“We offered ourselves to the war”: soldier Yaryna Chornoguz published a collection of poems straight from the front line

“To be a poet in Ukraine is to cry forever in poems on still fresh graves,” says Master of Philology Yaryna Chornoguz in her new book. But sobbing is hardly her only mission, because she has been on the front lines since 2021, “because poets in this country are the first to hear the war…”.

The collection of poems has a title [desain: оборона присутності], where square brackets are an important part of the name. It is about to appear in bookstores. Why this book is worth a place in the home library – reflects the book reviewer UP. Life Olena Lysenkowho has already read the collection.

This book is about how war creates a new language, makes you explore topography by touch, and makes you want to die first. As he wrote in the preface to the poetry collection scout Yaryna Chornoguz Ukrainian philosopher Vakhtang Kebuladze: “when one of the soldiers turns out to be a poet, the defense of presence takes on a new dimension”.

I asked Vakhtang why this book is important to him. He was not philosophically direct in his answer: “Ukrainian books about Russia’s war against Ukraine form our historical narrative, our cultural and political subjectivity. Poems about war, which do not poeticize its horrors, but reveal the depths of human existence that come to light during the war, are cultural heritage not only of Ukraine, but also of all humanity. And when the author of the poems is a military woman, her own unique experience speaks in them.”

In “Defense…” Yaryna unexpectedly conducts a dialogue with her colleague from the pen Galina Kruk and her thesis “I’m sorry that poetry does not kill”. Chernoguz seems to be writing to her in response “…learned to kill with poems”. This whole collection is not just a rethinking, it is about acquiring new skills of humanity in the conditions of war.

“God speaks with death, answers with iron”

But Yaryna most clearly conducts a dialogue with Martin Heidegger. It is not for nothing that the title of the collection contains its important concept, which has influenced almost the entire European philosophy – “desain”. A soldier of the Armed Forces of Ukraine seems to be saying to a German thinker: look, I am right here in the very heart of your existence, your vaunted “here-being”, right here beyond all categories and concepts. There is me, the subject, and not only my thought makes this existence possible. Your “objective here-being” does not exist without my weapon and my defense:

“Poetry is no longer true if it does not bleed” from a poem [непокараність]. And there: “Language has lost its rhyme and is now hunting for meanings”.

If we believe the philosopher Heidegger, language is the home of being. But in war, if you believe the soldier Chernoguz, the house of existence is empty, because speech is mute. So, even God speaks to us in a “silent” language – deaths And we have to respond to him in the language of silence, that is, the language of iron and blood.

Donbas landscapes and Cossack graves also do not speak to us in poetic language on these pages – it is impossible to sing Cossack songs about Siverskyi Donets during the war:

“Siversky Donets at the beginning of my century / you became the Styx on which fishermen fish / and in which shells lie that did not reach / to one of your shores.”

Chernoguz offers us to cross this Styx together and find ourselves in a new dimension, which the author calls the afterlife. The expressiveness of language, its poetics in this afterlife loses its meaning: “a century ago a bag of 200 would be called a white shroud for an angel in the flesh”.

Old poetics prevents Chernoguz from telling about the war and remaining honest. But not only poetry can be changed by martial law. Our afterlife becomes a fiction, a delusional hiding place, if we reject pain: “in this country everything is a lie / except pain / in this country / only pain can tell the truth”.

However (and here again a paradox) the Ukrainian language is for a soldier of the Armed Forces of Ukraine the cozy home to which her being seeks to return. I thought about this when I read an intimate reference to someone who died in the war and had Ukrainian tattoos on his body. And here’s this: “the truth is so long sought and rises in the east / In my language”.

This book is about the paradox of life during the war and the afterlife – the only possible form of existence for people who have seen death. “We met with Yaryna in a Ukrainian city near the front, and I heard words from her that I will never forget: “We learned to live in peace with war.” In such a paradoxical way, she briefly and aptly described the experience of a person on the front line.” – writes in the preface Vakhtang Kebuladze.

Vakhtang’s friend and another participant in the trip to this front-line city is a philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko told me that life itself speaks through Yarina Chornoguz’s lyrics:

“For me, Yaryna is one of those people who express the depth and courage of Ukrainianness with her being, her actions, and her texts. Her texts are more than literature. They are born in battles, at the risk of life, born when in the hands – a machine gun, a reconnaissance drone or first aid equipment. In these texts, life itself speaks – in a situation where it meets death so closely – and in this meeting the value of life shines through even more acutely.”

Yaryna Chornoguz with Volodymyr Yermolenko, Vakhtang Kebuladze and other participants of the Ukrainian PEN trip. Photo from Volodymyr Yermolenko’s page