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 thirty-four translators.

The anthology offers short selections of poems by fifty 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.

Section 2 of the anthology highlights the explosive 1920s, a time of intense creative activity connected with the political stabilization of Soviet Ukraine and the policy of “Ukrainianization,” which entailed unprecedented support for the Ukrainian language (in contrast to the aggressive Russification of previous and future periods). Wildly productive debates raged over the forms and functions of literary Ukrainian, with strong arguments from the avant-gardistes, Neo-Classicists, proletarian and agricultural camps, and many others. (Interested readers should check out the two-volume anthology Ukrainian Literary Modernism of the 1910s–mid-1930s, which focuses entirely on this thrilling period.)

In historical hindsight, the 1920s in Soviet Ukraine also stand out as a window of relative creative freedom, bracketed by the violence and chaos of the preceding decade (which saw the First World War, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and the multitude of warring parties between 1918-1922) and the more pointed political violence of the 1930s, which in Ukraine began with collectivization and mass famine, and continued into the dark years of Stalinist purges. The poems of Yevhen Pluzhnyk (1898-1936), while known for their lyrical lightness, also deal candidly with the filth, spectacle, and senselessness of wartime violence, which Pluzhnyk experienced firsthand. Pluzhnyk is also one of many brilliant Ukrainian poets of the period whose life and career ended prematurely amid the Terror of the 1930s.

AM & OK