Abstract
Since launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, 2022, Russian authorities have provided several narratives to justify their aggressive actions and war crimes. According to the first, their war is only a response to the actions of the “Nazis”; therefore, the current war is a continuation of the Great Patriotic War in which Russia defeated Hitler. The second asserts the superiority of Russian culture over Ukrainian and explains the attack on Ukraine by the desire to protect the Russian language and culture on Ukrainian territory. Both of these narratives can be categorized as ressentiment, a term coined by Nietzsche that refers to a feeling of hostility towards an individual who is deemed responsible for one’s failures or hardships. This reaction involves glorifying an idealized past and vehemently opposing anything associated with the freedom and cultural values of another. Russophone anti-war poetry written after February 24th, both in Russia and abroad, deconstructs these propaganda narratives and offers its own narrative strategy for talking about Russian history, which I term the poetics of “de-ressentiment.” This essay analyzes anti-war poems by Russian-speaking poets and identifies the principles and tasks of de-ressentiment in the context of Russia’s catastrophic policies. The paper explores how Russian-language anti-war poetry tries to find the right language to discuss the most traumatic topics in Russian history and proposes a total revision of Russian history and culture. This de-ressentiment revision should break free modern Russia’s destructive focus on its past that deprives it of any future.
Introduction
On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, escalating the war against the Ukrainian people that started in 2014. On the same day, Roman Leibov, a Russian-Estonian literary critic, writer, and poet, wrote the poem “Anatomy of Ressentiment.”1 In this literary work, Leibov presents a progression of various destructive narratives linked to Russian history during the 20th century, with a particular focus on the narrative surrounding the Stalinist period of Russian history as the time of order and prosperity that is, a mythological construction that should supplant the facts about the millions of victims of Stalinist repressions. The author argues that utilizing this narrative in present-day political rhetoric is a significant factor in the country’s aggressive and belligerent conduct towards human rights, freedom, independence of individuals and LGBT groups, as well as freedom of speech and opinion. The poem ends tragically, predicting a return to life “as under Stalin.”2
The post-collapse era of the Soviet Union witnessed the propagation of various myths, including the notion of Stalin as a harsh but efficient manager, and the belief that the Brezhnev era was a period of stability. These myths, together with the widespread poverty and economic turmoil that Russia experienced in the 1990s, contributed significantly to the emergence of a pervasive sense of ressentiment within the Russian government’s power structures and a significant portion of Russian society.
Under Putin’s 23-year reign, Russia has transformed into a totalitarian state.3 During this time, another Stalinist myth has gained renewed strength and influence on society. According to this myth, Russia was the sole power that defeated Nazi Germany in World War II and saved the whole world from the evil of Nazism by sacrificing millions of its citizens, a fact that is unquestionably true. The world, and especially Europe and the United States, have remained ungrateful to Russia and are constantly betraying Russia by trying to appropriate this victory for themselves, while simultaneously, during the Cold War and after the collapse of the USSR, seeking to weaken, humiliate, and ultimately destroy Russia – their only geopolitical rival in the struggle for power in the post-Soviet space. By making this narrative a part of the ideological program of the Russian government, Russian propaganda seeks to present Putin as a heroic figure who stood up against the “empire of lies”4 and prevented Western forces from destroying Russia. When Putin announced the decision to launch a “special military operation” against Ukraine – a euphemism invented by the Russian authorities to replace the word “war” – the leader justified it by saying that he was responding to the threat posed by Western countries and NATO. Putin claimed that this was an act of “self-defence” against the threats created by their former allies from World War II. According to Putin, the goal of the West is to use Ukraine to “squeeze us, finish off and destroy us completely”.5
Poetry, being the most responsive form of literature, quickly reacted to the disaster that was initiated by Putin. In the initial days of the war, anti-war poems started surfacing on social media platforms, particularly on Facebook.6 Following a period of direct appeal to the readers on social networks, authors and publishers united to publish collections of poems and journals that declared the anti-war and pro-humanistic stance of Russian-language poetry. Thus, since February 24, poetry has become the dominant literary genre for directly expressing and documenting the unfolding catastrophe.
In contrast, fiction related to the war in Ukraine is currently represented in small numbers, likely due to the requirement of more prominent detachment from the event and more time to create and publish. However, despite the limited representation of prose, notable texts have emerged. For example, the novel “Bobo”7 by Russian-Israeli writer Linor Goralik tells the story of an elephant named Bobo and his journey across Russia to meet its leader, who is waging war with Ukraine. Another example is the story “The Demon’s Lawyer”8 by Boris Akunin, in which the writer’s alter ego undertakes to become a lawyer and public defender at the trial of the ideologist of the war in Ukraine, Vladimir Surkov, and ultimately becomes the puppet of a former Putin functionary in regaining power.
Undoubtedly, fiction related to the Ukrainian war in Russian will be presented in more significant quantities shortly. In this regard, an analysis of Russian anti-war prose remains to be done in the future. However, in this essay, I will focus on poetry as a significant aspect of the literary response to the war in Ukraine by Russophone poets.
At the same time, it is important to emphasize that today, there are two directions in Russian poetry, and only one of them is anti-war. The second is pro-regime Russian poetry, also known as Z-poetry (named after the Latin letter Z,9 which symbolizes Russian aggression towards Ukraine). The principal authors of this literature are Zakhar Prilepin, Alexander Prokhanov, Maria Vatutina, Anna Dolgareva and others. In October 2022, a collection of so-called Z-poetry “The Poetry of Russian Summer”10 was published in Russia, which brought together many pro-government authors under one cover. The major mouthpiece of Russian propaganda, The Russia Today TV channel, first handled the collection distribution, after which it began to be sent to users free of charge through the Russian government services website Gosuslugi. In December 2022, an anthology of poetry compiled by Zakhar Prilepin entitled “Resurrected in the Third World War” was published in St. Petersburg and, as it is said in the annotation, should bring “a real Russian Word” that will “inspire” Russians “to new acts of bravery.”11 Poets-propagandists in their works have enthusiastically adopted anti-Ukrainian sentiments and Putin’s rhetoric regarding Russia’s animosity towards the Western world and Russia’s willingness to exact brutal, violent retribution upon Ukraine and the “collective West,” whom Russian propaganda views as the “successors” of Nazism, the regime that was vanquished by their motherland.
Not propaganda Russian-language poetry, whose geography expanded after February 24 because many Russian writers, poets, editors and critics who disagreed with Putin’s barbaric policies decided to leave Russia, took a firm stance against the war, expressing support for Ukraine. These writers and poets attempt to re-evaluate and re-think the previously mentioned turning points of Russian history, such as the Stalin era and the USSR’s triumph in World War II, which have formed the basis of the mythological discourse of Russian authorities. In their texts, they often deconstruct these myths and propose a new narrative strategy for understanding Russian history and culture, which I will call de-ressentiment.
This essay offers a critical analysis of how ressentiment has transformed in post-Soviet Russia, leading to the current state of destruction in the country. It also provides a summary overview of the key journals, books, websites, publishing houses, and media that have become platforms for anti-war Russian-language poetry. Furthermore, this study aims to identify the historical events and associated ideologies that are being rethought in anti-war Russian-language poetry after February 24, 2022, and, as a result, have formed a discourse of de-ressentiment. It is important to note that this article does not analyze the official pro-government Russian poetry. The examination of these very often anti-humanistic texts requires a separate and more detailed investigation of the war narratives that Russian media and authorities use. In light of these considerations, this essay sheds light on the current state of anti-war Russian poetry and its desire to find a language to reinterpret the most traumatic topics in Russian history.
1 From Aphasia to Ressentiment
In 2009, Sergei Ushakin, in his article “Used: The Post-Soviet State as a Form of Aphasia,”12 argued that in the 1990s, Russian society found itself in a state of “new closedness” due to several internal and foreign policy reasons. This led to several symbolic shifts, the most significant of which was the loss of familiar reference points for Soviet people after the collapse of the USSR. Consequently, the society experienced disintegration of speech, with a lack of symbolic forms that could adequately express the essence of the current situation. Due to the absence of generalizing mental “maps” that could suggest a vector of historical and political development, there was an exaggerated fixation on the past and an increased use of ready-made symbolic structures from Russian history. These symbols were familiar to the audience and thus became objects of secondary recycling, in the absence of adequate signs that accurately reflected the post-Soviet situation and new non-Soviet experience. Ushakin likened this regression to the cultural forms of the past, so prevalent in post-Soviet Russia, to the process of linguistic aphasia, which is a type of symbolic production that exists through the exploitation of symbolic forms from the past.
Aphasia, a prevalent speech disorder commonly associated with brain damage,13 has been a topic of extensive research since the latter half of the 19th century. While it is widely acknowledged that physiological factors cause this condition, there are also non-physiological approaches to understanding aphasia that have been explored in a number of studies. Henry Head, an English neurologist, proposed one of the prominent theories of aphasia. He associates this speech disorder with a violation of symbolic formulation, thinking, and expression. Head’s theory has been developed further by the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, who, in the third volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, wrote that the theory of aphasia indicated a direction that leads “toward the general problem of the symbol” and to the problem of individual perception and consciousness.14
Roman Jakobson, a linguist, proposed a non-physiological approach to aphasia in the 1940s, which focused on the complex relationship between an individual’s ability to speak and the society’s provision of a historically specific repertoire of discursive actions. Jakobson argued that aphasia can be understood in a structural sense as comprising two interrelated processes: the disintegration of speech and the regression of speech to earlier symbolic forms.15
Following a long-established tradition of phenomenological and structural analysis, Ushakin, in his paper, used the concept of aphasia to interpret the “pathology” of the “symbolic” and “verbal consciousness”. He argued that aphasia is a phenomenon where discursive losses are combined with discursive compensations. Ushakin showed that in the 1990s and early 2000s, Russian society, which was experiencing a loss of relevant ways of describing reality, had to resort to rhetorical techniques and the active use of symbolic products of the past. This attachment to the symbolic structures of the past turned into “a form of sustainable cultural production”.16 One prominent example of such production was the nationwide popularity of the television show “Old Songs About the Main Thing,” where Russian pop artists performed popular Soviet songs on New Year’s Eve. At the same time, Ushakin emphasized that revisiting the discourses of the Soviet era did not mean a return to the ideological rhetoric of that time. Rather, this act of regression signified the insufficiency of existing modes of expression to achieve the desired social or communicative outcome.
The method of de-contextualizing the past and re-contextualizing the present allowed, during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, to create the effect of recognition in a state of disorientation to revive a sense of symbolic order and predictability. However, with Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in the early 2000s and the shift in Russia’s foreign and domestic policies away from democracy, the appropriation of symbols of Russia’s Soviet and imperial past took on a different meaning, becoming a form of ressentiment.
Ressentiment, a term first introduced by Friedrich Nietzsche in his book “On the Genealogy of Morality” (1887), refers to a feeling of deep-seated vengefulness. This emotion arises when one feels powerless to act upon a situation that has caused them suffering, either by changing it or letting it go. As a result, it projects a postponed and imaginary revenge that both obfuscates the original trauma and internalizes it in the form of ongoing suffering.17 According to Gilles Deleuze’s concise definition, ressentiment represents a reaction that “ceases to be acted in order to become something felt”.18 This phenomenon occurs when the traces of previous impressions replace new external stimuli or become indiscernible from them. Nietzsche calls such individuals “the man of ressentiment” as they are incapable of forgetting and constantly reliving the passions of the past, thus sacrificing their future.19 These individuals are incapable of affirming their position in the world, and so their resentment legitimizes and compounds itself by negating and blaming the hostile world they depend on.
Max Scheler, who developed Nietzsche’s concept, wrote that ressentiment can have a more profound impact when it goes beyond specific hostilities – when it does not lead to a falsification of the worldview but perverts the sense of values itself. In this new phase, the “man of ressentiment” no longer turns away from the positive values, nor does he wish to destroy those who possess them. “Now, the values themselves are inverted: those that are positive to any normal feeling become negative”.20 Lacan, viewing ressentiment in a psychological context, associated the term with aggression proper to envy; ultimately “the man of ressentiment” becomes dependent on it in his actions.21
An analysis of Putin’s tenure can reveal a multitude of social, political, and cultural discourses that have arisen from a sense of ressentiment. In the following paragraphs, I will list some of these discourses that will be helpful for examining Russian-language anti-war poetry and its perspective on Russian history.
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According to Putin, NATO’s expansion to the east was the first insult that Russia had to endure. During the 1990s, Western partners had promised that such an expansion would not take place, but they ended up deceiving Russia. Putin believes that the West does not respect Russia and dreams of its weakness. In response to the aggression of the West, Putin has emphasized the need for a “strong” Russia based “traditional (read patriarchal) values”, and the restriction of democratic freedoms, in his opinion, is a response to the “aggression” of the West.
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As I noted earlier, Max Scheler wrote that ressentiment is capable of generating its own value system – as opposed to the dominant one: what “they” consider justice, “we” will consider injustice; that “they” think is freedom, then “we” are oppression; that “they” consider as morality, then “we” are debauchery, et cetera. Putin and his associates regularly speak out against gender and other freedoms, considering them “imposed” by Western civilization; the aggressive war against Ukraine they called “liberation”, and for the word “peace” or calls for peace, the Russian police throw anti-war protesters to prison, considering that word “piece” “discriminates against a special military operation.”
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On the eve of May 9, 2012, stickers with the words “We can repeat it” appeared on cars in Russia. The slogan reflected the feeling of hostility that Russia feels toward itself from Western Europe and the United States, but at any moment, the country can “rise from its knees” and “repeat” the victory over Nazi Germany, that is, over any enemy of Russia. The explosion in popularity of the sticker with that inscription occurred in the spring of 2014, against the backdrop of the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas.22 That this is exactly what the supporters of the slogan are eager to “repeat” is clear from the sticker itself. In addition to the inscription, it depicts rape (a man with a hammer and sickle instead of a head rapes a man with a swastika), an act of unconditional superiority, aggression and possession.
Thus, in the 1990s, the use of signs and symbols to compensate for speech was a passive expression. However, in the 2000s, along with the gradual turn of the country towards dictatorship, it became a more active social and political act aimed at restoring the ressentiment myth of a “strong and independent Russia” that was lost due to the machinations of “enemies” at the end of the Cold War. What in the 1990s began as the exploitation of images of the past to compensate for the lack of significant images in the present, in the 2000s, developed into the use of symbols of the past to actively express aggression against reality. These symbols became emblems of revenge and took on the form of narratives of ressentiment and promises of revenge for violated pride. While in the 1990s, debates about the future were still present in socio-political rhetoric even with the symbolization of the past, under Putin, especially after 2014, the past replaced the present. Russian society found itself living in the Great Patriotic War, waging an endless struggle against the “haters of Russia”. This conflict is ceaseless due to the never-ending sense of humiliation that fuels ressentiment. It is impossible to fully compensate for this feeling, as a complete resolution would signal the arrival of the future, and the future, in the logic of ressentiment, should not come since it will bring with it the loss of the meaning of life for the “man of ressentiment.” Instead of “Old Songs About the Main Thing”, offering the Russian viewer words and images to fill the void created after the collapse of the USSR, Russian propaganda on television and on the Internet today calls (and the Russian government forces) to pick up a machine gun and go, like “your grandfathers” once did, fight the new “Nazis”.
Aphasia as a speech dysfunction, expressed in the inability to find adequate words to describe reality in the 1990s, was symbolically reflected in the case of the Russian anthem. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the melody of Mikhail Glinka’s “Patriotic Song” (1838) became the anthem of the Russian Federation. However, the anthem was performed without any words as no generally accepted text for the “Patriotic Song” existed. A competition was announced to create a text that all Russian citizens could accept, but not a single text was officially adopted. When Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, became the President of Russia in 2000, he suggested using the Soviet anthem that was adopted during Stalin’s regime but with a new text. The new text largely repeats the old one, as it was written by Sergei Mikhalkov, a poet who was favored by the Soviet regime and wrote the text for the Anthem of the USSR. This moment in modern Russian history can be considered the beginning of the transition from aphasia to ressentiment. The feeling, which could not find words, and wandering between the signs and symbols of the past eventually acquired a verbal-ideological mechanism directly related to the era of Stalin, whose time for the majority of Russian citizens is associated not so much with mass repressions or deportations of ethnic minorities, but with the victory in the Great Patriotic War.23 Over time, Putin and his associates have amplified this mechanism, turning it into the driving force behind their rhetoric of ressentiment. In 2020, Putin articulated his view of ressentiment towards history in an essay that claimed victory in the Great Patriotic War granted Russia, the Soviet heir, the moral right to global greatness, despite perceived Western animosity aiming to diminish it.24
Moving on to the review and analysis of Russian-language anti-war poetry produced after February 24, 2022, it is essential to summarize two objects of ressentiment, which, as I will demonstrate later, play a crucial role in shaping the poetics of de-ressentiment among Russophone anti-war poets.
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The main object of ressentiment in Russia is Victory Day. The collective hero of May 9 in Russia is the victorious people, that is, a kind of “collective body” to which belong, mainly not war veterans, but their heirs. The Day of Victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 under Putin turned into the Day of Victory over enemies in general – of course, also not specifically historical, “but as eternal and metaphysical as the Victory itself”.25 As Sergei Medvedev noted, “the entire modern Russian identity is built on the ideologeme of victory over Nazism”.26 Consequently, any new victory is a continuation of that one, and any new enemy is another incarnation of that former enemy. As a result, Russia has declared the “denazification” of Ukraine as one of the goals of the war, which is entirely unrelated to reality.
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Another essential object of ressentiment is Russian culture, or rather an artificial construct of “Great Russian culture” utilized by Russian nationalists and Putin’s clique to justify its exclusivity, claiming the right to impose its values, language, and worldview on others, while simultaneously privileging the use of force over respecting other cultures, languages, and traditions. This approach perceives anything different as a threat that must be replaced by a familiar cultural code. The ideologists behind Russia’s attack on Ukraine frame it as a necessary measure to safeguard the “Great Russian culture” and its values, which they contend are under threat. Hence, Russia’s attitude towards Ukraine as a careless “younger brother” who needs to be “taught a lesson”. Any resistance from Ukraine is perceived not only as a political act but also as a cultural one, a rebellion against Russian culture and its sacred symbols, such as Aleksander Pushkin. Putin’s government, writes Anna Narinskaya, appropriates Russian literature, “often making it to justify its crimes, “pulling” dead writers to its side who are unable to resist it from beyond the grave.”27
In the upcoming chapters, it will be demonstrated that the discussion of de-ressentiment in Russophone anti-war poetry revolves around the subjects of Victory Day and “Great Russian culture” along with its prominent figures. To better understand the texts that offer a de-ressentiment perspective on these subjects, it is necessary to have a brief overview of the different platforms established after February 24 for publishing Russophone literature that opposes war.
2 Geographical and Virtual Spaces of Russian-Language Anti-war Poetry
2.1 Journals and Online Projects
In April 2022, Linor Goralik, an Israeli writer, poet, and translator who wrote in Russian and Hebrew, launched an online journal named ROAR (Russian Oppositional Arts Review). The journal is published every two months and aims to introduce its readers to the contemporary Russian language culture, including poetry, fiction, music and art. ROAR opposes “servile official [Russian] culture, which in extremes merges with the blatant propaganda serving the current criminal political regime in Russia”.28 In the initial issues of the journal, only Russian-language short prose and poetry were published. However, in the sixth edition of the project, Vlad Petrenko’s poem “Congo” was published in Ukrainian. As the publication expanded to include more languages, Goralik renamed the journal “Resistance and Opposition Arts Review” by removing the word “Russian” from its title. Since April 2022 and at the moment of writing this paper, ten issues of the journal have been published, in which the works of known Russian-speaking authors living both in Russia and abroad: Andrei Rodionov, Anna Russ, Alexander Barash, Polina Barskova and others.
The bilingual (English/Russian) project “EBB/
The project “r\a\z\n\i\ts\y” (“Differences”) arose at the end of July 2022 and publishes Russian-language poetry, short prose and non-fiction. The journal’s editor-in-chief is Russian-language writer Igor Tibman, who left Russia in 2022. The journal’s slogan: “without censorship and without a homeland”, emphasizes its two main policies: a) the texts published in it are not subject to any censorship; b) the journal accepts texts from authors writing in Russian, regardless of location. The creator of the journal notes that after Russia attacked Ukraine, Russian culture discredited itself, and the Russian language turned into “a raving lunatic, instantly deprived of legitimacy”, which is hated by “the cultures of the former colonies.”31 However, Tibman believes the tragedy that occurred is not the fault of the Russian language since “the language does not choose whose instrument of enslavement it will be, it is just a language like all other languages, even if it was used by the colonialists.”32
In 2022, the founders of the New York-based KRiK Publishing House, writer, poet and journalist Gennady Katsov, who emigrated to the United States in 1989, and his wife, a publisher Rika Katsova, created the online poetry project “No War: Poets Against War”. The project provides a platform for poets who “share a common hatred of war”.33 Many Russian-speaking poets, including Lena Berson, Katya Kapovich, Vadim Zhuk, and Semyon Kraitman, have contributed to the project.
“The Fifth Wave” journal was launched in Amsterdam in the spring of 2023. Its editor-in-chief, Maxim Osipov, is a cardiologist, writer, playwright, and translator who had to emigrate from Russia first to Germany and then to the Netherlands after February 24, 2022. The first issue of the journal explains that the title refers to the fifth wave of emigration from the country caused by disasters in the last hundred years.34 The journal publishes prose, poetry and essays by Russian-speaking authors who are united by “nonacceptance of war and totalitarianism, love of Russian culture as part of European culture, a sense of personal involvement, responsibility for what is happening, the desire to see Russia as a free, peace-loving country, no matter how unrealistic this desire may seem right now.”35
Finally, an independent artistic and analytical journal “Discourse”, in March of 2023, published “Poems Against Violence: An Anthology of Anti- authoritarian Poetry from Pushkin to Foreign Agents”36 on its website. The collection includes works from modern as well as classic authors such as Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Tyutchev, Marina Tsvetaeva, Maximilian Voloshin, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and others. The anthology also features poems from agents of unofficial Russian-language literature like Kirill Shirokov, Tatyana Voltskaya, German Lukomnikov, Dmitry Bykov, Vera Pavlova, and others. The preface to the anthology states that authors who have produced anti-authoritarian and anti-war works have been subjected to repression, exile, and execution throughout the history of the country. The collection aims to bring together “uncensored poems against violence and autocracy – from Pushkin to today’s foreign agent poets” and “to support everyone who is not afraid to speak the truth.”37
2.2 Books and Poetry Collections
In June 2022, the Israeli publishing house of the Babel bookstore (Tel Aviv) published a poetry collection “Witnesses and Beholders”. It includes poems written by Russian-speaking poets in the first fifty days of the war unleashed by Russia against Ukraine. Among the collection’s authors are Linor Goralik, Roman Leibov, Vsevolod Emelin, Alexander Kabanov, Maria Stepanova, Alexander Delfinov and Alexey Tsvetkov, who died in May 2022. The title of the collection was inspired by the final line of a poem by Lena Berson, a Russian-Israeli poet. The anthology seeks to overcome “the paralyzing numbness and express their different voices, which are filled with indignation, curses, pain, and irony. These voices come together like an angry ancient chorus, accusing and providing evidence for the coming trial”.38
At the same time, in Germany, the anthology “War. Poems 02.24.2022–05.24. 2022” were compiled and published by writer and translator Lyubov Machina. Over a hundred authors from Russia, Ukraine and other countries, writing in Russian, contributed to the collection.
In July 2022, a collection of poetry and prose, “Let Us Live! Writers are Against War”, was published in Israel. The book’s compiler is Alexander Binshtein, a poet born in Nizhny Novgorod who emigrated to Israel in 2001. The authors of the collection, as stated in the annotation, are Russian-speaking Israelis who are not indifferent to the tragedy of the war in Ukraine. The poems, stories, and essays in the book were written at different times, some during the escalation of the conflict in Donbas and others after Russia’s full-scale attack on Ukraine.
In the winter of 2022, the “Poetry of Last Times” collection was published in St. Petersburg, compiled by literary critic and Princeton University professor Yuri Leving. This collection, which included poems by 126 authors, became the only anti-war collection of poetry published in Russia since the beginning of the war. The poems, written from February to July 2022, chronicle the collective trauma of war through artistic expression. For this reason, the poems are arranged not by author but by the date they were written. In the preface to the collection, Yuri Leving states, “Russian poetry, since the time of Pushkin, has learned to maneuver between the Scylla of censorship and the Charybdis of the Secret police. There have been eras in the history of Russia when such a skill helped to escape from poverty and even from prison. I want to believe that the time of Aesopian language has not yet returned, and an artistic expression, no matter how sharp it may seem, has the right to an “immunity contract” that belongs by right to the traditions of Russian literature.”39
To summarize, media platforms for anti-war Russian poetry have several distinct features. Firstly, most of these platforms are located outside Russia due to the country’s laws that actively persecute individuals with anti-war views. The isolation from the literary metropolis is not a new experience for Russian literature throughout history. However, in the current situation, this separation is often translated in a much more radical and non-conformist manner. Some poets, trying to comprehend themselves in a situation of forced exile, even question their right to write in Russian, as we will see in the following chapters. Secondly, the editors of these platforms emphasize that the poetry they publish is in search of a new language. Some refer to it as post-imperial or post-colonial, while others highlight its anti-militarist and anti-totalitarian nature. Although these are quite different terms, they all reflect the de-ressentimental nature of the search carried out by Russophone anti-war poetry.
3 Victory Day: the Day of Defeat
Victory Day over Nazi Germany, celebrated in Russia on May 9, under the Putin regime, has become not a day of remembrance of the fallen soldiers or honoring veterans but a cult of glorifying war and archaic military traditions embodied in the Victory Parade. During the initial year of Putin’s leadership, the May 9, 2000 Parade was replete with emblems of Soviet militarism, indicating that Russia’s memory politics was poised to revert to the Stalinist myth of the Great Patriotic War, which spearheaded the quest for a new Russian ideology.40 In 2005, Putin hosted one of the largest parades the world had ever seen and was joined on Red Square by the highest ranks of world leaders, including George W. Bush and Tony Blair. In 2008, three months before Russia attacked Georgia, during the parade, heavy military equipment was used on Red Square for the first time in modern Russian history. This event symbolized the rise of ideas of ressentiment and the desire for violence, which was an attempt to compensate for the feeling of defeat after the collapse of the USSR. Describing his attendance at a parade to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of Victory Day, the pro-Kremlin writer and Russian far-right nationalist Aleksandr Prokhanov articulated the ressentimental nature of May 9 in Putin’s Russia: “we are […] celebrating the Victory over the dark and seemingly hopeless days of the 1990s. The Russian state has prevailed over the defeat [symbolized by] perestroika and the powerlessness of the 1990s. It has once more raised itself up to its full size and irrepressible height”.41
In anti-war Russian-language poetry, the theme of Victory Day becomes one of the central ones for critical reflection. One of the most famous poems that de-ressentimizes Putin’s cult of Victory is that of Russian theatre director and poet Evgenia Berkovich. Her poem, “He’s overdosed on the news”, was first published on Facebook in May 2022 and later printed in Leving’s “The Poetry of Last Times”. The poem became viral on the internet, particularly among Russians who were against the war in Ukraine. One year after Berkovich had published the poem, Russian authorities arrested her on charges of “justifying terrorism” due to the play “Finist, the brave Falcon” that she staged. It is evident that Berkovich’s anti-war views were a significant factor in her arrest.42
In “He’s overdosed on the news” a grandfather, the veteran of the Great Patriotic War, asks his grandson not to write about him in social media in the context of the war in Ukraine and, most importantly, not to associate “any victories” with his name. Furthermore, he requests that his portrait not be taken to the Victory Parade. All he and other veterans want is long-awaited peace:
In reference to the poem, Berkovich pointed out that the cult of victory arose due to the absence of real remembrance of the war. The Stalinist myth first replaced this, and under Putin’s regime, it became a holiday of ressentiment.43 Berkovich’s poem is an appeal to refrain from exploiting the past and stop using it as a justification for committing atrocities.
Anna Halberstadt, a Russian-speaking poet and translator from Russian, Lithuanian and English residing in New York, wrote a poem describing the Russian invaders in Ukraine as individuals who proudly see themselves as “the successors of those/Who entered Berlin in 1945/And raised the Soviet flag/With the colors of fresh blood over the Reichstag.”44 The poem “Pink Ponies and Sofa Troops” by Elena Fanailova, a Russian poet, journalist, and critic, also recounts the moment when the Soviet flag was raised over the Reichstag as a sign of victory over the Germans in 1945. According to Fanailova, Victory Day has become a day of defeat for modern Russia due to the ressentiment that has taken over the country. She expresses this idea through a sarcastic reference to the memes used by Russians to express their feelings of ressentiment, the most influential and evident of which is “We can repeat it.” In her poem, Fanailova portrays the progression of ressentiment, starting from a desire to seek revenge on the world for the events of the 1990s culminates in a readiness to taint even Paradise with loathing. The characters in the poem are full of resentment and humiliation, which they transform into hatred, holding a kolovrat, a symbol similar to the swastika, as they demand satisfaction not only from the world but also from God. The poem effectively demonstrates the dynamics of ressentiment and how it can lead to extreme actions. “There is passion on the sofa, no matter how you lie on it/ We can repeat it, they wrote, Stalin’s Gulag/ And over the Reichstag we will raise our Soviet flag/ Our Slavic Kolovrat at God’s Gates”.45
Russian poet and literary critic Alexandra Tsibulya, in her diary-like poem, describes St. Petersburg on May 9, 2022, as a city full of militaristic symbols. At some point, the decoration built for Victory Day falls, revealing the emptiness behind it. Tsibulya considers Victory Day as nothing more than a myth in Roland Barthes’s terms, that is, an empty form that the Russian authorities filled with the desire for violence and coercion: “Every piece of the air wants / To have power over me.”46
Russian poet, journalist and literary critic Tatyana Voltskaya often addresses the theme of Victory Day and the Great Patriotic War in her anti-war works. One of her poems, “Fascists are shooting at Kharkiv,”47 expresses the shock she experienced when she realized that her compatriots were destroying Ukrainian cities, similar to the Nazis during World War II, driven by a sense of ressentiment. In another piece, Voltskaya writes, “The unjust war / It devalued her grandfather’s medals”.48 In other words, with its act of aggression against Ukraine, the Kremlin made Victory Day meaningless; the day that was for the poet a day of remembrance of the fallen was branded with shame. Like the character of Berkovich’s poem, Voltskaya hears the voice of her grandfather:
Russian actor, screenwriter and poet Vadim Zhuk, in his poem “An Old Soldier’s Song”, stylized after the Russian folk song “Soldiers, Brave Guys”, where soldiers answer questions posed to them. In Zhuk’s poem, the soldiers are asked about their grandfathers: “Soldiers, brave guys, / Where are your grandfathers?”.50 The answer given is a cannibalistic one: “Our grandfathers are lunch for the Kremlin,/ This is where our grandfathers are”.51 This response reflects the harsh reality in Russia where Victory Day has become the event of symbolic sacrifice. The Kremlin hypocritically appeals to the “grandfathers” who fought in World War II while sacrificing their descendants for the sake of ressentiment and criminal, greedy ambitions. In another poem, Zhuk moves from a symbol of ritual sacrifice to a picture of the apocalypse, where May 9 is the day of the end of the world. Vladimir Putin, portrayed as another horseman of the apocalypse, is looking forward to this day:
The artist, musician, and philosopher from St. Petersburg Maxim Evstropov, in his poem “Over the Corpses,” describes Putin as a man who has unearthed the corpse of history and now uses it as a shield to carry out his aggression against a neighboring country and its people.
Unwilling to bury the past, Putin’s ideology, in its perversity, sees victory in World War II as a variation of the Stalinist myth of Russia as the messianic savior of the world from the Nazis. In this sense, modern Russia can be said to exist in what Walter Benjamin referred to as “messianism” where the past and future is transformed into an “instantaneous present.”54 The poetics of the works of the poets mentioned in this chapter are aimed at overcoming this indistinguishability of past and present to bring order to the chaos created by Putin. Chaos and indistinguishability are the main allies of the Russian leader in hiding in them the significant facts about the Second World War, for example, the death of 27 million Soviet citizens, and instead offering a heroic myth with the cult of death for the motherland.
Anti-war poetry brings language to expose this myth, demonstrating its toxicity and destructiveness. Its language is a manifestation of signs of de-ressentiment, where all that Russia “can repeat” is the Gulag. As Nietzsche argued, ressentiment is a result from an impotence to react, to either change or forget the cause of one’s suffering.55 That is why the central trope of the poems given in this chapter is the burial of war veterans and the request to be forgotten as a symbol of the need to separate the past from the present, death from life. In this optics, to forget does not mean to stop remembering, but to stop using and “raising from the dead” those who gave their lives for Victory. The alternative to this is to turn the Great Patriotic War into Moloch, which would compel Russia to commit crimes in Ukraine.
4 Pushkin and (Great) Russian Culture
Alexander Pushkin is widely recognized as one of the most significant cultural icons in Russian literature and history. In 1859, the Russian poet and literary critic with nationalist views, Apollon Grigoriev, wrote in the article “A Look at Russian Literature after the Death of Pushkin” the phrase that became famous – “Pushkin is our everything.” Grigoriev regarded Pushkin as the embodiment of all that is original and unique in the Russian people, which sets their consciousness and way of life apart from that of other nationalities. In the dispute between Westerners and Slavophiles, the former represented Pushkin as a carrier of European culture, a fighter for freedom, and the latter emphasized his role as a guardian of the “Russian spirit” and defender against foreign influences. Since then, Pushkin has been not just a poet but a figure personifying Russia and the Russian language. Both Soviet and post-Soviet authorities often used the image of Pushkin for their political and propaganda purposes. In 1937, the Soviet Union celebrated the centenary of Pushkin’s death on a grand scale, during which, according to a witness, “Pushkin was portrayed as a politicized figure with a manipulated version of the past, meant to legitimize the Soviet state.”56 In 2019, the pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestia, in connection with the 210th anniversary of Pushkin’s birth, wrote that the poet still remains the embodiment of the “Russian spirit.” The article portrayed Pushkin’s image in a militarized fashion: “Pushkin remains on his high pedestal. Moreover, nothing will stop him as long as Russian speech is heard.”57 Thus, for the Russian authorities and propagandists, Pushkin is nothing more than one of the “Russian weapons”, something like a tank that should go forward and crush all those who disagree to recognize and respect the superiority of Russian culture.
Following the outbreak of war in Ukraine, the country’s authorities demolished monuments to Alexander Pushkin in many Ukrainian cities by insisting that Pushkin is not part of Ukrainian culture. In their anti-war texts, Russian-language authors also try, if not to “demolish” Pushkin, then at least to argue the militarized image imposed on him as an exponent of the “Russian spirit” and the “unique Russian path”. Additionally, many of these authors use the image of Pushkin to raise concerns about the culpability of Russian culture in the war in Ukraine.
Journalist and poet Marina Gurman, who was born in Ukraine and emigrated to Israel in 1994, in the poem “Alive! Horses! Burned,” tries to understand the reasons that prompted the “non-humans” from Russia to start a war against Ukraine and does not find an answer in the Russian language, the language of Pushkin:
For Gennady Katsov, Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Russian culture, as well as the current Russian authorities, all share the responsibility for the war in Ukraine. In his poem “A terrible century: there is a risk zone everywhere,” Tolstoy, Pushkin, Chekhov and Dostoevsky visit the afterlife world to meet the children who died in Ukraine.59
The Russian poet Andrey Radionov, in his poem “Just, you know, let us not mention politics,” refers to Joseph Brodsky’s60 poem “Don’t leave your room” and raises the question of whether Brodsky should be held responsible for the fact that the Russians are at war with their Ukrainian neighbors. Radionov seems to be implying Brodsky’s scandalous poem “For the Independence of Ukraine,” which Brodsky himself never published:
Russian-Israeli poet Semyon Kraitman created a poem, “Mikhalych fixes the machine gun”, in which he first described the terrible scene of a Russian soldier shooting captured Ukrainians and then the even more terrible moment of the rape of a Ukrainian girl by Russians. The poem ends with the death of the girl whose last words, “Pushkin is our everything,”62 flow down from her lips along with blood. There are two important aspects to this poem. The first is that the girl grins with mortal bitterness at her killers, for whom “Pushkin is our everything”. Most likely, this girl is not far from Russian culture; perhaps she knows and loves Russian literature but now explores that this literature is personified by the Russian soldier who came to take her life.
The second aspect is the name of the poem’s main character, Fyodor Mikhailovich, through whose eyes we see what is happening. It is an apparent reference to Dostoevsky and an episode from the writer’s novel “Demons”, where in the chapter “At Tikhon’s”, Nikolay Stavrogin confessed to his rape of a young girl. The intertextuality of this episode in Kraitman’s poem points to the “Russian carnival”, described in Dostoevsky’s text as complete destruction of norms and orgy of violence. The reference to Dostoevsky also suggests that if one understands Russian culture in a ressentimental sense, then the violence portrayed in “Demons” becomes a part of everyday life.
In a poem by Berlin-based Russian-language poet Alexander Delfinov, Pushkin and Dostoevsky are once again a sinister pair. Delfinov describes a world broken into thousands of fragments by the war, and the poem’s character, no matter how hard he tries, cannot put this puzzle together. In this state of chaos and the breakdown of all logical connections, Pushkin appears to him like an arrogant artilleryman shouting: “Well, where is your Ukraine?”63 and Dostoevsky is like a soldier dancing in a T-shirt with the “Russian Spring”64 print.
In the poem “Disintegration” by Russian and American poet, playwright and professor of biology at Marshall University (USA), Viktor Fet, Russia is an empire that disregards limits and boundaries. Fueled by ressentiment, the country is at war not only with Ukraine but with the entire world. In response, Ukrainian cities have targeted Pushkin and Brodsky for destruction, considering them as symbols of Russian imperial expansion, whether they truly represent it or not. “The Empire commits suicide online / in the Russian-World War. / Pushkin and Brodsky are scattered into marble flakes, / Not at the shooting range, /But in Mariupol, Chernihiv and Irpen”.65 In another poem, Fet declares February 24, 2022, as the date of the end of Russian culture: “Russian culture is gone / disappeared down like Assyria and Ur.”66
Russian philologist and poet Yegana Jabbarly, who left Russia after February 24, 2022, for Taiwan, in her poem “Russian Dreams. The Dead Body of Language”, describes Russia in the past and present as a colonialist and aggressive project, both politically and biologically. “Russian colonialists brought with them languages, pathogens, microbes and viruses/ and delivered them into the dreams of locals / straight into the blood.”67 Russia, in her poem, is a state that does not recognize the culture, language, and traditions of national minorities and brings death to them. The metaphor of the body of language, starting with decolonial discourse, is gradually transformed into literal physicality – itchy skin “as if a shell is being exploded from within,/ as if from within, everyone who is dead is talking, / as if every bruise is a word that does not exist.”68
Not all Russian-speaking poets view Pushkin as a symbol of imperialism in their anti-war poems. Some see the poet and Russian culture in general as hostages of Putin’s war.
Russian actionist and poet German Lukomnikov has been writing and publishing short poems in the style of Russian ditties since February 24, 2022. In one of his recent poems, Pushkin is a poet whose voice is drowned out by the sounds of war. Pushkin here is a representation of poetry itself, the voice that “babbles” something but remains unheard by anyone:
Tatyana Voltskaya, in the poem “Russia will be cancelled,” laments the shame that Russian culture has brought upon itself because of the war in Ukraine. Pushkin or Chekhov are not the initiators of this war, but they are the most essential part of the country that is destroying Ukrainian cities today: “Russia will be cancelled. With Pushkin and Tolstoy […] /With Pasternak and Chekhov […]/ Indeed, why remember them on the ruins of hospitals and schools”.70
Samara native Sergei Leibgrad, a poet, cultural critic and journalist who moved to Israel after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, writes in his poem that Pushkin’s descendants have forever disgraced themselves with the war against Ukraine. However, this is not the fault of the Russian poet himself:
Regardless of whether some poets consider Pushkin a symbol of imperialism or see the poet disgraced by a terrible and unjust war, both problematize the question of the guilt of Russian culture in the war in Ukraine. As a result, this problematization leads to several de-ressentimental statements:
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Russian-language poets whose works were cited in this chapter share a sense of responsibility for the war in Ukraine (even if they have not lived in Russia for a long time), while the official Russian authorities constantly declare themselves victims and abdicate responsibility for their aggressive policies, justify their actions by citing the need to respond to perceived threats, which is indicative of ressentiment.
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Max Scheler asserts that “the romantic state of mind” is pervaded by ressentiment. He explains that ressentiment is always the romantic nostalgia for some past era (Hellas, the Middle Ages, etc.) and is not primarily based on the values of that period but on the wish to escape from the present and the future and avoid the need to offer contemporary values, symbols, narratives, and action programs to the present or the future. Therefore, any praise of the “past” serves the purpose of replacing present-day reality.72 The analyzed poems remove the romanticized perception of Pushkin and other significant Russian cultural figures. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Brodsky are not simulacra that the Russian authorities use to create romantic nostalgia about past greatness but figures and symbols that require reconsideration and revaluation in the present. The names of Pushkin and Dostoevsky are not presented as immutable authorities and titans of the Russian past but are embedded in the context of the reinterpretation of Russian culture in light of the ongoing war in Ukraine. Such a reassessment is crucial in the process of overcoming harmful ideologies that have plagued Russian society, including the prioritization of the imperial over the local, the state over the individual, and the pervasive disrespect and fear of otherness and foreignness, as well as the narrative of the superiority (“unique path”) of Russian culture.
Conclusions
In The End of History and the Last Man, Frances Fukuyama attempted to analyze the direction of history after the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union and associated the figure of the last man with the subject of liberalism, the inheritor of equal recognition under the triumphant liberal order. Rejecting Nietzsche’s prediction of heroic transformation, Fukuyama imagined that the human would survive the end of history without destroying itself on the altar of ressentiment.73 This book was published in 1992, and the researcher could hardly have imagined that exactly thirty years later, Russia would declare the war, which would become its triumph in ascending to the altar of ressentiment.
The special military operation (the Kremlin’s official name for its war against Ukraine), which Putin announced on February 24, 2022, is a continuation of “another special operation being conducted on Russians’ historical memory, aggressively reshaping the nation’s self-perception and its understanding of history”.74 Putin uses the past as raw material to maintain power, like oil and gas. In 2017, Vladimir Medinsky, who was the Minister of Culture from 2012 to 2020, claimed that complete objectivity cannot be achieved and that myths can also be considered as facts. He further stated that there are no definite events, only interpretations of history. According to him, there are no historical concepts that can be considered the “one and only truth” or “honestly objective.”75 The former Minister of Culture argued that history should be seen from the point of view of national interests. Among Russia’s leading national interests is now to make the mythical past its present, to turn the country into an insatiable aggressor whose sense of resentment will never be satisfied.
The question of the future is not part of Russia’s national interests. Neither Yeltsin nor Putin offered any attractive vision for the country’s future. Moreover, for Putin, the future is an enemy that threatens his power. The treatment of Alexei Navalny, Putin’s main political opponent, exemplifies this view. With Navalny’s principal political slogan declaring the country’s transformation into the “Beautiful Russia of the Future,” he personifies the future and its irreversibility for the current leader of Russia. Notably, Putin refrained from mentioning his rival’s name, allegedly sanctioned his poisoning with Novichok, and subsequently imprisoned him in a remote Arctic colony, where on February 16, 2024, the politician died. Another example of the president’s fear of the future can be found in his 2018 declaration of readiness to use nuclear weapons and destroy the world. Famously, Putin said, “Why do we need such a world if Russia is not in it”76 These words can be interpreted not only as a threat to humanity but also as a complete denial of the future for a world without Putin’s power.
As Dina Khapaeva writes, the post-Soviet era demonstrates that history politics has replaced traditional future-oriented ideologies, substituting more abstract theoretical discourses with decontextualized and misconstrued historical events. “Their re-enactment in the present – like Putin’s reprise of “the Great Patriotic War” in Ukraine – showcases the absence of a project for the future”.77 To abolish the future, Putin and his propagandists needed to cancel the linearity of historical time and offer Russians a narrative of a mythical time in which the past and present are inseparable. According to this narrative, the war against the Nazis during 1941–1945 is still ongoing in the form of the war against Ukraine. The entire ideological apparatus of Russia is geared towards preserving the mythical time where the Great Patriotic War serves as a cosmological event that is still unfolding today. Consequently, on May 9, 2022, posters congratulated the Russians on the “Victory of 1945–2022,” and the city of Volgograd in February 2023 was renamed Stalingrad for a day to commemorate the Battle of Stalingrad from 1942–1943 and Putin’s visit.
The mythical temporality embedded in the ressentiment worldview creates an illusion that history can be repeated and re-enacted. Russian anti-war poetry seeks to break the continuity of the ressentiment and restore history’s linearity. Through the manifestation of signs of de-ressentiment, these works bring attention to the fact that Russia is trapped in the ongoing Great Patriotic War and must bury her dead in order to bury the war itself. Its authors understand that Russia will never achieve peace with its neighbors unless it first achieves peace with its past.
Gurman, Jabbarly, Kraitman, Fet and other poets remove any idealized view on Russia’s cultural and historical legacy, suggesting that they should be subjects to critical rethinking, significantly when Russia postulates hatred of otherness and uses the name of its cultural heroes, like Pushkin or Brodsky, in order to deny the right of other peoples to freedom and identity.
The idea that Russia has its own “unique path” in world history has reached messianic proportions that Putin has tried to use it to make not only his own citizens but also Ukraine and the rest of the world reject the present and return to a mythical past. The poetry of Berkovich, Zhuk, Voltskaya, Fanailova and other authors is distinctly anti-messianic and shows how Russian messianism, with its cult of victory in the Great Patriotic War, made possible the massacre in Bucha. For poets like Evstropov and Leibov, ressentiment is the heart of darkness in today’s Russia. By exposing it, they debunk the myth created by Putin’s propaganda about the infinity of the past and thereby spark hope for a future for another Russia.
Roman Leibov, “Anatomia resentimenta” in Poezia poslednego vremeni, ed. Yuri Leving (Moscow: Izdatelʹstvo Ivana Limbakha, 2022), 27.
Leibov, “Anatomia resentimenta”, 27.
On Russia’s transition from democracy to totalitarianism, see, for example: Alexander Etkind, Russia Against Modernity (Hoboken: Polity, 2023): 64–65.
“Putin’s declaration of war on Ukraine: Full Text”, The Spectator, February 24, 2022, https:// www.spectator.co.uk/article/full-text-putin-s-declaration-of-war-on-ukraine.
“Putin’s declaration of war on Ukraine.”
On March 21, 2022, a Russian court banned Facebook in Russia, recognizing the American company Meta as “extremist.”
Initially, Goralik planned to release the novel in Russia, but fearing persecution by the authorities, she instead published it online. See, Linor Goralik, Bobo, https://linorgoralik.com/bobo.html.
Due to censorship reasons, “The Demon’s Lawyer” was the first story by Boris Akunin (Grigori Chkhartishvili) published outside of Russia. See, Boris Akunin, Advokat besa (Tel Aviv: Babel, 2022).
It is unclear why the Latin letter Z was chosen as the symbol of the war. There is no official explanation, so several theories have emerged. Some suggest that the Z originates from the Russian word zapad (“the west”), while others believe it stands for the phrase “Za pobedu!” (“For victory!”). Some believers even see in the Z one-half of the swastika which they claim is an ancient symbol of the Slavs. Whatever the truth, during the spring and summer of 2022, the Latin Z proliferated throughout the Russian media and everyday life.
Aleksander Pelevin (ed), Poezia Russkogo Leta (Moscow: Eksmo, 2022).
Zahar Prilepin (ed), Voskresshie na Tretʹei mirovoi: antologia, (St. Peterburg: Piter, 2022).
Sergei Ushakin, “Used: The Post-Soviet State as a Form of Aphasia”, NLO, no. 100 (2009): 760–792.
See Alexander Luria, Traumatic Aphasia: Its Syndromes, Psychology and Treatment (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), 17–26.
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume Three: The Phenomenology of Knowledge, trans. Steve G. Lofts (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), 247.
Roman Jakobson, Studies on Child Language and Aphasia (The Hague; Paris: Mouton, 1971), 13.
Ushakin, “Used: The Post-Soviet State as a Form of Aphasia”, 766.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Essay I, paragraph 10, 20–22.
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 111.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo. How to Become What You Are, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), I, 6, 13.
Max Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. Lewis B. Coser (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1998), 56.
Frank Vande Viere, “Envy: Sin of Sins, Painful Birth of Desire” in The polemics of ressentiment: variations on Nietzsche, ed. Sjoerd van Tuinen (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019), 95.
For more about it, see: Artem Efimov, “Kto i zachem pridumal lozung ‘Mozhem povtoritʹ’?”, Meduza, May, 9, 2022, https://meduza.io/feature/2022/05/09/kto-i-zachem-pridumal-lozung-mozhem-povtorit.
Yan Mann, “Situating Stalin in the History of the Second World War.” In The Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia, ed. David Hoffmann (London: Routledge, 202), 57. For more about it see also: Mariya Yarlykova, and Xunda Yu. “Rethinking War History: The Evolution of Representations of Stalin and His Policies During the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 in Soviet and Russian History Textbooks.” Studies in East European Thought 72 (2020): 174–176. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-020-09361-7.
Vladimir Putin, “75 let Velikoi Pobedy: obshchaia otvetstvennostʹ pered istoriei i budushchim”, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, June 19, 2020, https://rg.ru/2020/06/19/75-let-velikoj-pobedy-obshchaia-otvetstvennost-pered-istoriej-i-budushchim.html.
Mikhail Edelʹshtein, “Velikaia Otechestvennaia Navsegda, ili Serezha, otpusti deda!”, Vot-tak.tv, June 6, 2022, https://vot-tak.tv/novosti/07-06-2022-kolonka-mihaila-edelshtejna.
Sergei Medvedev, “Russkiy resentiment”, Otechestvennye zapiski, 63, no. 6 (November 2014): 181–184. https://magazines.gorky.media/oz/2014/6/russkij-resentiment.html.
Anna Narinskaia, “Mezhdu vivisektsiey i pokloneniem. Zachem nuzhen dekolonialʹniy vzgliad na russkuyu literature.” Carnegie Politika, March 23, 2023, https://carnegieendowment.org/politika/89337.
Linor Goralik, “About ROAR”, ROAR no. 1 (2022) https://roar-review.com/About-ROAR-a00d35f461bd4bd48f2d0d1502b0e93e.
Ot redaktsi, “Chto my nadelali?”, EBB, no 2. (2022) https://ebbzine.com/ebb2.
Ot redaktsi, “Chto my nadelali?”
Igor Tibman, “Ot redaktsi”, Raznitsy, no 1. (2022): 3. https://www.alteritiesmag.com/322195318977.
Tibman, “Ot redaktsi”, 4.
“O proekte”, No War – poety protiv voiny, https://nowarpoetry.com/about-the-project.
Throughout the 20th century in Russian history, four significant waves of emigration can be distinguished. These include the white emigration during the Civil War and the 1920s, those who defected to the USSR after World War II, the repatriation of Soviet Jews in the 1960s to 1980s, and the mass emigration from Russia after the collapse of the USSR.
“O zhurnale”, Piataia volna, https://www.5wave-ru.com/about.
The Russian foreign agent law requires anyone who receives “support” from outside Russia or is under “influence” from outside Russia to register and declare themselves as “foreign agents”. The phrase “foreign agent” has strong associations with Cold War-era espionage and now serves as a marker for the government to identify all those who do not agree with the policies of the Russian authorities. Among the Russian-speaking writers and foreign poets are Dmitry Bykov, Tatyana Voltskaya, Linor Goralik.
“Stikhi protiv nasilia”, Diskurs, March 21, 2023, https://discours.io/expo/poetry/anything/russian-poetry-against-violence.
Gelia Pevzner, “Izdatelʹ sbornika antivoennykh stikhov «Poniatye i svideteli»: Eto poeticheskie svidetelʹstva dlia budushchego suda”, RFI, June 16, 2022, https://www.rfi.fr/ru/%D0%BA%D1%83%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%82%D1%83%D1%80%D0%B0-%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BB%D1%8C-%D0%B6%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%BD%D0%B8/20220616-%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%B4%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%8C-%D1%81%D0%B1%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0-%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D1%85-%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%85%D0%BE%D0%B2-%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%8F%D1%82%D1%8B%D0%B5-%D0%B8-%D1%81%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B8-%D1%8D%D1%82%D0%BE-%D0%BF%D0%BE%D1%8D%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B5-%D1%81%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%B0-%D0%B4%D0%BB%D1%8F-%D0%B1%D1%83%D0%B4%D1%83%D1%89%D0%B5%D0%B3%D0%BE-%D1%81%D1%83%D0%B4%D0%B0.
Yuri Leving, “Khor siren” in Poezia poslednego vremeni, ed. Yuri Leving (Moscow: Izdatelʹstvo Ivana Limbakha, 2022), 5.
Elizabeth Wood, “Performing memory: Vladimir Putin and the celebration of World War II in Russia,” The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, no. 38 (2011): 172–200. On the rise of the mythology around the Great Patriotic War see: Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Teddy J. Uldricks, “War, Politics and Memory: Russian Historians Reevaluate the Origins of World War II,” History and Memory 21 no. 2, (2009): 60–82.
Aleksandr Prokhanov, “Pobeda kak skorost’ sveta”, Izvestiya, May 11, 2015, https://iz.ru/news/586385.
On February 24, 2022, Berkovich was arrested for picketing against the war and detained for 11 days.
Ian Shenkman, “Ded umer, on uzhe nichem ne pomozhet. Intervʹiu s Evgeniei Berkovich”, Novaia gazeta Evropa, May 18, 2022, https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2022/05/18/ded-umer-on-uzhe-nichem-ne-pomozhet.
Anna Halberstadt “Osvoboditeli” in Poezia poslednego vremeni, ed. Yuri Leving (Moscow: Izdatelʹstvo Ivana Limbakha, 2022), 457.
Elena Fanailova, “Rozovye poni i divannye voiska”, No War – poety protiv voiny, https://nowarpoetry.com/authors/elena-fanailova.
Alexandra Tsibulya, “Veter kolbasit nartsissy i sryvaet” in Poezia poslednego vremeni, ed. Yuri Leving (Moscow: Izdatelʹstvo Ivana Limbakha, 2022), 316.
Tatyana Voltskaya, “Fashisty strelaut po Kharʹkovu”, No War – poety protiv voiny, https://nowarpoetry.com/authors/tatiana-voltskaya.
Tatyana Voltskaya, “Ogrebiom po polnoi”, No War – poety protiv voiny, https://nowarpoetry.com/authors/tatiana-voltskaya.
Voltskaya, “Ogrebiom po polnoi”.
Vadim Zhuk, “Starinnaia soldatskaia pesnia” in Poezia poslednego vremeni, ed. Yuri Leving (Moscow: Izdatelʹstvo Ivana Limbakha, 2022), 153.
Zhuk, “Starinnaia soldatskaia pesnia”, 154.
Vadim Zhuk, “Sidi i zhdi. Poka meshochnik mart” in Poniatye i svideteli: Khroniki voennogo vremeni (Tel-Aviv: Babel, 2022), 30.
Maxim Evstropov, “Po-nad trupami”, Raznitsy, no 1. (2022): 118.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (Boston: Houghton Miffl in Harcourt, 1968): 265.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Essay I, paragraph 10, 21.
Michael David-Fox, Peresekaia granitsy modernostʹ, ideologia i kulʹtura v Rossii i sovetskom soiuze (Moscow: NLO): 371.
Arseniy Zamostianov, “Russkiy dukh: Pushkin ostaetsia «nashim vsem» tretʹe stoletie”, Izvestia, June 6, 2019, https://iz.ru/885388/arsenii-zamostianov/russkii-dukh-pushkin-ostaetsia-nashim-vsem-trete-stoletie.
Marina Gurman, “Zhivye! Loshadi! Goreli”, No War – poety protiv voiny, https://nowarpoetry.com/authors/marina-gurman.
Gennady Katsov, “Uzhasny vek: povsiudu zona riska”, No War – poety protiv voiny, https://nowarpoetry.com/authors/gennady-katsov.
It is common among Russian-speaking intellectuals to call Brodsky the “Pushkin of the twentieth century”. See, for example: Elena Vanina, “Pushkin XX veka – poet po familii Evto-Brodsky. Interviu avtora filma “Brodsky ne poet” Nikolaia Kartozii”, Meduza, May 22, 2015. https://meduza.io/feature/2015/05/22/pushkin-xx-veka-poet-po-familii-evto-brodskiy.
Andrey Radionov, “Tolʹko, znaeshʹ, davaĭ bez politiki”, No War – poety protiv voiny, https://nowarpoetry.com/authors/andrey-rodionov.
Semyon Kraitman, “Mikhalych popravliaet PPSha”, No War – poety protiv voiny, https://nowarpoetry.com/authors/shimon-kraitman.
Alexander Delfinov, “Pazl” in Poniatye i svideteli: Khroniki voennogo vremeni. Vtoraia kniga (Tel-Aviv: Babel, 2022), 30.
The slogan “Russian Spring” among pro-Russian forces appeared in 2014 during the outbreak of the war in Donbas.
Viktor Fet, “Raspad”, No War – poety protiv voiny, https://nowarpoetry.com/authors/victor-fet.
Viktor Fet, “Purimshpilʹ-zong”, No War – poety protiv voiny, https://nowarpoetry.com/authors/victor-fet.
Yegana Jabbarly, “Rossiskie sny (mertvoe telo iazyka)”, Raznitsy, no 1. (2022): 104.
Jabbarly, “Rossiskie sny (mertvoe telo iazyka)”, 105.
German Lukomnikov, “Kogda grokhochut pushki, n-na” in Poezia poslednego vremeni, ed. Yuri Leving (Moscow: Izdatelʹstvo Ivana Limbakha, 2022), 289.
Tatyana Voltskaya, “Rossiu otmeniat” in Poezia poslednego vremeni, ed. Yuri Leving (Moscow: Izdatelʹstvo Ivana Limbakha, 2022), 82.
Sergei Leibgrad, “Potomok pushkina podonok” in Poezia poslednego vremeni, ed. Yuri Leving (Moscow: Izdatelʹstvo Ivana Limbakha, 2022), 412.
Max Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. Lewis B. Coser (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1998), 49.
Frances Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992): xxii–xxiii.
Dina Khapaeva, Putin’s Dark Ages: Political Neomedievalism and Re-Stalinization in Russia (London and New York: Taylor & Francis, 2023): ix.
Vladimir Medinsky, “Interesnaya istoriya”, Rossiiskaya Gazeta, July 4, 2017, https://rg.ru/2017/07/04/vladimir-medinskij-vpervye-otvechaet-kritikam-svoej-dissertacii.html.
“Zachem nam takoi mir, esli tam ne budet Rossii? Putin – o globalʹnoi katastrofe posle iadernogo udara”, Meduza, March 7, 2018, https://meduza.io/news/2018/03/07/zachem-nam-takoy-mir-esli-tam-ne-budet-rossii-putin-o-globalnoy-katastrofe-posle-yadernogo-udara.
Dina Khapaeva, Putin’s Dark Ages: Political Neomedievalism and Re-Stalinization in Russia (London and New York: Taylor & Francis, 2023): 21.
