Marianna Kyanovskaya’s poetry today is one of the most important voices of struggling Ukraine. Struggling for what? After February 24, 2020, we faced the threat of a world war. We understand that the heroic sacrifice made today by Ukrainians, including poets fighting on the front lines, is done not only on behalf of the freedom of the Ukrainian people, but also in the name of the civilisation of freedom. Freedom has become a hated target of aggression by the genocidal regime of Putin’s Russia. But the crisis of the world we have lived in so far also has an internal source – our path to slavery in the post-truth era. By prioritising autocracy over democracy, the lust for wealth over the enslavement of the weak and excluded, we corrode from within and strengthen dictatorships that violate the freedom of other countries as well as our own citizens. We strengthen them militarily and economically, as we realised with horror in the case of Russia, but is it only that? 

The foundations of our spiritual life are crumbling. The language with which we were able to describe the world adheres less and less to reality. Imagination does not embrace modern forms of doing evil. In the face of the destruction of Aleppo and Mariupol, the words establishing our future in the ruins of World War II ring hollow: Never again. On the wane is so important in the culture of freedom to be oneself, giving way to the recurring words of Primo Levi from the Holocaust era: is this a man? We live in a time of urgent need to restore the credibility of words and the visionary power of imagination. Therefore, it is very telling that the European Poet of Freedom Award has been given to Marianna Kiyanovska. An award, we should add, given by Gdansk, the city of Solidarity, which placed words from a poem by Czesław Miłosz on a monument dedicated to workers killed by the communist regime: You who wronged a simple man / Bursting into laughter at the crime. / (…) Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. / You can kill one but another is born. / The words are written down, the deed, the date.

 Kiyanovska’s poetry leads us where there is no freedom. It is a journey through the circles of Dantean hell to the bottom of the abyss. For it to be possible at all, the poet renounces freedom, both individual and that contained in the Latin maxim: Fac sapias et liber eris – she does not pretend to the wisdom that would make her free. She is more concerned about others, inhumanly enslaved, often already dead. And she remembers the words of Hannah Arendt: Freedom is only possible between equals. 

 Marianna Kiyanovska in literally a few weeks wrote nearly two hundred poems in the series The Voices of Babyn Yar. Later, more were written, more than three hundred in all, only some of which made it into the book. They are set during the ten days after the Germans entered Kyiv on September 19, 1941. The worst began on the eve of the Yom Kippur holiday – 33,761 human lives were slaughtered in 38 hours. She can hear their voices. Now. That is, in modern Kyiv, while the war in Donbas is already underway. She hears primarily the voices of the Jewish victims, although there are also Ukrainian and German voices among them. She gives herself over to them, becoming their instrument and, in an ecstatic haunting, transcribing them into poetic text. The resulting poems resemble incantatory lamentations, artfully orchestrated with a classical order of rhythm and rhyme. On the other hand, in the semantic dimension they are governed by completely different laws, breaking up the established course of reasoning with violent punctuation, chaos of sensations, dream visions, speechless sobbing.

Kiyanovskaya’s poems, written, as it were, outside the protocol of judges’ and historians’ inquiries and outside the matrices of literary conventions, striking in their immediacy and the nakedness of their first-person account, make the question of the right to speak in other people’s voices, or the blurring of the line between the voice of victims and speaking on their behalf, unfounded. Serhiy Zhadan wrote that the voices haunting the poet exist within a single space, in a polyphony that includes the victims of both the Holodomor and the Holocaust, and therefore it is impossible to hear the voice of only “one’s” dead while suppressing the others. Through Kiyanovskaya’s poetic act, eschewing the boundaries of cultural or national divisions, a living testimony to the aftermath is born, through which all those martyred in the “sliced lands” become “ours” – “for death is truly to be together,” says the voice of Babin Yar. Freed from the “black pit” of collective oblivion, the voices, condemned by History to oblivion and namelessness, make freedom and write its new name.

Lightning meets water and wind. So titled, Marianna Kiaynovska composed her book of poetry from poems written between February and October 2023, adding a few from an earlier period. If we were tempted to read the title words as an excerpt from the apocryphal hexagram of the I Ching – Book of Changes, we should – following the poet’s voice – add more: Lightning meets memory and imagination. Above: the wind of imagination. Stimulating. Below: water of memory. Accepting. But fickle are the lines of fate, and poetry, to read them, tries to capture the world in transition. In one poem, a flash of lightning transforms into an apple tree of lightning – threatened by a fiery conflagration, the bloom and fragrance of the fruit are saved in the garden of poetry so that the imagination can free the memory. The bright thunder from the sky, lethal in the arsenal of war, transforms into a light over our home, helpful in pulling down the veils of memory. 

Urthona, the deity of imagination from William Blake’s poetic realm, reigns supreme in Kiyanovska’s land of poetry, along with Enitharmon, its female emanation. What brings the author of The Lightning closer to Blake and Miłosz hides in the belief that the only way out of the Land of Ulro is through the clearance of the imagination. We live in a land of disinheritance, and even if – as in today’s Ukraine – “the sky has fallen,” “we are still here.” “Here” points to the place from which the gods have departed, and the cries of the people are not heard by them. But everywhere here, in the Mariupol mars fields, in the “blooming fertile blooded lands,” there are still people and other non-human existences. And if so, this is where the work for the poet is. Water, even when it becomes steam, still remains water. 

Kiyanovska’s earlier book of poetry, collecting the output of two decades, was composed of 373 poems. That’s the boiling point of water in Kelvins. Which, not coincidentally, becomes prophetic. In the Land of Ulro there is still water, there is still life. All that is needed is to build a forge where the hammers of words transform the discharges in hearts into lightning speech. And it doesn’t have to be exclusively literary speech. Words from the forge of imagination incarnate through poesis, that is, the act of doing, and need the ability to transform the accumulated crumbs of light into the energy of goodness. For Viktoria Amelina, to whose memory the volume Lightning is dedicated, the only poetry possible in the face of war is “in Kharkiv / as a volunteer.” 

The speech of lightning gives voice to every gesture of the heart, everybody. We find it in the white rose’s complaint from Luise Glück’s poem, “…I have only / my body for a voice.” But thanks to this “only,” both the rose in the garden in Burlington, New England, and the inhabitants of the blue and yellow submarine, as well as the other creatures taken in by the new incarnation of Noah on the Ark of the Word, “can’t disappear to silence.” Water continues to be water, “we live during and after this war simply”. Above: the wind of imagination. Stimulating. 

Below: memory water. Accepting. Imagination cannot be left alone. The separation of Urthona and Mnemosyne is the source of cosmic drama. This knowledge Kiyanovska inherits from the twentieth century and recognizes its new dimensions in today’s Ukraine. Not techne alone is responsible for the Holocaust. Kiyanovska’s footnote to Zygmunt Bauman‘s Modernity and the Holocaust is precisely about imagination. If we put it at the service of modern technology, its boundaries are unimaginably expanded, but the most important one, called phronesis by the Greeks, which determines our humanity, is obliterated. We can regain it only through memory. The speech of lightning separates the grain from the chaff. Its wisdom is prudent, it does not moralize, it does not indulge in idealistic illusions, it values energy efficiency, but does not forget about life-saving. She makes us realize that more dangerous than crossing this boundary, is to obliterate it. Mnemosyne gives his heart to Urthona: “the basic component of memory is the will-directed, or at least intention-directed, work of the imagination. Remembering is one of the key elements of Aristotle‘s phronesis,” Kiyanovska says.

Coming across George Santayana’s words “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, we feel the need to add: But it is also important how we remember. We, today, through modern media – eyewitnesses of new tragedies unfolding in the former Soviet territories or in Israel. Kiyanovska writes not about remembering, not about the power of trauma to take away empathy, but about the culture of remembering: “teach me not to be silent / this war beyond memory to remember … teach me not to be silent / to roll over language with memory.” In the speech of lightning, the poem is a work of remembrance and strives to speak at last in a “full language” born of listening to the voices of the martyred, enslaved and silent. 

Krzysztof Czyżewski 

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