Authors

Iryna Kovalchuk¹;  ¹ UCD, UK

Discussion

"The true stories of the past year must be preserved and told to the world with a Ukrainian voice, recorded in memorable works for future generations." – General Valeriy Zaluzhny, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine

Since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukrainian literature has been documenting the tragedy of war at various levels: at the state level as a battle for Ukraine’s existence and at the individual level as the personal stories of the military, refugees and people who face the hardships of war.
This paper presents a comparative analysis of the topics and emotions described in the anthology State of War (2023), a collection of essays written by 35 Ukrainian writers among whom are Sofia Andrukhovych, Yuri Andrukhovych, Lyubko Deresh, Kateryna Kalytko, Max Kidruk, Ihor Pomerantsev, Oksana Zabuzhko, Peter Zalmayev, and Serhiy Zhadan. Using Voyant Tools, a web-based application for text analysis, we identified the most frequent lexical units that constitute the thematic vocabulary of each writer’s essay, outline its topic and verbalize the emotions. The frequently used vocabulary is divided into first-, second- and third-most frequent lexical units. The paper will analyze the similarities in distribution of the most frequent lexical units in all 35 essays of the anthology and examine the verbalization of positive and negative emotions.