Starting in July 2026, Circumference is publishing a bimonthly series of posts featuring poems from the anthology A Ukrainian Century: Poems, 1900–1999 (forthcoming in Fall 2027 from World Poetry Books).

Edited by Ostap Kin and Ainsley Morse, and featuring the work of twenty-plus translators, the anthology offers short selections of poems by fifty-two poets spanning the heady, peripatetic, and often catastrophic twentieth century. Aware that no anthology can adequately represent the entirety of poetry written in Ukrainian over a one-hundred year period, the editors have made a selection that is simultaneously idiosyncratic and representative—one that allows readers to extrapolate a broader picture from the fascinatingly particular.

To wit, this first post highlights the work of early modernist poet Ahantanhel Krymsky (1871–1942). “Before a Portrait” and other poems by Krymsky appear in the first of the anthology’s eight sections, alongside other “modernist precursors” who laid the foundation for further twentieth-century developments in Ukrainian poetry. Today, these poets are considered foundational for Ukrainian letters: Lesia Ukrainka, Ivan Franko, Mykola Vorony. Krymsky is better known for his substantial scholarly contributions to the study of middle Eastern and Turkic languages and cultures (including Crimean Tatar, his own nationality on his father’s side) as well as, to some extent, for his novel Andriy Lahovsky. But his poems bring together his creative and intellectual activity—as he writes in another poem addressed to an absent beloved: “You aid my faith in truth, in science.”

As “Before a Portrait” (translated by Alex Averbuch) demonstrates, Krymsky wrote openly about his homosexuality, making it a fact of his darkly lyrical poems as well as his personal biography. “Before a Portrait” (1908) is an elegy, a lament for the dead, but one that brings no consolation: instead, it dives headlong into the grave, detailing in graphic and gruesome detail the terrible distance time has wrought between the speaker and his beloved Victor. The stark contrast between the beautiful portrait and grim reality, and the refusal to offer any reassurance or redemption (right up until the abrupt closing line: “Nothing!.., nothing!.. Limitless nothing!”), makes the poem sharply modern.

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