Ukrainian literature – the war simplifies the language

For decades, Ukrainian writers were a group that was neglected in literature history; Not only in the rest of Europe, but also in Ukraine itself. This changed with the Russian attack war on Ukraine, and the wealth and diversity of this European literature is not perceived in the country itself and in other languages. This does not only apply to the contemporary literature: two anthologies are drawn for the extremely productive years between the wars, especially the short phase in which the Soviet central government in Moscow not only tolerated a Ukrainian culture, but even expressly welcomed: an attitude that should later turn into cruel hostility.

How much these troubled times of past and emerging gets the fates of Ukrainian poets shaped, among other things, the anthology “poetry of the damned”. It gathers works by the neoclassics, a small group around Maksym Ryl’s’kyj and Oswald Burghardt, who often published under the name Jurij Klen.

The neo -classics were committed to a beautiful, even enthusiastic European literature, which dreamed of an almost metaphysical poetic distance: Again and again the distant landscapes of Languedoc or the city silhouette of Venice appear, and again and again the ancient Greece shines through the verses. They escaped the crowded narrowness of their own time, except for a few years of war, displacement and prison, through these dreams that were not political but were made political.

When the Bolsheviks under Stalin began to suppress the various national cultures at the end of the twenties, the small circle of neo -classic victims of the state repression: Three died in Siberian Gulags, Oswald Burghardt emigrated to Germany, and only Ryl’s’kyj adapted and densely densely densified songs on Stalin. Their crime was only to see themselves as the Ukrainian representative of a European culture. They almost remained unknown because of that, but in the end Pawlo Fylypowytsch kept right when he wrote: “Death is giving you over and what you love / only your songs sow will bloom and sprout.”

The texts in “A touch of horror and hidden hope” are so interesting today because this is a time saturated by war myths and stories.

Less dreamy, but on the contrary, fully focused on the time of the First World War is the anthology “a touch of horror and hidden hope”. It gathers poems and short stories from this war, which in Ukraine lasted beyond 1918: until 1920 Ukraine was the main area of ​​the Russian civil war and until 1922 there were various uprisings. An estimated ten million victims demanded this war after the war.

This book tells of that, and Iwan Bashanskyi’s diary serves as a guide. Bashanskyi was a teacher in Wawschkiwzi, a village in northern Bukovina. In a sober, reserved, naive prose, he captures how world events keep going over Wawschkiwzi and, like this war, which initially becomes the thoughts and nightmares of everyone, gradually becomes a – albeit horrific – everyday life. Serhij Zadan stated in his essay about the war at the time and today: “You don’t get used to death, but his presence no longer seems so unnatural.”

The book circles this present from different perspectives: it is sorted by topic, it is about captivity, about flight, life in the hinterland, but also about how the modern Ukrainian nation found itself. With all the topicality of many of the texts, it is also a contribution to the revision of a historical picture of the First World War, which is still associated with the position of position at Verdun, Ypres or the Chemin of the Dame. The fact that this war in Eastern Europe looked very different is often nothing more than a footnote even in current overall representations.

A question that arises this book and that is still highly topical today is that: How to write about the war, how about it? Because the war, writes Zadan in his essay, »simplifies the language. The condensed presence of fear and death leads to a simplified language, to a command and poster language «. And that is not just a problem that concerns the production of literature, because: “War also destroys the ability to listen and understand.”

Some of the stories reflect this impoverished compression of the language until the reported events only have the bones left. Walerian Pidmohylnyj describes in “The Third Revolution” the conquest of a city by Nestor Machno’s anarchist partisan army; It is the 14th change of power since the beginning of the war in the city. Ksana comes from the village and has fled to the city, because »in the village where they lived, the fights seemed even more terrible. Her husband had kissed her, and she was still very afraid. At that time she asks: ‘What do we do when Machno comes?’ He laughed and replied: ‘I will cure his fighters.’ Machno had come and shot her husband. At night somewhere behind the village. ”And there is no more to say about this man’s death. The impoverishment of the language follows the impoverishment of sensations. Ksana’s uncle Petrovytsch later tells that he used to love the green living trees so much, but now he loves the dry because they burn better.

The texts in “A touch of horror and hidden hope” are so interesting today because this is a time saturated by war myths and stories. A new warpos, a new heroic story in cinemas and streaming services, appears every week. Even if an attempt is now more common not to keep up a glossy heroism too much, these stories sound completely different from these stories, which drips the struggle for a language and meaning from the lines.

There are-very different from the delicate, escapist-controversial verses of the neoclassics-in the majority of raw, unpolished, insisted texts, in which one on top of that is often missing: hope for normality. This is despite the fact that most of the texts were only published after the end of the civil war when there was a kind of cultural peace in Ukraine for a short time; As if the demons of the war only unfolded their full power after the weapons rested; If after the struggle for the existence, the full extent of the horror would come to light.

Probably also because peace and calm were so fragile. Many of the authors were murdered under Stalin from the end of the twenties, Walerian Pidmohylnyj, for example, was shot in Gulag in 1937, like so many of his colleagues, which founded a completely new, dark school of Ukrainian literature: Rosstriljane Widodschennja, the shot Renaissance, a sad punch line – a new war for re -discovering.

Natalia Kotenko-Vusatiuk / Andrii Portnov (ed.): Poetry of the damned. Arco, 176 p., Br., € 11.99.
Kati Brunner, Claudia Dathe, Beatrix Kersten (HG): A touch of horror and hidden hope. Arco, 544 p., Br., 26 €.