Volume 9, numéro 1, 2022 Ukrainian Culture and the War in the Donbas Sous la direction de Mark Andryczyk

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The article considers a range of literary texts about the war in Donbas and argues that one of the primary representational strategies employed by Ukrainian writers has been the use of “parapolemics.” The article operates with Kate McLoughlin’s definition of this term as a focus on the “outskirts” of armed conflict, but also relates the idea to concepts drawn from trauma studies. While, on the one hand, the use of parapolemics may be a way of avoiding direct representation of wartime violence and death, the opportunities it affords are extremely valuable: focusing on the “backstage” of war and eschewing direct representation of violence allows writers to explore otherwise marginalized, and highly complex, dimensions of wartime experience. At the same time, connecting the parapolemic approach to ideas taken from trauma theory, particularly relating to empathy and responsibility, allows us to understand how parapolemics provide a way of reflecting both on the ethics of representing war and the of self-other relationships that arise in wartime.

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This article explores the English translations of contemporary Ukrainian war poetry featured in the two anthologies Lysty z Ukrainy (Letters from Ukraine, 2016) and Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine (2017), through the prism of Jacques Derrida’s concept of “relevant.” It argues that although the economy of the original poems could not always be sustained, these translations nonetheless remain relevant primarily thanks to what they do rather than what they say. After contextualizing the recent (re)emergence of war poems as a genre of Ukrainian literature and providing an overview of the two translation anthologies, the article compares the Ukrainian originals with their English translations and discusses the various translation challenges. It then returns to Derrida’s own case study to extend the modifier “relevant” beyond its “economic” parameters to apply it more broadly to translation’s socio-political significance. It concludes with a discussion of how the two anthologies in question reflect the state of the reception of contemporary Ukrainian literature in the English-speaking world and how the translations they feature inform our understanding of the (un)translatability of poetry.

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When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, the Russian media ran what I propose to call a simulation of “non-invasion”—a spectacle aimed to distance Russia from the war. This essay explores activist art resistance against this simulation. Specifically, I discuss three art projects that were staged during the first, most violent year of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict: Mariia (Maria) Kulikovs'ka’s performance at “Manifesta 10” in St. Petersburg, Serhii Zakharov’s guerrilla installations on the streets of occupied Donetsk, and Izolyatsia’s #onvacation occupation of the Russian pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. These art projects, I argue, not only attacked the simulation from the outside as independent entities, but, by penetrating the simulation on site and online, they disrupted it from within.

I offer three reasons to support this claim. First, these art projects superimposed images of the invasion over the physical sites where the “non-invasion” simulation dwelt and, in this way, not only made the war visible but also produced “a glitch in the matrix” effect—a conflict within the simulation visual regime that was inconsistent with its concealment function. Second, they “hailed” (in Louis Althusser’s terms) actants of the simulation as subjects of Putin’s regime, provoking suppressive reactions that proved Russia’s participation in the war—which the simulation, thus, failed to downplay. And third, with carefully orchestrated strategies of online outreach to the public, these art projects attached themselves to the media dimension of the simulation, making the simulation’s media proliferation work against itself.

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Focusing on Akhtem Seitablaiev’s blockbuster Kiborhy: Heroi ne vmyraiut' (Cyborgs: Heroes Never Die, 2017) and Sergei Loznitsa’s auteur production Donbass (2018), this article argues that the latest cycle of Ukrainian war films merits critical attention as an astute record of conspicuous social transformations in today’s Ukraine and as a medium that presents an original perspective on the hybrid nature of modern war and its mediatization, the latter being a relatively new theme in war films broadly defined. The article uses post-colonial and cyborg theories of hybridity, Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra, and the Marxist notion of “false consciousness” to illustrate how post-Soviet, post-colonial, and post-truth aspects of war-torn Ukraine conflate in Seitablaev’s and Loznitsa’s works to bring to the fore a recent shift in the nature of warfare itself. As the two films unequivocally demonstrate, the latter is defined not so much by high-tech armed operations and direct annihilation of the opponent as by contactless warfare, as well as its consequences for those directly influenced by it.

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With ongoing war in the Donbas, war narratives and war images saturate public media in Ukraine, the discourse contaminated by ideological remnants of the Soviet World War II cult and by fake news. Art that deals with war wounds can subvert the familiar visual language of war propaganda, where the suffering of victims is a mere pretext for touting the inevitable triumph of the heroes. Currently in Ukraine, the most prolific art in this regard is produced by women-artists who address the trauma of war through painting and installations that offer highly personalized accounts. Often touching upon extreme circumstances, their art is about tolerance, both in terms of endurance and of the mutual understanding necessary for cohabitation. Alevtyna (Alevtina) Kakhidze’s ongoing performance creates an opportunity to comprehend the war in the Donbas from multiple perspectives, including that of a gardener. She associates the tending of plants with her mother who died on occupied territory, refusing to leave her garden. Mariia (Maria) Kulikovs'ka’s sculptures serve as shooting targets for separatists in the occupied centre of contemporary art in Donetsk. Vlada Ralko’s paintings of tortured bodies become a metaphor for scars garnered by a war that remains close to home. Paintings and sculptures by Maryna Skuharieva (Skugareva) and Anna Zviahintseva (Zvyagintseva) address the ruin of representation inflicted by war, and the conceptual performance by Liia (Lia) Dostlieva and Andrii Dostliev contemplates the healing process of war wounds. Neither making spectacle from the “pain of others” nor deeming it unrepresentable, this art seeks emphatic alternatives to traditional war narratives.

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This article examines representations of the enemy in the Ukrainian satirical songs pertaining to the Russo-Ukrainian war in the Donbas. I focus primarily on the output of Orest Liutyi (the stage persona of Antin Mukhars'kyi) and the semi-anonymous Mirko Sablich (Mirko Sablic) collective. Using the method of multimodal discourse analysis, I examine how the enemy opposing the Ukrainian Army is portrayed in the song lyrics and the accompanying music videos. Considering the complex nature of the conflict and the lack of uniformity in the backgrounds of the warring parties, I am particularly interested in who and why is identified as the enemy in the songs. The enemy appears in several guises: “moskal's”—Russian or pro-Russian aggressors from outside Ukraine; “separs”—Ukrainian collaborators who support, often through military efforts, the separation of the Donbas from Ukraine; and “vatniks”—passive anti-Ukrainian individuals who live in Ukraine and whose inaction is perceived to be harmful to Ukraine’s wartime efforts. Whereas these songs call upon Ukrainians to repel the external enemy (“moskal's”) in armed combat, no clear strategy is suggested for how the internal enemies (“separs” and “vatniks”) should be dealt with or, in some cases, even identified. As a result, Liutyi and Sablic, while positioning themselves as “counterpropaganda” projects, risk labelling as “the enemy,” and thus alienating, the audiences most susceptible to propaganda, who could otherwise benefit most from their myth-debunking efforts.

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In 1918 Central and Eastern Europe were on the brink of enormous change. The collapse of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires had led to the growth of national self-awareness in many peoples, and the Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, and peoples of the Baltic and Balkan regions declared their nation-statehood. Ukrainians also exercised their right to self-determination, establishing the Western Ukrainian National Republic (Ukr. acronym: ZUNR) on their ethnic territory. The regular military force of the new republic was the Galician Army, with the word “Ukrainian” subsequently added to it (Ukr. acronym: UHA). It immediately commenced armed operations against Polish formations that also aimed to seize power in this territory. However, when establishing their army the Ukrainians encountered serious personnel issues, especially a severe shortage of Ukrainian officers. One means of resolving this problem was to contract military personnel of other nationalities who were citizens of the ZUNR as well as other countries. In some cases actual mercenaries were hired. This article describes where, how, and under what conditions this took place in the UHA.