Dr Ketaki examines the influence of the Ukrainian poet Victoria Amelina on war poetry, comparing her work with other war writers, exclusively for Different Truths.
In 2022, whenever I used to navigate frequently to the BBC or CNN channels, I felt perturbed by the devastating news of the ruthlessness inflicted on the Ukrainians by the Russians. The poets and writers of Ukraine kept me preoccupied and I kept on gleaning the snippets of news about their research and writings in these crucial times.
Writers can reconnoitre a situation the best and the poets are already declared as “unacknowledged legislators of the world” by the legendary poet, PB Shelley. While surfing the news bulletins and magazines, I came across a name, Victoria Amelina, a poet and public intellectual, who carried on her research even under the threats of missiles and fusillades. She kept on recording the erosive times in her poems and writings registering the diehard efforts of the invading Russian army, hell-bent on shattering the national identity of Ukraine.
Amelina at the War Spot
Amelina helped her son move his base to Poland and she decided to stay back at the war spot herself to witness the ruins her land was turning into. At the time, Kyiv faced a fierce invasion in the early summer, Amelina, wrote these lines while witnessing an explosion from her apartment, “The war is when you can no longer follow all news and cry about all neighbours who died instead of you a couple of miles away. Still, I want to not forget to learn the names.” (cf. The Guardian, July 3, 2023). On the 1st day of July 2023, Amelina died of wounds caused by a Russian missile attack on a pizza bistro in the eastern town of Kramatorsk.
Amelina used to explore the artists and painters of her country as well. Before she met her sad demise, she concentrated on the works of contemporary Ukrainian artist, Polina Rayko, whose creations had mostly been destroyed by the inundations caused by the collapse of the Kakhovka dam. Yes, art is long though life is short. But if that life is threatened with a disaster, then who would remain in the world to appreciate the artwork? This very thought troubled Amelina, who had even ventured to interview womenfolk who survived Russian occupation till then.
Amelina, an Intrepid Soul
Amelina was an intrepid soul, who was not oblivious to the responsibilities she had towards her nation, which went into doldrums before her eyes, snatching off the light from her own eyes even. After her tragic death, Uilleam Blacker had taken the onus of translating “Poem about a Crow,” penned by Amelina:
In a barren springtime field
Stands a woman dressed in black
Crying her sisters’ names
Like a bird in the empty sky
She’ll cry them all out of herself
The one that flew away too soon
The one that had begged to die
The one that couldn’t stop death
The one that has not stopped waiting
The one that has not stopped believing
The one that still grieves in silence
She’ll cry them all into the ground
As though sowing the field with pain
And from pain and the names of women
Her new sisters will grow from the earth
And again, will sing joyfully of life
But what about her, the crow?
She will stay in this field forever
Because only this cry of hers
Holds all those swallows in the air
Do you hear how she calls
Each one by her name?
(indebted to The Guardian, Jul 3, 2023, for all this information).
First World War poets like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Rupert Brooke are still read with much passion. When I had been fortunate enough to pay my regards to Owen on my tour to Oxford, I came to know of a memorable fact as well. The stained-glass window in All Saints Church, Dunsden Green, where Owen stayed for a couple of years from 1911 to 1913, had been inspired by his poem, “Deep under Turfy Grass”.
Tagore’s Influence on Owen
And just as I was about to head towards St. Giles from there to have a dekko at the collection of Ashmolean Museum, I heard of Tagore’s influence on Owen from a friend who accompanied me on that visit. Coming to St. Giles, I went to the Internet café instead and began surfing the documents related to Owen. Yes, Gabriella was not wrong. Owen’s mother, Susan Owen, wrote a letter to Rabindranath Tagore (in 1920, when Tagore was in London), which ran as follows:
Dear Sir Rabindranath,
I have been trying to find (the) courage to write to you ever since I heard that you were in London…but the desire to tell you something is finding its way into this letter today…
It is nearly two years ago, that my dear eldest son went out to the War for the last time and the day he said Goodbye to me—we were looking together across the sun-glorified sea –looking towards France with breaking hearts—when he, my poet son, said these wonderful words of yours… ‘when I leave, let these be my parting words: what my eyes have seen, what my life received, are unsurpassable.’ And when his pocketbook came back to me –I found these words written in his dear writing—with your name beneath. (cf. “A Strange Meeting of Minds” by Somak Ghoshal in The Mint, 28 June 2014).
Horror of Holocaust
Holocaust came with its horror and intimidation during the Second World War, none can gainsay the fact. Elie Wiesel, who won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1986, had written a memoir in 1960, titled Night. In Night, Wiesel narrated his spine-chilling experiences in different Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald n 1944-45, towards the end of the Second World War. In about 100 pages or so, he had recorded his loss of faith in humanity and compassion starting from his hometown, Sighet, Romania, to all the concentration camps he had been tossed with his father.
He was a young caregiver to his father till his death in ne such hell, after being roughed up mindlessly. He incurred wounds and developed dysentery, which led him to his death in January 1945. Wiesel hid in the upper bunk while his father was being brutally beaten up in a bunk below. The memoir comes to a close just when the US Army came up to Buchenwald to liberate them, sometime around April 1945.
Picture design by Anumita Roy
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