‘Lament and battle cry’: poetry from wartime Ukraine

Fiona Benson: I’d like to start with biography. Artur, you were born in 2001 and came of age as a writer during the ‘quiet war’, between 2014 and 2022, and then full-scale Russian invasion. How did you come to writing and how has it been affected by the war? Or is war all you have ever known?

Artur Dron΄: I wrote my first texts back in school, but I began writing regularly and thinking of myself as a poet at the age of seventeen. At that time, I was a first-year university student and had just moved to Lviv. At seventeen, I decided that I wanted to work in literature and made writing the main focus of my life.

As for the impact of the full-scale war, after the invasion I stopped writing and lost faith in words, language, and literature. It took a lot of time to reflect on these concepts again and to understand whether they still held any meaning in such a horrific time. Fortunately, I came to realise that they did. Half a year later, I started writing again, but it was a completely different kind of writing than during my student years – concise, blunt, clear, compressed, stripped of metaphors and various literary devices. In my opinion, it felt more appropriate for the time and circumstances.

FB: Yuliya, you were already a well-established poet before the war began. What were your themes and interests before the war? How has the war changed your writing?

Yuliya Musakovska: I’ve always been interested in human nature and the psychology of relationships. I was a love poet: one of my most popular poems is written in the form of wedding vows. My work explored the societal expectations and challenges faced by women. 

The beginning of Russian aggression in 2014 became a turning point – our home and lives were in danger. The unpunished evil of the past returned. War crept into my poetry and never left. Since the Revolution of Dignity, I also felt and wrote about a different kind of love: for my people and their strength, unity, resilience. But writing about war from a distance is different than experiencing it directly, when your city is being bombed and your friends are killed. I never thought I’d write poems about the aggressor’s war crimes. In 2022, my poetic language shattered – metaphors seemed dead and worthless – but I had to piece it back together. Now it feels like using a broken arm that has never fully healed.

FB: Yuliya, the first time I met you was quite soon after the full-scale invasion, when you came to the UK to spread the word about the war and talk about what was happening to your country and its writing community by sharing biographies and poems by Ukrainian poets. How central do you think poetry has been to the war effort?

YM: If anything can speak of the unspeakable, it is poetry. It has the tools to convey both the most beautiful and the most horrible things. It gives a home to intense emotions and provides a language for both lament and battle cry. Poetry has always been big in Ukraine, with the poet Taras Shevchenko regarded as one of the nation’s founding fathers. Since the full-scale invasion began, countless poems have been written to cope with the new, terrible reality, to document the truth, and to process loss. Travelling across continents with my work, I have felt it was my duty to share the voices and stories of those who cannot do so themselves: the fellow writers we have lost to Russian aggression and those defending our lives on the frontline. 

FB: Artur, you volunteered for the 125th Separate Territorial Defence Regiment and much of We Were Here is about life as an active soldier. I’m trying to imagine this as a writer – how and where did you get the poems down? 

AD: There are no grand, romanticised stories here about dodging bullets, pulling a notebook out of my back pocket, and scribbling poems in a trench with a pencil. In reality, it’s much more down-to-earth. Poets know that the act of writing things down is just one part of creating a poem – almost the final step. Thinking, reflecting, and assembling words in your head can happen under any circumstances. And when I found myself in calmer conditions – like in villages near the front where we were stationed, with access to communication and some free time – I could write things down, rewrite them several times, and refine them into their final, definitive form.

FB: I’m going to push you a little bit here, Artur. Can you think of a specific poem and describe exactly where you were when you wrote it and worked on it? How did it first come to you? A word? A phrase? What tools did you use to note it down? Can you give me some specifics? I’m always hungry to know how a poem was conjured. 

AD: Alright, I’ll try to help you with this! I can tell you about the poem ‘Grandma’ for example. I wrote it in the village of Yakovlivka, near Kramatorsk. Those were our first weeks in the Donetsk region but we hadn’t yet been to the front line, under shelling or in combat. At that time, we were in the rear, preparing the defensive line in case the Russians broke through towards Kramatorsk. One day, I was talking on the phone with my grandmother. It was a touching conversation – full of sadness and longing for each other. And at the end of the call, she said something about ‘taking a child by the hand and walking with them along the road.’ After that conversation, I wrote the poem ‘Grandma’, which is the monologue of a grandmother to her grandson at war. The poem is made up of my own grandma’s words, only slightly adapted. It all began with the phrases ‘Don’t tell me where you are’ and ‘Take a child by the hand and walk with them along the road.’ Between those sayings, that’s where the poetry lies. I wrote the poem in the Notes app on my phone and later copied it into a notebook in the house. It’s one of the first poems I wrote in the battle zone. 

FB: Yuliya, in poems like ‘Spartan Boy’ and ‘Ashes and Wax’ in The God of Freedom, you write about what it takes to care for the traumatised, to be the one who tries to sew them up. There is also some guilt about not fighting on the frontline in poems like ‘A Soldier is Born’. How important do you think the witness of those on the home front and in exile is? 

YM: In Russia’s genocidal war, every one of us in Ukraine is a target. We owe our lives to our defenders and are forever indebted to them. All of us have been affected, but the trials our soldiers endure are unprecedented. Today we say: you either serve in the defence forces, or you work to support them. It’s only fair – everyone must make their contribution to the resistance.

Survivor’s guilt is always there, especially after you’ve lost family members or friends. But also, each time tragic news comes you know it could have been you, killed in your sleep by a Russian missile or drone, or tortured to death in the occupied territories. Our wartime reality is multi-layered: there is the frontline, the home front constantly under attack from missiles and drones, and exile. The full portrayal of the Ukrainian experience requires the presence of both soldiers and civilians, including the displaced. In literature, I believe people look for stories they can recognise themselves in – and there is space for all of them.

FB: Children are important subjects in both your work. Would you like to say a little bit about why?

AD: I believe there are many reasons, but to put it briefly: children embody both the deepest pain of this war and the greatest hope. They are the answer to questions like: what are we fighting for? Is all this sacrifice worth it? And so on. Children are the main answer to the most important questions.

YM: Motherhood inspired me deeply. I was never particularly drawn to children before having my own, but then my son’s childhood unfolded before my eyes as a miracle I wanted to explore. It also took me back in time to mine, letting me relive the moments of enjoying fairy tales and discovering the world anew. In The God of Freedom, I have several poems written for my son, as well as in each collection I’ve published since 2011. 

It is heart-wrenching to think of the children killed by the Russian war, the unimaginable pain of their parents. This pain reaches anyone who can feel. Recording their stories in poetry allows us to grieve together. We must never forget; we must bring the evildoers to justice. It is also unbearable to watch your own child be traumatised in wartime. A different kind of nightmare is imagining your children facing the horrors of occupation, stripped of freedom and identity, militarised and used as a tool of war against their homeland, or kidnapped and taken to Russia to be raised by strangers. As parents, we are always looking for ways to protect them, for the counter-spell, if I may quote your own work, Fiona. Poetry can also be that kind of spell, a chant, a prayer.

FB: You both wrestle with faith and religious imagery in different ways. Yuliya, in one of your poems God is napping on a pine branch, and in ‘The God of Submission’ you are furious with Him. Artur, you adapt religious formats and texts (I’m thinking of ‘Prayer’, ‘Trisagion’ and ‘First Letter to the Corinthians’), often as a form of revolt and protest. Could you both say a little bit about how faith (or the lack of it) interacts with your writing?

YM: One of my greatest influences was Pavlo Tychyna, a Ukrainian poet from the 1920s and early 1930s Executed Renaissance generation. In his early works, he was a pantheist – a believer that the universe itself is God. I sense the divine presence in many things. Although I am a Christian, I still feel a bit pagan, since my writing has been rooted in ancient Greek myths as much as in the Bible, and I’m rather sentimental about our ancestors’ beliefs in the forces of nature. In my poem, the god of submission stands as the antagonist to the god of freedom – their struggle is eternal, reflecting the conflict between two philosophies: to resist or to submit.

In contemporary Ukrainian wartime poetry, we often speak to God, regardless of our personal faith. We have many pressing questions for the higher powers: why has this war been allowed, why are we the ones being killed, how can evil go unpunished, and when will retribution come? At the same time, we know we must save ourselves.

AD: In my case, a personal relationship with God is one of the foundations of existence. It’s a very important aspect of life, which is why it appears so often in my writing. I only write about what is most important to me, and I do it in the most important way I can – with the highest level of honesty. And that always goes hand in hand with matters of faith.

FB: You are both poets who write about Ukrainian history in your poems. Artur, you write about Vasyl Stus, a poet whose opposition to the Russian regime saw him die in a Russian internment camp after thirteen years. It seems to me there is a long history of defence embedded in Ukrainian literature. Do you see yourself as part of this tradition?

AD: Yes, and for me, it’s very important to feel like a part of the Ukrainian literary tradition. It’s crucial to understand this sense of continuity, to feel myself as a literary descendant of Stus, Yevhen Pluzhnyk, or the writers of the Executed Renaissance. And defending Ukraine in this war has always also meant, for me, defending Ukrainian literature and culture.

FB: Yuliya, your poems carry history through a personal lens – I’m thinking of ‘For the High Wave’ and ‘The Inheritance’. How important do you think this alternative historical record is?

YM: History records events and literature records stories. This first poem was a way to tell my father’s story – how he was repressed in the 1970s by the Soviet regime for his free spirit and desire to explore languages and cultures. For a long time, my father didn’t want me to share his story publicly. Fortunately, poetry is a genre that allows the author to reveal and conceal as much as they wish. It became the way I could render and process those events. Yet his story was only one of many similar ones – of young lives and bright minds ruined during the Soviet occupation. ‘The Inheritance’ speaks of many family traumas: deportation, repression, and survival through the Second World War – and how these experiences shaped the lives of my grandparents and their entire generation. They were always reluctant to talk about these things, but understanding what they went through gives us a stronger foundation and a deeper awareness of who we are.

FB: Artur, you often use the dramatic monologue form and your poems speak in different voices – what does that allow you to do? Where do you get the inspiration for your voices?

AD: I do this when I want to write about an experience I haven’t personally lived through. For example, the experience of a mother sending her son off to war. I can’t write about that from my own perspective – I know what it’s like to say goodbye to my mother, but I have no idea what it feels like to see your son go. So if I want to tell that story truthfully and sincerely, the only way is to take the words of such a mother and turn them into literature.

That’s how the poem ‘Mother’ was written. About ninety per cent of it consists of the real words of a soldier’s mother. I just slightly rearranged them and shaped them into a poem. My texts written from the perspectives of different people, roles, and experiences are the documented words of those who have actually lived through them – the only ones who have the right to speak about them. For instance, the poem ‘Wife’ is told from the voice of a woman speaking about her husband who was killed. I don’t have the moral right to speak about that horrific experience from my own voice. But I can take her words and put them into a book so that she is the one telling it.

FB: It amazes me that after everything you’ve been through there is so much love in your poems. You both begin with poems of love, and Yuliya in ‘The Sun Fox’ you have the terrific line ‘it’s good we didn’t save ourselves from the most audacious wonders’. Artur, your poem ‘the lights will never go out in your house’ is a kind of benediction and promise of wonder in the event of your death. How important are these moments of wonder, kindness, and love in your work?

YM: To persevere, we must find strength and look for light – in those beside us, in those who support us. The bright souls are the most visible in dark times. Love is what sustains us and never fades. Love is the most audacious wonder.

AD: You could say that this is exactly what I write about. Because I believe I don’t have a single book about the war. My texts – both poetry and prose – are about love. The love that exists in people, the love they hold on to, that helps them survive, that gives them motivation, that becomes the most central and important thing.

FB: Finally, war is such a creative bully – what will you write about when the war is over?

AD: Probably the same thing I write about during the war: the light in people.

YM: I carry with me the idea of writing a novel based on my father’s story. I also want to write a book of love poetry, if I can. I hope I still can.