Discourse of Trauma, Resistance, and Cruel Optimism in Korotko’s War Poems
Abstract
War Poems by Ukrainian writer Alexander Korotko was the first emblem of the new resistance literature that arose in Ukraine in 2022. The reality of the war became a factor of resistance, generating new senses toward the establishment of an innovative political reality in Ukraine. At the same time, Korotko’s book is an intensification of Ukrainian resistance to the ideology of new Russian fascism (Rashism). The poet resorts to the construction of metaphors that combine the idealistic and the real, in which there are graphic depictions of reality in all its forms of war and terror. At the same time, the narrative demonstrates the need to sacralize the space-time dimension of Ukrainian reality, outlining the consequences of the war from the perspective of the future. The poetic subject affirms the idea of the victory of humanity; the war becomes a factor in the drastic reformatting of the world and Ukrainian reality and the formation of a new sociocultural and political identity of Ukraine in the paradigm of new humanism, a New Sincerity. The tragic events of Irpin and Mariupol find their poetic configurations and constellations in the book, which maps out the topography of war in Ukraine in 2022. The narrative presents the key concepts of war and how its emotional and intellectual representations are exploited and reinforced in Ukrainian society and media. The perspective of Berlant’s methodology regarding the analysis of the poetic narrative constructed in the conditions of military operations has been explained and underlined.