Reading Ukrainian Literature in Wartime

The SBS Ukrainian program recently broadcast a recording of a conversation between Professor Mark Edele (Hansen Chair in History) and Emeritus Professor Marko Pavlyshyn (Monash University) to mark the launch of Marko Pavlyshyn’s new book, Ukrainian Literature: A Wartime Guide for Anglophone Readers as part of Mark Edele’s ‘Elements in Soviet and Post-Soviet History’ series, published by Cambridge University Press. This event was hosted by the Ukrainian Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand and chaired by Oksana Mazur (SBS Ukrainian) and Dr Iryna Skubii (Mykola Zerov Fellow in Ukrainian Studies). You can listen to the conversation via the YouTube link below and/or read the transcript below.

Oksana Mazur: Today we are talking about a new book written by Professor Marko Pavlyshyn, Ukrainian Literature: A Wartime Guide for Anglophone Readers. The introduction has been written and presented by Dr Iryna Skubii, Mykola Zerov Fellow in Ukrainian Studies at the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies.

Iryna Skubii: Dear guests, welcome to the book launch! Today we celebrate the publication of Marko Pavlyshyn’s new book, Ukrainian Literature: A Wartime Guide for Anglophone Readers which has recently been published by Cambridge University Press in its series ‘Elements in Soviet and Post-Soviet History’.

This event is hosted by the Ukrainian Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand.

Before I introduce our distinguished author, Emeritus Professor Marko Pavlyshyn, and the editor of this series, Professor Mark Edele, I would like to say a few words about this remarkable book and why it’s so important and special today.

Ukrainian Literature: A Wartime Guide for Anglophone Readers is a powerful and timely introduction to Ukrainian literature in English translation. While many Ukrainian authors have already been translated into English, there has been long a perception that a Ukrainian literature remains largely inaccessible to readers abroad and with this book Professor Pavlyshyn in fact proved the opposite.

What this book also shows us is that the de-colonisation of Ukrainian studies and literature began well before the past few years, though it has remained largely unnoticed by international audiences.

As a historian I also find it is very surprising and refreshing that Marko begins this book not with the distant past, but with the present, with the responses of Ukrainian poets and prose writers to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as well as the preceding eight years of war. This decision not only speaks to the urgency of the current moment, but also powerfully anchors Ukrainian literature in the lived experiences of today.

The book then takes the readers on a compelling journey back to Ukraine’s medieval past, ending with Prince Ihor’s campaign on the eastern and southern frontiers of Kyivan Rus’ against nomads—a history that may echo today in unexpected ways.

Another important feature of this book is its concise format. Only a writer as skilful as Professor Pavlyshyn could condense the entire Ukrainian literary history into just ten concise chapters. From my experience teaching the entirety of Ukrainian history in just ten lectures, I can say that it is an immensely challenging task, and I imagine that with a project as ambitious as this book, some topics have been included, others combined or excluded, and it would be great to hear later from the author about his decisions during the writing process.

At its core the book explores the long and complicated history between Ukraine and Russia. For many Anglophone and non-Ukrainian readers it may come as a revelation that the war has deep historical roots shaped by centuries of Russia’s imperial colonisation, political subjugation and repression and I believe that this book illustrates for us how literatures in Ukraine could tell us the story of their beginnings on Ukrainian land, building the nation, its entanglement and fight against empire and totalitarianism, national revolution and independence.

Although the book focuses primarily on texts written in Ukrainian, it’s also about the richness of Ukraine’s multilingual literary history. Here we can find about Polish, Russian, Jewish, Crimean Tatar writers, that have shaped Ukraine’s literary landscape.

Before we begin our conversation, let me introduce our author and editor.

Marko Pavlyshyn is Emeritus Professor of Ukrainian Studies at Monash university where he taught Ukrainian language and literature and was Director of the Mykola Zerov Centre of Ukrainian Studies. His scholarly specialisation is modern and contemporary Ukrainian literature and he’s the author of many books and publications on literature, culture, national identity of Ukraine, and postcolonial approaches to literature.

Our second speaker today, Mark Edele, is the inaugural Hansen Professor in History at the University of Melbourne. He is a historian of the Soviet Union and its successor states. A former Australian Research Council Future Fellow, he has served as Deputy Dean of Melbourne University’s Faculty of Arts. His publications include many books in Soviet history, Stalinism and the Second World War, and the most recent one titled Russia’s War against Ukraine: The Whole Story. Thank you.

Oksana Mazur: Interesting book, interesting time—Ukrainian literature during wartime for people who just speak English and other languages. Professor Marko Pavlyshyn, please tell us why did you decide to write this book during this time?

Marko Pavlyshyn: The war is a special challenge to anyone who is in solidarity with Ukraine. I asked myself: what can I do that will correspond to my expertise, but also help tell the Ukrainian story to a broader audience? So the idea of a book starting with the literature of the current war and then working backwards arose. Going through the various phases of Ukrainian literary history from the present to medieval times, it would reflect on how the opposition between an aggressive imperial power and a nation that recovered its independence thirty years ago and is determined to retain it is reflected in writing today, and how predecessors of that conflict appeared in past times.

Mark Edele: I was struck when re-reading the book before the launch about the important role of poetry in Ukrainian literature, not just now, but also historically, and I wonder if you have some thoughts on this essential role of poetry over other literary forms?

Marko Pavlyshyn: Yes, you are quite right, Mark. Poetry throughout Ukrainian literary history has been the dominant genre. In the period of the formation of the modern Ukrainian nation, Ukraine was subsumed as a colony within an imperial state. Ukraine struggled to create a literature which would be the foundation of a nation, rather already having a society as a basis on which literary culture could develop. For a long time Ukraine didn’t have novelists writing major novels and offering them to a large public able to read them and, more importantly, buy them. What was available was the form of poetry, a genre of shorter forms that is not dependent on a large market and doesn’t require the full investment of a writer’s time and energy—as the production of the 19th century’s long realistic novel did, for example.

Today the reason for the predominance of poetry is different. This is a time when many people who have not thought of themselves as poets are so moved by the experience of war and the suffering occasioned by it that they turn to poetry as a means to express their emotions, sometimes their outrage and their reflections, and they can do this in short forms much more easily than in long forms. You can write a poem in the gap between one shelling and the next. You can write a poem as you’re sitting in the compartment of a train, fleeing your home city. You can write a poem at night as you’re trying to de-stress and tapping away at your computer and allowing words to shape themselves. It’s something that is spontaneous and therefore appropriate to the terrible character of the times in which Ukrainians live today. Later on, no doubt, there will be the long prose works that reflect on the war experience. The big works about war always come retrospectively.

Mark Edele: Yes, and of course the other aspect of that is that poetry as a short form is also particularly well suited to social media and that entire social media landscape we operate in, right?

Marko Pavlyshyn: Exactly. There is no need for that protracted filtration process where the poet creates a collection and submits it to a journal or a publishing house. Every person can be his or her own publisher today, and people take that opportunity and use it to good effect.

Mark Edele: Now, this is an existential war right for Ukraine and for Ukrainians and cynics might say writing poetry or writing about poetry might be a waste of energy which is better spent fighting and we together organise an entire online seminar series called Ukraine Writes Back, right? So we must be thinking that there is something useful to that process of writing back. So I would like you to invite you to reflect a little bit about the role of literature in wartime and then also the role of a book like yours, a guide to the Ukrainian literature at war, for readers outside of Ukraine who read in English.

Marko Pavlyshyn: Mark, as journalists repeatedly have emphasised, the war has been a hybrid war since 2014. After the full-scale invasion of 2022 it remains a hybrid war fought on many fronts—the military, of course, but also economic, diplomatic and, naturally, cultural as well. The war needs to be reflected in the creative outputs of the people who experience it in every way that seems appropriate to them, and the fact that many people, unprompted, have begun writing poetry is one of the phenomena of this war. Professional poets have also reflected on the meaning of this war for themselves, for how they see the world and reflect that vision in poetic form.

It’s up to those of us whose business it is to read and understand cultural phenomena to interpret what is happening on the literary landscape in Ukraine. We need also to give others who can’t read Ukrainian literature in the original the opportunity to do so in their own language. That’s the practical objective of this book: to help readers who want to understand Ukraine through its literature to find translations of that literature into English.

Mark Edele: I would like to ask you, Marko, a somewhat self-serving question: so your book was published in a series which I edit together with Rebecca Friedman, as part of the Cambridge University Press Element series and the series is called Elements in Soviet and Post-Soviet History and I was wondering why you chose to send your manuscript to us or in the first instance to approach me with the idea of writing this book for this series of very short books.

Marko Pavlyshyn: Mark, what impressed me about the series was its self-description as a conscious endeavour to present sides of scholarship concerning the Soviet and post-Soviet spaces in a new way—a decolonial way, as we’re accustomed now to saying in scholarly circles. The scholarly environment hitherto has privileged the Kremlin, Moscow and Russia, as the core part of the Soviet and post-Soviet space, and it has done so at the expense of proper attention being paid to Ukraine and the other parts of the former Soviet Union. Your series, I thought, deliberately set itself the task of doing something that I have been trying to do in my own writing from the 1990s onward: to turn attention toward Ukrainian issues, and your series was the best venue for doing that.

Mark Edele: Thank you. I mean, one of the things the series also does is give a kind of a space for somewhat experimental history writing. It’s quite self-consciously a presentist history, a history of the present, which some historians find a corruption of their business, while it strikes me that history is always in some way present-centric because it’s written by people who are located in a space and a time which will focus their attention to certain things and not to others. And we’re trying to do that quite self-consciously in that series. But one of the really interesting experimental parts of your, or experimental aspects of your history of Ukrainian literature is that it is in reverse chronological order. So it doesn’t begin somewhere and then go straight to the present but it begins in the present and then goes backwards and I am wondering if you want to reflect on why you have chosen this kind of order, rather than the more conventional way to tell a history, which is begin at some point and end at another one chronologically later.

Marko Pavlyshyn: The book is directed in the first instance to those readers who know little about Ukraine but would like to learn through Ukraine’s literature what Ukraine is all about, what Ukrainians want, and who they are. My assumption has been that they’re moved to want this by present-day circumstances—by the war which they see unfolding on their computer screens and their television screens. It seemed natural to address this desire of the imagined reader first.

Then, having talked about the present, it makes sense to look at causes, preludes and anticipations. The start date is 2023, the year when Victoria Amelina, the poet, novelist and civil activist died as a result of wounds she received during the shelling of Kramatorsk. The next date is 1992, the date of the publication of a provocative book immediately after the commencement of Ukrainian independence. Then 1965, the period of resistance to Soviet authoritarianism in the work of the so-called ‘people of the 1960s’, the key text being Internationalism or Russification? by Ivan Dziuba. And so on, all the way back to the Middle Ages.

That also gave me an opportunity to place the Middle Ages last, not only because the texts there might seem more remote than those from more recent periods, but also because that is the period which figures so vividly in the fantasies of Vladimir Putin as he tries to justify his outrageous invasion of Ukraine and his denial of Ukraine’s identity and its right to exist. I wanted that part of the narrative to come last, so that the connection between Kyiv and contemporary Ukraine would flow from everything that had already been being said.

Starting each chapter with a date also enabled me to pick illustrative narratives for each of the chapters. For example, 1847 is the date when members of the anti-autocratic Brotherhood of St Cyril and Methodius were arrested and its members, including Taras Shevchenko, were taken to St Petersburg for interrogation. That narrative begins with the story of how the wedding plans of one of the Cyrillo-Methodians, the historian Mykola Kostomarov, were interrupted by his arrest. Anecdotes like that introduce each of the chapters—which I hope makes the book more readable than otherwise it might be.

Mark Edele: And in the process also you of course also provide a very short history of Ukraine as well, so the book can sort of serve as an introduction to the history of Ukraine as well, which is very useful.

Oksana Mazur: Thank you very much. Now I have a question also. I would like to ask the author why the book refers to other literature cultures, like Polish, Russian, Jewish and Crimean Tatar.

Marko Pavlyshyn: I thought that even this very short book, which had to abide by strict guidelines of length, had to contain at least indications of the other literatures that developed in part on the territory of contemporary Ukraine. The book strives to say that Ukraine is the territory encompassed by the internationally recognised borders of Ukraine. Today, and in all periods of Ukraine’s history, those territories were inhabited not only by Ukrainians but by people of different ethnicities, cultures and languages. They, just as much as Ukrainians, are part of the history and identity of Ukraine.

Oksana Mazur: I would like to thank everybody for interesting conversation, discussion and description. Thank you, Professor Mark Edele, for your interesting questions. Thank you also, Professor Marko Pavylshyn, for the book and for your answers, and we hope to see more books. Thank you for sharing this information with our audiences. Thank you.

Mark Edele: Thank you for having us.

Marko Pavlyshyn: Thank you very much, Oksana.

Thanks to the SBS Ukrainian program for granting permission to re-publish this conversation.

On Friday 29 August 2025, the Arts Faculty at the University of Melbourne is hosting a Symposium, ‘Ukrainian Studies in Australia: Past, Present, and Future‘, marking Ukraine’s Independence Day, celebrated on 24 August since 1991.

For more information on our activities in this field, visit the website for the University of Melbourne Faculty of Arts Research Initiative on Post-Soviet Space.

Feature image: Emeritus Professor Marko Pavlyshyn.