Viktoria Amelina was a Ukrainian writer and war crimes investigator who died following a Russian missile attack upon the city of Kramatorsk in June 2023. More than once, I have read of Ukrainians referring to her as the person who could have written their great novel of national survival and resistance. (Her first novel was about the Maidan Revolution in 2014.) Even without such talk of future greatness, her life was cut off while she was very young – only thirty-seven. She ought to have had so much time, for whatever becoming was to be. Twelve other individuals died from that same attack, including four children. Who knows what futures they might have found or made for themselves also, if only the missiles had missed.
I found the small collection of Amelina’s poetry, Svidchennya / Testimonies, in a strange little bookstore in Amsterdam that specialises in Eastern European literature. Amelina only wrote a few poems before her death, and the collection is padded out with art and a lengthy chronology of her travels and prizes and a thoughtful afterward by the writer Sofia Chelyak. Really, I cannot complain about the size, for the daintiness of the book made it something I could carry around with me at work, snatching a few lines here and there. It also meant it was not intimidating, like a novel, for someone approaching it in the original Ukrainian.
“I don’t write poetry
I am a prose writer
It’s just that the reality of war
eats up punctuation
the coherence of a subject
the coherence
eats up
as if into our language
there fell a shell”
Amelina’s poems range from such broken, fragmented verse, to more structured poems where the line lengths are fuller, the punctuation orderly, and there is even a hint of a rhyme. All of them are responses to the invasion of her country. We can imagine something like the verse I quoted above being scribbled in a notebook as she sits in a jeep under fire, heading towards a frontline city to try to protect her people. Then there are the more reflective verses, where I picture her sitting in some sad anonymous hotel room (in New York, say, waiting for a prize or the chance to speak), thinking of all the people who are not there anymore, or who have lost so much:
“When Mira left her home, she took with her a bead from her curtains
When Tim left his city, he took a small stone from the street
When Yarka lost her garden, she took an apricot’s stone
When Vira left her home she took nothing
“I’ll be back soon,” she said,
And took not a thing at all”
The poem names these people, and goes on to list still more of these little things, these talismans and protectors against a sense of greater loss, that people take with them.
“And then your home will be in your pocket,
And there it will sleep
You should take your home from your pocket
In a safe place
When you are ready”
These lines are beautiful because they are humble. Often, narratives of war and trauma are about overcoming. Here, Amelina states clearly that it’s not for the poet to decide how the narrative looks – it’s for the person to decide for themselves. “When you are ready.” Take your time to mourn, to grieve, and only then start again.
The poem ends still more strikingly, for someone like me (or, I presume, you), reading this far distant from the direct horror of the war. The second-to-last verse runs like this: “And what would you take with you?” Literally, this is Amelina asking herself (the word “take” is in the feminine singular past), and she answers her question (these stories). But it’s just as much, by hanging there in a separate line, a question to ourselves as readers. Reading something like Amelina’s poetry requires us to put in these imaginative leaps. It’s a kind of moral obligation. Reading it and remaining detached would be like pressing your face against the barbed wire fence at the edge of a camp, viewing what’s inside as a spectacle instead an outrage to your fellow-feeling.
The importance of naming and individualisation is also highlighted in the poem “The Losses of the Ukrainian Army”. It begins by noting that these numbers are secret, but then goes on, as if straining against the injunction to keep silent, to start numbering them:
“There will be the neighbour, a rather eccentric one,
Who planted red flowers.
The friend who never told off anyone.
The translator, whom we loved so much.
That girl who annoyed everyone.
The artist whom everyone liked,
But, it seems, loved that girl.”
A comparison with this kind of writing which comes to my mind is the work of Anna Akhmatova, in her Requiem, written with her son imprisoned during the Great Terror but not published until long after: “and I pray not for myself alone, / but for all of them, who stood out there with me.” Such a concern for others is no different to Amelina’s involvement of ordinary people by telling their stories in her own poems. Likewise, when Akhmatova says “I would like to call everyone by name, / But the list is taken, and there’s nowhere else to help me find out” she shows the same concern for naming and victims as individuals.
Yet while Akhmatova’s poetry is inevitably far more accomplished as poetry, thanks to her huge experience and focused talent in that medium, Amelina’s poems, at least to me, are just as powerful – indeed, possibly even more so. The majority of the poems in Testimonies are short, but as we read them we have an awful sense that they are alive. The number of people who have had to leave their homes since Amelina’s passing has only increased with new incursions into Sumi and Kharkiv regions. The defence of southern Donetsk has collapsed, leaving only the north unoccupied. This year civilian casualties have increased significantly as the air attack has ramped up in scale. And of course, whenever Amelina lists those who have died, we have to add the line with her own name ourselves. It is impossible not to.
These days, too, the mood is worse than when Amelina was writing. Her poems come from a time when hope of a complete victory was higher. She has a poem from April 2022 that seems almost overly optimistic to me now: “The future – it’s what we ask ourselves about during a quiet moment: / Do you see it? / Can you see it?” Of course, the answer eventually is a kind of yes, a kind of affirmation. The Russians had already left Kyiv region in a “gesture of goodwill”, and by the end of the year they would have been driven back to the Dnepr in Kherson Oblast and lost most of the lands they occupied in Kharkiv Oblast. Yet with the exception of the Kursk incursion, which did not restore control over any Ukrainian land, subsequent Ukrainian offensives have been failures. Russia still has the upper hand on the front, the current US administration is not particularly friendly to Ukraine and fatigue is rising, both domestically and internationally.
The future, yes, I see it. But I do not look forward to it.
The poems are full of striking images, striking less because they are unexpected than because their truth is impossible to deny. Amelina was there from the beginning, volunteering, documenting what her own eyes witnessed and others passed on with words. There’s so much grief and loss, and so many childless women wandering homeless – it’s a mood like that conjured by Beckett at times, but retaining a more direct connection to real events in a way that heightens (for me) their impact. What I like about them is that they prove Adorno’s comment that “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz” except that which deals with it. A new barbarity has created a new (for Amelina) way of expression, and driven her from finely-tuned prose into this direct and damaged poetry.
Perhaps the main German-language poet of the Holocaust was Paul Celan, a writer whose highly-allusive, pared down, language makes him a real challenge for me to read and understand. (Incidentally, his birthplace is in today’s Ukraine.) Both he and Amelina reacted to the horrors they faced in a similar way – the destruction of punctuation, the shattering of extended lines. But one thing that differentiates them is this sense of hope: Amelina’s poetry occasionally retains narrative and therefore a sense that the chaos of life at war can still be brought into order somehow in a way that Celan’s, in my experience of him, does not.
All this is to say that these poems are not just recollections of war, but poetry in and of themselves, poetry that stands comparison with other writers, just as much as it brings sad pleasure on its own.
I read Amelina in the original Ukrainian, which is my first time reading an extended work in that language. I have no formal learning in it, aside from reading a few chapters of a “Colloquial Ukrainian” textbook to note the key grammar endings where they differ from Russian; all I do is speak that other language fluently. I had no particular intention of learning Ukrainian either. When the full-scale invasion began I subscribed to various Ukrainian news channels on Telegram so I could keep up with their perspective, and after a few months a number of them gradually switched language from Russian to Ukrainian. I was annoyed (as were many of their readers), but kept reading. Somehow, gradually, I stopped merely reading and began understanding too. The written languages are very similar in practice, so it was not hard. A comparison would be reading Dutch if you speak German and English. Even without knowing Dutch, you can understand much of what is written. As if by magic. Listening, however, is another story.
As a result of this, however, there’s something uncomfortable about my Ukrainian. A little bit like how the war effected Amelina’s poetry, it’s shaped my understanding of her country’s language. To give an example, I knew the word for “rape” in Ukrainian when I saw it here, but had to google the word for “flower”. I probably know, at this point, more ways of saying “to die” in Ukrainian, than I do in German, the language of the country where I actually live. I’ve come to recognise that Ukrainian is a beautiful language, but all the words I know in it are words of violence and horror.
But there’s another source of discomfort, too: the sheer ease of the language is disturbing. Coming from the “language of the occupier”, it’s like I’m not even learning Ukrainian as itself, but myself colonising it. Every time I come across a “new” word and it’s immediately guessable because it’s a word I know in Russian with a different prefix or using an “і” instead of an “и”, I feel like I’m cheating. Though I do try to view it the other way – that every Ukrainian word that I have to look up is the language proudly asserting its difference – it doesn’t quite wash away the distaste entirely, perhaps because the number of shared words seems so high.
Taras Schevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet (though he also wrote a large number of prose works in Russian, and a few poems), while imprisoned in what is today Kazakhstan, had a similar kind of problem. He found that his Ukrainian was beginning to collapse from being so long away from a Ukrainian-language community. He was making mistakes, for example by using Russian prefixes on his verbs instead of Ukrainian ones. All languages stand in continuity with every other, but Ukrainian and Russian are so close that the former is in practice forced to constantly be on watch for the words of the latter seeping in where they are not supposed to be. While reading Testimonies I sometimes found myself searching for words which in the end I could only find in Russian dictionaries.
All this is to say that, reading Amelina as a Russian speaker, you also have the shock of a language asserting itself:
“And this is also not poetry
Just the truth
Written in a column
Without punctuation
In Ukrainian
(That’s important)
To gather money for the AFU
And for my sister”
I am glad I read these poems, that I heard Amelina’s voice and was able to translate a few snippets of it here. (Out of copyright considerations I did not do more, but I’ve written to the rightsholder to ask if I can do the rest of the poems mentioned and will make a separate post if they agree). Many Ukrainian cultural figures like to tell us to stop reading Russians and start reading Ukrainians, but the fact remains that Ukrainian has few translators, even for authors as canonical in their tradition as Schevchenko, Ivan Franko, or Lesya Ukrainka. While I have my misgivings with a considerable amount of what these contemporary cultural figures say on this and other topics, the idea that we should all hear about Ukraine from its own people is something that there can be no reasonable argument against.
That is why I’m grateful to have the opportunity to share Amelina’s voice with the readers of this blog, as a small contribution to that end.
The original poems and others can be read on these pages:
“Жінко, він ще до тебе повернеться, твій Азов”: добірка поезій Вікторії Амеліної
“Наче у мову влучив снаряд”: добірка віршів Вікторії Амеліної про війну
Here you can read three of her poems, professionally translated:
