Authors

Olga Partan¹;  ¹ College of the Holy Cross, United States

Discussion

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, divisions between various members of the creative intelligentsia have created two antagonistic camps: Z-supporters and those condemning the war. The falsehood of official Russian state propaganda of a so-called “Special Military Operation” for the “de-Nazification of Ukraine” is juxtaposed to narratives exposing the horrors of the war and the Russian nation’s historic responsibility for its outcomes. This presentation is dedicated to poetic anti-war narratives written by Vera Pavlova and Evgeniya Berkovich. While Pavlova currently resides in emigration freely publishing her poems, Berkovich is serving time in prison after being falsely accused of providing “justification for terrorism.” After a brief biographical overview, this presentation will focus on the issues of poetics and politics in the era of the Russian-Ukrainian war, conducting a close textual comparative analysis of several poems by these two female artists and discussing the significance of Russian-language poetic resistance to the violent military aggression against Ukraine, which used be called a “brotherly nation.”