„Szkoda, że poezja nie zabija”: Przemiany poezji ukraińskiej w obliczu wojny

Ostap Sływynski

doi:10.36744/k.3768

“A Pity that Poetry Does Not Kill”

Transformations in Ukrainian Poetry in the Face of War

Ostap Sływynski

o.slyvynsky@ucu.edu.ua
Ukraiński Uniwersytet Katolicki (Ukraine)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2963-6593

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36744/k.3768

Abstract

Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (2022), Ukrainian poetry has been undergoing changes at various levels – starting with form and vocabulary and ending with ethical issues concerning the attitude of the creator and the tasks that poetry has to perform in a situation of existential threat to the individual and the community. In this essay, I try to diagnose the most important of them, looking at poems by Ukrainian poets written during the first year of the full-scale war, and taking into account the poets’ comments and reflections, expressed in interviews and essays. The most significant of these changes are: a specific ritualization of the poem at the level of theme and form, resulting not only from the return of faith in the “magical power” of language, but also from the awareness of the need for solidarity, unification of the community through culture; reflections on the so-called “martial law” of language, which is characterized by the concretization, demetaphorization, and emphasizing of the “military” meanings of individual words; a reflection on hate speech that permeates not only everyday communication, but also the language of poetry and is treated as something destructive to language, but at the same time inevitable in times of brutal war.

Keywords:

poetry, war, language, ritual

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Published

2024-12-23

Cited by

Sływynski, O. (2024) “‘A Pity that Poetry Does Not Kill’: Transformations in Ukrainian Poetry in the Face of War ”, Konteksty, 346(3), pp. 257–262. doi: 10.36744/k.3768.

Authors

Ostap Sływynski
o.slyvynsky@ucu.edu.ua
Ukraiński Uniwersytet Katolicki Ukraine
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2963-6593

Ostap Sływynski – literaturoznawca i tłumacz, poeta, pracuje w Katedrze Filologii Polskiej na Narodowym Uniwersytecie Lwowskim im. Iwana Franki oraz w Katedrze Filologii na Ukraińskim Uniwersytecie Katolickim. Wizytujący profesor na Uniwersytecie w Greifswald (2013), Uniwersytecie im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu (2021–2022) i Uniwersytecie Śląskim w Katowicach (2020–2022).