Disbelief 100 Russian Anti-War Poems

Grewelthorpe: Smokestack Books, 2023.

Item #11111
ISBN: 9781739772277

Paperback, 300 pp.

Putin’s war in Ukraine has been met by outrage and disbelief around the world. Since the start of the war, writers in Russia, Ukraine and the Russian diaspora have been expressing their opposition to the invasion in an extraordinary outpouring of public and private poetry. Disbelief/Немыслимо presents some of the most moving and hard-hitting of these poems in Russian and English, by 100 poets including Polina Barskova, Tatiana Voltskaya and Misha Aizenberg. Several poets have been included here anonymously for fear of persecution; others have left Russia.
In his lectures on Vladimir Vernadsky, Vsevelod Ivanov argued that in the noosphere – the intellectual cloud around the planet – wars and natural disasters create voids which must be filled by the work of poets, artists, musicians, and philosophers. This powerful tragic chorus is just such an attempt, expressing a shared sense of incredulity at a war in the heart of twenty-first century Europe that has left millions displaced and tens of thousands dead or imprisoned; that has triggered an international economic crisis, turned Russia into a pariah state and the Russian language into a tool of cultural erasure and oppression.

In two languages English and Russian./На английском и русском языках.

Price: $15.00