Julia Nemirovskaya (ed.)

Disbelief

100 Russian Anti-War Poems Poetry selection. Smokestack Books. UK 2022. 198 pages bi-lingual Russian-English, available in full English

Putin’s war in Ukraine has been met by outrage and disbelief around the world. Since the start of the war, writers in Russia, Ukraine and the Russian diaspora have been expressing their opposition to the invasion. An international group of poets and translators have been collecting these poems as the Kopilka project.

DISBELIEF presents 100 of the most moving and hard-hitting of these poems by poets including Polina Barskova, Vladimir Druk, Tatiana Voltskaya, Mikhail Aizenberg and Tatiana Shcherbina.

Julia Nemirovskaya, the editor, in her introduction:
For those in Russia who withstood Putin’s omnipresent propaganda machine and opposed the war the horror also included struggling with a sense of deep personal responsibility for the outrage taking place before their eyes. Russophone poets from everywhere have been ravaged by the sight of their native tongue...
Russophone Ukrainian and diaspora poets, many of them bilingual, who insisted on using the Russian language for their poetry of protest, in order to subvert Putin’s use of Russian in propaganda and state control; as one bilingual poet put it, „I refuse to abandon the language to the Putinites!“

Poetry adds an important dimension to our understanding of the war, exposing its inhumanity and absurdity in a form that is immediately accessible and relatable... Each poem adds its own perspective on the events of this year and turns our experience into something deeper, more subtle, or more macabre than just grief.