Poetry, along with the documentary prose, became a leading genre of Ukrainian literature during the war. They say that poetry has more in common with philosophy than with fiction: it does not engage in lengthy descriptions but delves into the depth of emotions and ideas instead, and established connection between them. It deals with the unsurmountable and verbalizes the unspeakable. The four poets I will talk about in this essay could not be more different as people and as writers. Maksym Kryvtsov and Victoria Amelina were killed by enemy fire. Borys Humenyuk vanished after a mission, and there is still hope that he will return one day. Volodymyr Vakulenko lived under Russian occupation and was tortured and shot by the enemy. Vakulenko and Amelina were civilians. Humenyuk and Kryvtsov were part of the armed forces. We owe them all a debt: we must not only remember their names but also read their words.
I was fortunate to call Victoria Amelina my close friend. I met Borys Humenyuk at a literary festival. I was Facebook friends with Volodymyr Vakulenko for a long time, and read his posts for many years: we interacted a few times. I have never met or spoken with Maksym Kryvtsov, but read his poetry since the start of the full-scale invasion. Yet each of them is dear to me, and each of them I will miss for a lifetime. Their poems now are like letters that a family member sent to all of us from the very center of hell – not in order to disturb us, but in order to explain, and describe, and comfort by saying “I am here, and nobody is ever alone.”
When writing a foreword to the collected works of Volodymyr Vakulenko-K. (1972-2022), a poet and a children’s writer kidnapped and shot by the Russians, Victoria Amelina (1986-2023), a Ukrainian author and poet and a war crimes investigator says that she feels as if her “biggest fear is coming true” and that she is “inside the new Executed Renaissance,” referring to the Ukrainian writers of the 1920s- early 1930s who were imprisoned, killed, or silenced by the Soviet occupational regime. Victoria visited the newly liberated village of Kapytolivka where Vakulenko lived and died, and helped his parents unearth his diary he buried in the garden after the arrival of Russian troops, on March 23 of 2022. Unfortunately, she turned out to be not entirely wrong: on July 1 of 2023 Victoria herself died from the injuries sustained after the ballistic missile strikes on Kramatorsk, the city she was visiting with the delegation of Colombian writers.
Volodymyr Vakulenko-K., an award-winning author of thirteen books of poetry, children’s books, and prose, added the letter “K” after his name for Kapytolivka, his native town in Eastern Ukraine. He participated in the protests during the Euromaidan in 2013-2014 and was very attuned to the struggles of the Crimean Tatars. On the photographs we see a very composed, fit man with a gentle smile: Volodymyr liked to dress like a punk, in black t-shirts and hoodies, and to shave his temples in a particular manner, mimicking an ancient Cossack hairstyle. He also wrote poems for children. One his collections is called Daddy’s Book. He visited countless schools and daycare centers, and I can’t help but think that kids must have been his favorite audience. He was single-handedly raising his autistic son. This man, who on the photos looks like a tough guy, saw himself first and foremost as a protector of children and all those who cannot defend themselves.
He kept a diary during the Russian occupation of his village in the Ukrainian east, knowing that due to his pro-Ukrainian position, he would most likely be betrayed and given out to the Russians. The diary is only thirty-five pages long, but it takes time to read it: Volodymyr’s condensed prose is filled with anguish. He did know that some of the villagers are open Russian sympathizers, and that sooner rather than later he himself will become a target. His description of the everyday life under occupation is chilling: the sound of tanks on the streets, the silence afterwards, lack of food, medicine, and supplies, people hiding in cellars, in the cold, numerous checkpoints to pass if one needs to go around the village, many humiliations and unexpected “visits” from Russian soldiers. The village was heavily shelled before the occupation. Its school was destroyed, many buildings were damaged. The tanks destroyed the park near a daycare center. Russian troops appeared badly equipped and scavenged for food, robbed the villagers: Volodymyr called them “the army of the broken technology.” They stole all the supplies from the local supermarket.
Towards the end of the diary, on March 20th (Volodymyr will be detained on the 24th) he writes that his family ran out of food almost completely. He rationed the last loaf of bread by dividing it into five parts, each part for a day. He gave the bread to his son and parents, and himself, went hungry. Volodymyr also revisits the past and states that he expected the full-scale invasion and enjoyed each day of peace. In the very last paragraph, he talks about dreams: he dreamt about his Maidan and war-time friends. The diary ends with him seeing the cranes flying over the house. Volodymyr interpreted the sign as the promise of victory for Ukraine.
…They say that poets sometimes anticipate the future in their poetry. When reading Volodymyr Vakulenko’s poetry, one can get goosebumps: in one of his poems (translation mine) he says “it is not your bullet yet/ You will meet yours under the cross while kneeling” (Christian references are strong in his work). A prominent topic in Volodymyr’s poetry was the problem of keeping one’s mind out of the tenets of propaganda of all kinds and combatting the informational debris. As a poet and writer, Volodymyr understood that our century is the epoch of the war on our minds: “Become a tree/From which madness/Will never pick the fruit.” A poet, to him, is someone who restores and preserves the purity of language, rejects hate, and stands up for those in need. I was especially moved by his existential poems, philosophical in nature. In one of them he says, “drink yourself, Oh ocean, tear the ligaments of the ships.” This was very much his essence: to find strength inside himself, not to rely on the outside world for resources, and to always be prepared for the trials of life. Knowing how alone he was, surrounded by the enemy, at the time of his imprisonment and death, one can only marvel at Volodymyr’s strength and the power of his writing.
Victoria Amelina (1986-2023), an award-winning Ukrainian novelist, poet, children’s writer, member of PEN Ukraine, and human rights activist, started writing poetry only with the beginning of the full-scale invasion. Her work as a war crimes investigator for the organization “Truth Hounds” influenced her writing; she dealt with the enormity of human suffering, difficult to imagine for those who did not have to see it. Her non-fiction book written originally in English was prepared for publication by a dedicated team of her friends and family members, and published by St Martin’s Press, with a foreword by Margaret Atwood. Her non-fiction book looked at the experiences of women in the war: her friends, journalists, and those who endured occupation. Her poetry collection, published by the Old Lion Publishing House, is called Testimony in Ukrainian; in her poems, Victoria does exactly this – she witnesses. One of Victoria’s poems in Valzhyna Mort’s translation was published in The New Yorker, only second Ukrainian poet to be featured in this magazine – after Taras Shevchenko, translated by Askold Melnyczuk. The poem reads, “Only women testify in this strange town,” immediately transporting the reader into the context of Victoria’s work as a war crimes investigator.
In her poems, Amelina does not offer the reader the luxury of introductions or even descriptions. There is no distance between the destruction and the storytelling: the speed of the media and communication systems, as well as the horrifying power of the present-day weapons and the absolute lack of ethics of our enemy, force the war upon all of us, civilians and soldiers, live and 24/7. Victoria captured this overwhelming rhythm of terror and ruination, suffocation and anxiety. Such poetry cannot be beautiful or pleasant. It cannot even conform to the rules of composition and meter.
…I stare at Victoria’s last message to me, sent three days before she was fatally wounded in Kramatorsk. She took a photograph of the night sky in Kyiv, pierced by the flashes of missiles or drones, from the window of her apartment on the 18th floor. It is the photograph of total darkness pierced by death, with faint, almost invisible city skyline. The flashes of light appear smudged, barely captured by the eye of the camera as irregular zigzags across the sky. This photograph seems to be saying, this is what the poetry of war is like: a dark canvas with the dots and lines of feverish light that intends to kill you.
In one of her poems, Victoria Amelina confesses that what she writes is not “poetry.” “Poetry” now is but splinters of words that fly every which way after the explosion after the bomb hits the very core of the language we use for speaking, writing, and descriptions. This kind of poetry is as unembellished as it can be. It is deliberately plain and raw, rough at the edges. It is also unapologetically political: “And why do you resemble them?/You’re brothers, perhaps? /No, our arms crossed/ not in embrace, but in battle /Our blood mingled with the earth/ from which they gathered our harvest…” (Translated by Marko Pavlyshyn)Victoria’s English was perfect, therefore she was often invited for readings and talks abroad as a spokesperson for Ukraine and its cause. One can only imagine what kind of an effect her words had on her audience. She refused to soften edges and declared her position openly: war must be called war, Russians must be held accountable, and no peace is possible without justice.
No conversation of Ukrainian poetry is possible without Borys Humenyuk (b. 1965), a powerhouse of a human, a poet, a fiction writer, and a soldier who joined the army in 2014 and then again – in 2022, when he became a deputy commander in charge of the machine-gun. In December of the same year he vanished while on a mission and have not been heard of since. Until this day, nobody can bring themselves to use the verbs in the past when speaking about Borys: there is hope that he may have been taken prisoner by the Russians. I met him in person only once, at a literary festival in 2018: a jovial man who looked like a builder or a farmer, or perhaps a lumberjack, tall, with broad shoulders and a kindly smile. In the 1990s he was a businessman and even endured an unfair trial and a prison sentence, about which he wrote a novel.
In fact, as a writer Borys is as anti-establishment as they get, it is just that this expression is not fitting; he wouldn’t waste his time on belonging or opposing such arbitrary and flimsy structures as “establishments.” He was simply outside of the narrow paradigm of the professional writing. To him, paradoxically, writing had to be about life, and life by default is bigger than any writing could ever be. He is himself a paradox, too. His close friend, a Ukrainian poet and author Pavlo Volvach says that Borys is an adventurer in the best sense of this word, cut from the same cloth as the great explorers, travelers, and warriors. He is also a sensitive person with a big heart. Pavlo recounts a story about Borys reading The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry while in prison, and being profoundly moved by it, so much so that he decided, from then on, to live with more awareness.
In his seemingly simple but ultimately sophisticated poetry, Borys Humenyuk strikes the reader with, on the one hand, his focus on the everyday life of a soldier documenting the war in all its ugliness, and on the other, his intricate knowledge of the Ukrainian poetic tradition, in particular, the poetry of Taras Shevchenko (1814-1961). Borys Humenyuk often is in a conversation with Taras Shevchenko, for example, in the poem “A Testament,” which is an allusion to Shevchenko’s iconic poem of the same name. Shevchenko says, “Make my grave there – and arise,/Sundering your chains,/Bless your freedom with the blood/ Of foemen’s evil veins!” and asks his people to speak about him, the poet, kindly and gently in “a family new and free.” (Translated by Vera Rich). Humenyuk says, “We don’t need eulogies/ In the silence that follows battle./ They always seem odd – / Like punching a dead soldier /Then ordering his to his feet…” “To remember us, eat the grain from the field /Where we laid down our lives” (Translated by Oksana Lushchevska and Michael Naydan). Humenyuk is deliberately removing any traces of pathos from his poems, and transforming the idea of poetry: it is not a “sweet” “gentle” or kind word he talks about, but “this sweet, gentle earth” on which the soldiers digging trenches write with their spades “the last Ukrainian poem of the last poets/Left alive.”
In another poem of his where he yet again engages in a dialogue with Taras Shevchenko, Humenyuk references Shevchenko’s poem “The Plundered Grave,” where the image of a desecrated grave stands for Ukraine itself, its history, rewritten by the colonizers, that is, Russia; its riches, stolen; and its very identity, endangered and ridiculed. Shevchenko wrote this openly anti-imperial and anti-colonial poem in 1843, after witnessing a Cossack grave (a kurhan) being open and robbed. Some critics interpret Shevchenko’s metaphor of the plundered grave as an image of Ukraine’s constant state of embattlement and yet resilience. Ukraine is a kind of a Prometheus (another recurrent image in Shevchenko) whose liver is eaten by the Zeus’s eagle every day, and yet grows back. Prometheus cannot die, but he does feel enormous pain.
In Humenyuk’s poem, this war is not just the war against the living, but also against the dead and the very cycle of life: against our cultural heritage, memory, history, and the ecosystems of the land itself. In one of his poems, explosions disturb the dead, and make them “die again” in their graves. It is a reference to the Biblical Judgement Day. The end of memory is a veritable end of the world, and the banishment (“killing”) of ancestors (“the dead”) signifies the beginning of an irreversible annihilation. The enemy does not simply seek to destroy us physically, but to erase us completely. Humenyuk’s poetic intuition is razor-sharp. “What’s unnatural is when a shell/Fired from a HAIL rocket launcher/[…] strikes a field./It’s unnatural to watch /Unharvested rye burning, /to listen to ground squirrels cry/while mice scurry in every direction” (Translated by Oksana Lushchevska and Michael Naydan). For Humenyuk, this kind of destruction is an attack on the cosmic order of things, not just on a territory, as this is a war on all the living beings and the notion of life itself.
On January 7, 2024 Marianna Kiyanovska, a Ukrainian poet, wrote to me that the poet and soldier Maksym Kryvtsov (1990-2024) had been killed. This is the worst news imaginable, she said. Maksym Kryvtsov participated in the Euromaidan, and was in the army in 2014-2019. He re-enlisted in 2022. His first collection of poems was published in 2023. He was a photographer, a poet, a writer, and a filmmaker. His poems about the Bucha massacre were widely read, reposted, and translated online.
There is probably not a person in Ukraine who does not immediately recognize the lines “He moved to Bucha in mid-March 2021/rented a small apartment in the basement and got a cat/ whose fur was the color of fudge on eclairs…” (Translated by Anastasia Khudaverdyan). The poem reimagines the lives of several Bucha victims whose photographs stunned the world. Russian troops killed these innocent civilians and let their bodies lie openly on the streets. We all remember the man on the bicycle and the woman with red nail polish. This final spectacle and posthumous disrespect must have prompted Maksym to write about these people, to restore their humanness, to show them not as random decomposing bodies but as human beings, each with their unique universe, desires, hopes, and loves. There is nothing about human beings that is insignificant, these poems imply, not a single detail. A human being cannot be reduced to numbers or even photographs.
The refrain of the poem sounds haunting: “Here lies number 176, rest in peace./Here lies number 201, rest in peace. /Here lies number 163, rest in peace. /Here lies number 308, rest in peace” (Translated by Anastasia Khudaverdyan). In Ukrainian, the expression “rest in peace” is actually “вічная пам’ять” that translates as “memory eternal.” This is a sentiment present also in Humenyuk: the preservation of memory and legacy, resisting that which philosophers call the Great Nothingness. The mission of a poet is to be a keeper of memory, of words, or knowledge; but also of ethics and empathy. Maksym Kryvtsov’s poetry is incredibly empathetic; it is infused with love towards the world and fellow living beings. Poetry, to him, seems to be the antidote not only to forgetfulness, but also to cynicism of war, or media, of our technologically advanced world that is too tired to empathize, having seen one gruesome image too many.
…In one of his last poems, Maksym Kryvtsov imagines his own body also mingling with the earth, slowly becoming one with it, decomposing: “My head rolls from tree to tree/like tumbleweed/or a ball/from my severed arms/violets will sprout in the spring/my legs/will be torn apart by dogs and cats…” (Translated by Christine Chraibi). He finishes the poem on a subtle note of either hope or acceptance of the inevitable: “How I wish it were spring/to finally/bloom/
as a violet.” After his death, the image of a poet as a violet flower appeared in the works of poets, painters, and animators. The poet is often accompanied by an orange cat. It is rumored that Maksym’s orange tabby cat that lived with him in his dugout died from the same explosion that killed Maksym.
…I reread their poems and realize: they have left us with so much. They were forced out of this world too early. Many of their words will remain unspoken, but we are fortunate to be able to read what they did manage to write. They made the figure of a Poet visible as a keeper of memory, language, and compassion. They fought for freedom and justice in more ways than one, as writers, as human beings, as fellow Ukrainians. As Askold Melnyczuk says in his blurb on Victoria Amelina’s non-fiction book, “Amelina has completed her worldly task, leaving us with the legacy of her example: of grace under pressure, as Hemingway defined courage, and of the abiding importance of her mission.” So has Kryvtsov. So has Vakulenko.
We are still hoping that Humenyuk will return from the war, and as we wait, we have poetry to hold on to.
“Becoming a Tree/ From Which Madness/ Will Never Gather Fruit” is a quote from a poem of Volodymyr Vakulenko «Стань деревом», с.116-117. Володимир Вакуленко-К. Я перетворююсь… Щоденник окупації. Вибрані вірші. Видавництво Vivat, Харків, 2024.
Sources used or mentioned:
Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine. An anthology. Eds. Oksana Maksymchuk and Max
Rosochinsky. Acamedica Studies Press, 2017.
Victoria Amelina. Looking at Women Looking at War. St. Martin’s Press: New York, 2025.
Вікторія Амеліна. Свідчення. Вірші. Видавництво Старого Лева, Львів, 2024.
Борис Гуменюк. Вірші з війни. Ярославів Вал, Київ, 2015.
Максим Кривцов. Вірші з бійниці. Наш Формат, 2023.
Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Archive. Compiled by Amelia Glaser, University of California,
Володимир Вакуленко-К. Я перетворююсь… Щоденник окупації. Вибрані вірші.
Видавництво Vivat, Харків, 2024.
Володимир Вакуленко-К. Татусева книга. Видавництво Старого Лева, Львів
