Dislocation: Russophone Poetry Against the War in Ukraine
A SSEES Culture and Society in Modern Russia seminar with Prof Julia Nemirovskaya. Please note that this event will be delivered in Russian.
Dislocation: Russophone Poetry Against the War in Ukraine
26 Feb 2025, 16:00 – 18:00
In her lecture, Prof Julia Nemirovskaya will discuss the phenomenon of the current abundance of war poetry, the dynamics of silence and profusion, the themes and evolution of styles in protest war poetry, and provide an analysis of selected individual poems, followed by a Q&A and discussion.
Since February 2022, she been collecting protest poems about the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine by Russophone authors from Ukraine, the former USSR, Russia, and the diaspora in a repository called Kopilka (“Coin Bank” in English).
The Kopilka group published its first bilingual Anglo-Russian anthology in 2022 (Disbelief, Smokestack Books, UK). That collection, along with a French anthology based on Kopilka poetry (Non à la guerre, Caractères, Paris, 2022), reflected the shock felt by the Russian-speaking world at the start of the full-scale war. Recently, we released a larger, 500-page war poetry anthology, Dislocation (Slavica, 2024), as a sequel to Disbelief. The group envisions a third volume, tentatively titled Rupture, with the three titles representing stages of poets’ attempts—with varying degrees of success—to distance themselves from Russian culture, its references, and sometimes the language itself.
Please note this event will be delivered in Russian.
Prof Julia Nemirovskaya
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As one of the “New Wave Poets” of the 1980s–90s, she was a member of the renowned Kovaldzhi seminar and the Moscow Poetry Club. Since 1988, she has lived in Sweden and, since 1991, in the USA. She has published four collections of verse and short stories, a novel, and a book on Russian cultural history, Inside the Russian Soul: An Historical Survey of Russian Cultural Patterns (McGraw-Hill, 1997, 2001), as well as two anthologies of protest wartime poetry, Disbelief (Smokestack Books, 2022) and Dislocation (co-edited with A. Krushelnitskaya, Slavica Publishers, 2024). Her work has appeared in Asymptote, GLAS, Literary Review, Znamya, LRS-Lettres Russes, Bonniers Litterära Magasin, and elsewhere and has been translated into several European languages. Her 26 plays have been staged in theaters across Russia, the US, Germany, and France.
She currently teaches and directs student theater at the University of Oregon.
Further information
Ticketing
Pre-booking essential
Cost
Free
Open to
All
Availability
Yes