They Invented a New Language for War

New York Times

22-02-2025

Odesa is to Ukraine as New York City is to the United States: a port city, a center of commerce and a place where languages, cultures and traditions collide, then meld into an instantly recognizable way of being. It's vulgar. It's dirty. It's highbrow. Odesa loves its opera, its theater and, perhaps most of all, its poets, who since Russia's invasion have written a chronicle of life in wartime.
They are doing it in regular posts on social media, as well as in more traditional publications and in live performances. They are recording war in a modern way, often in daily dispatches that draw immediate responses. . Publishing on social networks, these poets are writing for one another, for their community, and for their city — and their posts tell us more about life during wartime than can any history book or newspaper article. In unprecedented breadth and detail, the poets of Odesa have spent the last three years investigating how war changes people and places. When the war stops, as it may soon, they will still be there, investigating whatever it leaves in its wake.
I have been reading these dispatches from the beginning. Last month, I went to Odesa to meet some of the poets I had been reading. What I found is that the war did more than change their city. It changed the language — the languages — they use to describe it.
One of the oldest of these chroniclers is Maria Galina, 66, who has posted near daily updates since the first day of the full-scale invasion. For two and a half years, she began her dispatches with the words 'dobroho ranku' — 'good morning' in Ukrainian. After her husband, the poet Arkady Shtypel, died in October, Galina took a short break. When she returned, she was using a different salutation: 'New day, new morning.' Galina and Shtypel, who lived in Russia for most of their lives, had moved to Odesa just days before the full-scale invasion. She has said that, as someone who had also written science fiction, she was equipped to foresee the unimaginable. But maybe it was not science fiction but poetry, the art of intimations and intuitions, that enabled some writers to describe what had not yet happened.
Then again, what we think of as intuition is often, in reality, experience. The full-scale invasion was preceded by eight years of a smaller, slower, but also brutal war; Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, is less than 200 miles from Odesa by sea, and Donetsk, where Russia fomented a bloody separatist movement, is just 350 miles by land. And just an hour's drive from Odesa is the self-proclaimed republic of Transnistria, a Russian-backed breakaway part of Moldova. The husband of Taya Naydenko, one of Odesa's poet-chroniclers, is from there.
Born in 1981, he was 9 when the war there began. He grew up with shelling, shortages, fear, death. He came to Odesa after high school, looking for a regular life. He and Naydenko, who is a year younger, met and had two daughters, who are now 21 and 19. A few years ago, the couple were dreaming of slowing down, of traveling. Then Russia invaded. Last year, Naydenko's husband got called up.
Recently she posted a photograph of Toretsk, an industrial city of uniform apartment blocs now reduced, uniformly, to rubble. 'It's hard to imagine that there are people somewhere in this city. It's such an inhuman landscape. It's even beautiful in its inhuman way,' she wrote. 'And somewhere there, among our many fighters, is my husband, with his detachment.' She wrote the post in Russian, and only the word 'detachment' was in Ukrainian.
Most of Ukraine's fighting force is middle-aged. In the name of its postwar future, the country has protected young men from the draft: It was only last year that the minimum conscription age was lowered from 27 to 25. Naydenko's husband began his service as a storm trooper. Early on, he and a few other men spent weeks stranded in a cold cellar, with intermittent supplies of water and food. 'He came back — his wrists were like my daughter's,' Naydenko said, making a circle with her thumb and forefinger. He developed an ulcer. Now he serves as a drone operator, and Naydenko is happy, she said, that he gets warm food with some regularity and he has internet and can keep in touch.
Long before the full-scale invasion, Naydenko was writing poetry about war, loss and Odesa. In a 2015 poem, she imagines that Superman is living in her city and evading the draft:
Now she also chronicles her life as a soldier's wife. In one post, she described her family's elaborate efforts to hide her husband's service from her mother-in-law, to avoid worrying her. When the older woman gets her son on the phone, he tells her, without technically lying, that he is 'working a lot' and 'getting decent pay.' Naydenko, for her part, says that he is out walking the dog.
The poet and prose writer Ivan Bunin, who would go on to become the first Russian to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, spent the year 1919 in Odesa. He detailed the effects of the war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution: a descent into chaos, the political opportunism of longtime acquaintances, the growing familiarity of death and the rising awareness that the rest of the world did not care what happened to the people who were suffering in that city, in Kharkiv and elsewhere in Ukraine. The resulting book was titled 'Cursed Days.'
Bunin, who ended up escaping the Soviet Union and living in Paris for the next three decades, was one of many writers with a strong connection to Odesa. Alexander Pushkin, widely considered the greatest Russian poet and the father of Russian literary language, lived here as a young man (and, it appears, had to leave town because of his lack of discretion about an affair with the governor's wife). Odesa is a birthplace of Yiddish literature, a place where the spoken language became also a written one.
In the early 20th century, the city sent forth an influential cohort of writers who wielded irony in a way literature had not yet known. But Odesa's literary legacy is also its burden, in part because of the Russian and, later, Soviet imperial policies, none of the city's famous literary progeny wrote primarily in Ukrainian. The book that many people believe can be considered the great Odesa novel — 'The Five,' by Vladimir Jabotinsky, an Odesa native and founder of revisionist Zionism — was written in Russian. So was perhaps the most Odesa book of all Odesa books, 'Odesa Stories' by Isaac Babel, possibly the greatest modernist prose writer to work in the Russian language.
In 2023, Ukraine adopted the Law on Decolonization, which directed local authorities to remove from public spaces almost anything — images, symbols, monuments, memorials, inscriptions, slogans — that could be construed as representing Russian imperial policy. In some cities and towns, the task appeared straightforward: Russian and Soviet authorities were in the habit of spreading monuments to Lenin and Pushkin the way a dog spreads his scent. But many of Odesa's monuments reflected the city's particular history. Similarly, the state law on language, adopted in 2019 and expanded in 2022, mandated that virtually all public communication — whether in the government, in universities or in retail stores — be conducted in Ukrainian. It seemed like a necessary step to redress centuries of subjugation, but in Odesa, where Russian is the dominant language for most residents, it has been challenging.
Perhaps more than any other Ukrainian city, Odesa is the product of Russia's imperial project. Odesa was founded at the end of the 18th century, after Catherine II (often called Catherine the Great) directed her troops to conquer a town and lands that had been occupied for a couple of hundred years by the Ottoman Empire. The city was developed by a succession of foreigners — the founding mayor was a Spaniard; his successor a Frenchman — as the Russian empire's most ambitious commercial port, a center of business and culture. Now, as Ukraine's third most populous city, Odesa is both a strategic and a symbolic target for President Vladimir Putin, who fancies himself an heir to the emperor conquerors.
Even before the Law on Decolonization, the city dismantled a giant monument to Catherine. It wasn't the first time the empress's bronze likeness was deposed. Following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the monument was covered up — 'wrapped head to toe, bandaged with filthy wet rags, wound in rope and pasted all over with red wooden stars,' according to Bunin's description — and then taken down in 1920, just 20 years after it was erected. After Catherine was resurrected in 2007, she remained upright for a mere 15 years; the monument has since been stored, horizontally, in a metal box in the courtyard of Odesa's National Fine Arts Museum.
Odesa currently plans to remove 19 monuments, including two to Pushkin and one to Babel. At least one of the Pushkins is in the center of town, which was designated a UNESCO Heritage site in 2023 — as part of a symbolic effort to protect it from Russian bombs. One hundred and fifty-two writers and intellectuals signed a letter urging President Volodymyr Zelensky to defer the plan until after the war. Naydenko was one of them.
One day last fall, Odesans woke up to find that the names of many streets on Google Maps no longer matched the names they knew, which were also, for the most part, the names that remained on street signs. Pushkin Street became Italian Street. Bunin Street had been renamed for Nina Strokata, a Ukrainian dissident, who was also from Odesa. Taya Naydenko's street had once been called Nobility (Dvoryanskaya) Street; it changed names a half-dozen times over the course of the 20th century before reverting to Nobility. Now Naydenko discovered that her street had been renamed for Vsevolod Zmiienko. She searched the name: a military man who fought the Bolsheviks and died in exile. Naydenko wasn't happy. 'I may come from a police family,' she said — both of her parents were officers — 'but I don't think we should be naming streets for everybody in uniform.'
Admittedly, Naydenko was tired and irritable that day, as she is on many days. She seems always to be raising money and using it to buy supplies for her husband's detachment. The soldiers, who spend weeks on end sheltering in damp and cold spaces, whose winter uniforms aren't always as warm as they should be and whose food rations are sometimes lacking, often ask for medication: decongestants, pain relievers, digestive aids. Naydenko tries to buy about 20 packages at a time — not a bulk purchase, exactly, but more than any one or two pharmacies usually have in stock. She uses a website that searches drugstore supplies, then makes the rounds. The day the street names changed, Naydenko needed two dozen packs of cold medicine and found herself staring at a screen that was inscrutable to her. 'I'm not much of a spatial thinker,' she said. 'I need words.' Without familiar toponyms, she was lost in her own city.
We were having dinner at a pub called Sherlock on what used to be Bunin Street. A tweed cap of the sort that the fictional British detective wore hung in the corner. 'And another reason I get irritated,' Naydenko said, 'is that we know what's at stake.' She smiled. She was quoting the first line of a 1942 poem by Anna Akhmatova, the great Russian poet who was born near Odesa. A lot happened in this moment, and most of it went unsaid. What made the act of quoting particularly poignant is the odd fact — I can't overemphasize just how odd — that Naydenko, tall, thin, broad-shouldered and angular, with jet-black hair and a dramatic aquiline nose, looks like no one I've ever seen — except several iconic portraits of Akhmatova, who died more than a decade before Naydenko was born. Before I met Naydenko, I had been warned not to mention the resemblance.
The poem Naydenko quoted goes on to say, 'And our courage will hold to the last. / … Through it all we will keep you alive, Russian word, / Mighty language of our Russian land.' (Translation by Nancy K. Anderson.) Naydenko's choice of poem was no accident — but also not an invitation to me, a person raised on Russian poetry in Moscow, to join in lamenting the fate of the Russian language in Ukraine. If the poets of Odesa choose to preserve their use of Russian and their Russian-language literary history, it won't be as a language or a history they share with the Russians, who have spent the last three years killing their people and destroying their cities.
'Language is my tool,' she continued. 'I like having two sets of tools, I like finding something in one that I can experiment with in the other.' Before the war, she wrote poetry in Russian and occasional prose in Ukrainian; then she switched. Mostly, Naydenko doesn't want anyone to tell her what language to use or what the streets of her city should be called.
Like many parts of Ukraine, Odesa has two different administrations. One is led by the elected mayor of the city, Gennadiy Trukhanov, and the other by the appointed wartime governor of the region, Oleh Kiper. It was Kiper who, last summer, made the decision to rename city streets. The mayor objected. Dismissing 'the logic of the 'decolonizers,'' he said that to scrub the city's imperial past would be to 'abandon everything that made Odesa a world brand.' The governor shot back: 'If someone really wants to walk along streets with imperial/Soviet names, there's always Moscow. This will not happen in Odesa.' The mayor then conducted an opinion poll using the social media platform Telegram, arguably the best available substitute for democratic procedure in wartime. Responses split evenly, with half of Odesans apparently in favor of street renaming and half against.
Naydenko and I walked down the former Bunin Street, crossed the former Pushkin Street (now called Italian Street) near the former Pushkin Museum (now called the Museum of Foreign Writers), which, 10 days later, would be damaged by a Russian rocket, and down the former Catherine Street (now called European Street) to another pub, to meet three other poets: Ekaterina Kharchenko, who was 24, and Denys Dmitriiev and Danko Ptashyy, both of whom were 22. The three are what's left in Odesa of a five-person collective called the Naked Poets. (Their verse is raw, and some of their events involve stripping.) Our waitress, a stocky woman in her 50s, was a quintessential Odesan presence: She spoke Russian despite the language law, and she admonished me for failing to finish all of my food in the same tone she admonished Dmitriiev for spilling one glass of sweet wine and breaking another. When we were leaving, she asked where the young people were from and was surprised to learn that, despite having spoken exclusively Ukrainian all evening, all three were Odesans.
Dmitriiev had a tobacco pipe stuck in the top of his overalls. I gathered that he was hoping to spend some time smoking with Naydenko, who is not only a prominent poet but also a competitive slow-pipe smoker. (Yes, it's a sport.) But he had left his tamper at home, and Naydenko was unimpressed. She maintained an air of benign condescension as the three poets told me their stories of coming to live and write in Ukrainian. These were young people's stories — of a search for identity, of finding ways to separate from their parents, of locating visions of themselves in the future.
Ptashyy described two incidents that occurred in quick succession a few years ago. He saw a poet a couple of years his senior read in Ukrainian and was taken with everything about him — his writing, his manner, his personal style. Soon after, Ptashyy had an encounter with an Odesan Russophile who belittled him for speaking Ukrainian. That evening, Ptashyy went home to translate all of his poems into Ukrainian. Naydenko chuckled at the idea of translating all of one's poems in an evening.
The conversation turned to a recent event Kharchenko had helped organize at the art museum, where she works — the same museum where the monument to Catherine the Great was lying secreted in a box. The evening, dedicated to the memory of fallen poets, had caused a small controversy. One of the poets, who had died on the eastern front, had written in Russian and had published his work on a Russian social media platform that is now blocked in Ukraine. Kharchenko decided not to include the work in the evening's readings. It's not that she would have gotten in trouble, she said. It just felt wrong.
Talking over each other, the Naked Poets shifted to the topic of excavating poetry on social media. Dmitriiev described reading a poem by another young man who'd been killed. The poem began:
Only one person had commented on the poem. It was the author's mother.
Naydenko told me that she was worried about her husband. He was sinking into depression. When they talk on the phone, she tries to cheer him up. The war will end, she says, or at least he'll be granted a leave, and they will travel. He asks where they will go. 'We can go to Lviv,' she says. Her husband has never been to that city, in western Ukraine, and it's beautiful. 'What for?' he responds. 'So they can tell me I'm a Moscow-mouthed Moskal?' These are deeply offensive terms for ethnic Russians. Naydenko's husband's ethnic heritage is primarily Ukrainian and Polish, but like many people serving in the Ukrainian armed forces, he does not speak Ukrainian fluently.
'And this is when I finally get mad,' Naydenko told me. 'When the person I am closest to in the world, a man who is not young, who has bad knees, who is being brave for Ukraine, is made to feel like a second-class citizen.'
The men of the Naked Poets are less than three years from conscription age. To the Naked Poets, that probably feels like a long time. Naydenko is aware that it isn't. We were speaking before Washington and Moscow began talks that may force Ukraine into accepting a perilous, fraught cease-fire — and into preparing to face the next Russian attack without American aid. 'Are you ready for military service?' Naydenko asked the poets. 'Of course,' Dmitriiev responded. 'It's part of life.' Naydenko cringed. War shouldn't be a part of life, even if it has been for so much of hers.
The more we talked, the more it seemed that the disagreements among the poets were generational more than ideological. For the young people, the new experiences — of language, of recasting Ukrainian history, even of the war — felt like opportunities. For Naydenko, these have been years of loss: of her and her husband's dreams and his health and self-confidence, of their time together, of their city as they knew it. 'Imagine if it were suddenly decreed that all New Yorkers would now celebrate every holiday by putting on cowboy hats and dancing to country music,' she said to me. 'There is nothing wrong with those hats or that music, but it's just not New York, is it?'
It was after 11 — nearing wartime curfew — and we were walking through the center of Odesa again. The city looked a lot like its prewar self, just ever so slightly diminished. There were fewer people in the streets. The streets themselves were in greater disrepair than they had been before the war. After a couple of years of mandating nighttime blackouts, Odesa has allowed illumination again, but there aren't quite as many festive light decorations as there used to be, back when every street in the city center was lit up for forever Christmas. The changed street names, it seemed, were a small part of this general sense of diminishment, one of a thousand minor cuts made to Odesa's identity. These are some of the things war does when it goes on and on — as it likely will, for Ukrainians, even if the shooting war is temporarily stopped. War dumbs down civic life. It dampens family life. Along the front line, it has the obvious look of profound devastation. In the rear, it's a slow-motion robbery.