Documenting Catastrophe: Trauma, Poetic Form, and the Documentary Impulse in Contemporary Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian Poetry

• In Event: Slavic Documentary Poetry

Abstract

Documentary poetry in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine has emerged as a crucial medium for articulating both personal and collective trauma, particularly in the face of war, state violence, and historical erasure. This paper argues that documentary poetry in these three traditions develops through three distinct but interconnected subject structures, where personal and collective voices converge in fundamentally different ways. While sharing a common impulse to record and resist, these traditions diverge in their approaches to constructing subjectivity, negotiating historical truth, and transforming archival material into poetic form.
Through close readings of Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian texts, this study examines the contrasting strategies poets use to document catastrophe and how their roles oscillate between witness, archivist, and interpreter. The paper analyzes three key cases: the incorporation of judicial discourse in Russian poetry, where the legal framework is repurposed to expose the mechanisms of power, the use of oral memory and erasure in Belarusian poetic practice, and the fusion of direct witness accounts with lyricism in Ukrainian war poetry. These examples illustrate how documentary poetry challenges the binary between fact and form, history and subjectivity, testimony and artistic intervention.
Documentary poetry removes the need for belief in the narrator’s authority by splitting the narration between the subject of documentary poetry (“the authorial I”) that manifests her/himself in the structure of the text and the discursive subject (the “I” of a bearer of “another's word”). In doing so, contemporary post-Soviet documentary poetry both preserves and deconstructs historical truth, revealing poetry’s potential to bear witness while resisting fixed narratives of trauma and control.

Author

• Mariia Malinovskaia, Stanford U