Ukranian war through a poet’s eyes

Igor Pomerancev belongs to a generation of Russian poets who are strongly influenced by the political development of their country. Born in Saratov in 1948, he spent his childhood in Baikal. Pomerancev’s family travelled throughout the Soviet Union due to his father’s work as a war correspondent. He later emigrated to Munich and then London, and he currently lives and writes in Prague.

Pomerancev’s poetry was first published in the Moscow literary magazine Smena, and his work was later published in the exiled periodicals Sintaksis (Paris), Vremya i my (New York and Jerusalem) and Kovcheg (Paris). His first work outside Russia was for the BBC Russian Service, and he worked for Radio Free Europe in the 1980s, where he managed the programme ‘Through the barriers’.

Amputation

‘Amputation’, the anthology that Pomerancev edited and contributed to, is both a reference to the human body and states, and to the story of twelve soldiers who returned from the war with amputated limbs. Amputation is thus a picture book of five authors dedicated to the tragedy of war in eastern Ukraine.

As well as Pomerancev’s poetry, the Václav Havel Library will also present the writer Boris Chersonskij’s poetry collection ‘Messa vovremenavojny/ Missa in tempore belli’ (‘Mass in times of war’), which was written as an immediate poetic response to the shock of the ‘amputation’ of Crimea and the undeclared war in Donbas.

Screening

The Ukrainian poet Lyudmila Chersonskaja is one of the poets who contributed to the anthology. For the first time, Czech readers have the opportunity to get to know her work through the selection of poems from her collection ‘Vaulting the Ditch’ (2018).

The screening of the 2017 documentary ‘Amputation’ by Igor Pomerancev and Lydia Starodubcev will be part of the evening. Writers Boris Chersonskij and Lyudmila Chersonskaja will also present their work.

Czech experience

Džamila Stehlíková, translator and psychiatrist, will also contribute to the event with her impressions from a trip to Eastern Ukraine in 2014. Michael Žantovský, director of the Václav Havel Library, will present and moderate for the evening. The event will be translated into Czech.

For further information, please visit: https://www.vaclavhavel.cz/en.