Great historical events inspire great literary works: the Thirty Years' War, Napoleon's campaign and the First World War were the inspiration for Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen' Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus (1668), Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (1867), and Céline's Journey to the End of the Night (1932), to name a few. But none of these masterpieces was written in the heat of the moment. Certainly, there are exceptions, but as a general rule prose needs hindsight. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago (1974) could not have been written in the 1930s-1940s.
The same is not true with poetry. On the contrary, due to its need for an emotional charge, it thrives on immediacy, even if its final elaboration may take some time. Anna Akhmatova's 1940 Requiem, one of the pinnacles of 20th-century Russian poetry, is contemporary to the reality it describes: the terror of Joseph Stalin.
It would be futile to expect a great work of prose on the war in Ukraine today, its time will come. So far, the best novel on the subject is The Orphanage by Ukrainian author Serhiy Jadan. But it deals with earlier events, those in the Donbas in 2015.
But while prose is silent, poetry speaks out. And in these dark times, Russian poetry is back in full force.
Published in Saint Petersburg in 2022 by Ivan Limbach, the untranslated anthology "Poetry of the Last Times" (or "of the Ultimate Times") is a fine example. This over 500-page volume is the work of Yuri Leving, a professor at Princeton University in New Jersey. The texts – covering the first six months of the war, from February to July 2022, and by over 100 authors of different generations (some famous, others unknown) all scattered across the globe – form a chorus of a rare power.
This anthology has its "official" counterpart: the book "Resurrected by the Third World War. Anthology of War Poetry 2014-2022," which was published in 2023 (untranslated). Its 60 or so authors are inspired by the patriotic poetry of the Second World War but fail to reach its level or have the same resonance. Its coordinator is none other than Zakhar Prilepine (born 1975), the notorious champion of Russian ultranationalism, who wields a pen in one hand and a Kalashnikov in the other.
However, it's not in printed pages – however beautiful they may be – that we should look for authentic war poetry: In the time of the terror it circulated by word of mouth and in the post-Stalinist era in samizdat (clandestine copies), but now it proliferates on the internet – social media is in part responsible of its distribution.
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