the same.
For western Europeans, the grim scenes from eastern Ukraine, of frozen trenches cut through a landscape of scorched trees, eerily call to mind images from the Western Front of the First World War. The two conflicts have something else in common: a profusion of war poetry.
The poets of Mariupol and Bakhmut have little else in common with Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke. Much of their work is published in online journals and on Facebook pages, rather than in slim volumes. It ranges from drum-banging nationalistic jingles through lively performance poetry to the kind of poems written by Chornohuz, which are subtle, bleak and personal. “I don’t write with a purpose in mind,” she says in a café in the town of Slovyansk, 25 miles from the front. “I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything, just find some aspects of truth. The language of poetry is a way of saying things that are impossible to say any other way.”
Compared with Russian literature, Ukrainian writers have received scant international recognition but in the past few years, the country’s poetry has enjoyed a modest boom, driven by international concern about the conflict with Russia, after the annexation of Crimea and invasion of the eastern Donbas region in 2014.
Ilya Kaminsky, a deaf poet originally from Odesa who now lives in the United States, has received adulatory reviews for his writing in English, including Deaf Republic. Five years ago, the translators Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky published an anthology, Words for War, most of it about the civilian experience of the war in the east. Since the Russian invasion in February, there is a daily outpouring by poets who are uploading on to Facebook directly from the front lines.
They include Borys Humenyuk, who is taking part in the defence of Bakhmut, the most intensely fought-over town in Donbas. Olena Herasymyuk is another highly regarded female poet, who served as military medic.
Chornohuz’s poetic output is all the more remarkable, given the intensity of her own military life. When the Russian invasion happened, she sent her eight-year-old daughter, Orysia, to live with her ex-husband in the United States. Now she operates drones for her Marine surveillance unit, rigging them up to drop grenades as they spy on the Russian positions. As a paramedic, she rides unarmoured civilian Jeeps to extract dead and injured soldiers from no man’s land, in a team of three that includes her husband, Peter. She lost her previous partner in 2020, when he was killed by a sniper.
During an intense battle outside Mariupol earlier this year, she was ordered to dig a corpse out of the rubble, having been told that it was Peter. “For a few minutes, I thought that he was dead,” she says. “Then I saw that it’s not him, it was another officer. That was the hardest experience. My husband and I live with the risk that one day we could witness the death of the other — it’s a terrible feeling, by the way. But otherwise, we’d be in different units. I could be killed, he could be killed, and the body could be lost. It’s easier to survive one another when you are a witness than to know nothing about what happened.”
Poetry has been used by both sides in the war for propaganda purposes but, according to Maksymchuk, the anthology editor and a poet herself, the best Ukrainian writing on the war is indirect and ambiguous. “There are lots of unsubtle poems that serve as propaganda or a call to action,” she says. “When you write in a black and white way, you’re not inventing — you’re relying on slogans.”
Some of the best poems by Humenyuk, are about the effect of the war not on humans, but on nature. In one, he describes the way that different kinds of bird peck at the bodies of dead soldiers on the battlefield, including the seagulls that carry off fragments of fingers and flesh and drop them from above.
As a volunteer fighting on the front line, Chornohuz is patriotic Ukrainian, but her poems are striking for their frank pessimism. “The artistic value of a text suffers/when using words about victory,” runs one verse. “In this country everything is a lie/except pain.”
“I’m envious of Ukrainian poets who can write optimistically,” she says. “After this long on the front line, exchanging one trench, one abandoned house for another, for a year and a half, seeing guys dying in my hands, I have no idea after that how I write something optimistic. There’s no sense in writing poetry if you’re lying.
“People write patriotic odes to Ukraine, but they’re not valuable artistically,” she says. “I don’t need to write about the greatness of Ukraine. I can write about what I feel when I fight for Ukraine and that will say a lot more.”
