POLISH RECEPTION OF OSTAP SLYVYNSKYI’S “DICTIONARY OF WAR”

Abstract

Ukrainian literature, above all non-fiction, over the last decade and especially after the outbreak of full-scale war, by recording current dramatic events and developing new discourses of war, reveals to the democratic world a culture that still retains the potential to be an important way and element of the struggle for identity, for subjectivity in situations of extreme danger. At the same time, it is now particularly important to sound out these Ukrainian voices in European societies, for whom, after the Second World War and the numerous local conflicts of the last century, reflections on existential situations of captivity and torture, occupation-deoccupation, loss of home, death of loved ones, rape, commemoration, exile for reasons of active warfare, are gradually being placed more and more on the margins of socio-cultural discussions, and so the prospect of their oblivion and elimination is increasing. Translation as one of the cultural transfers provides an opportunity to bring all these traumatic experiences of Ukrainians closer to other national-cultural communities. The grand narrative is made up of smaller stories, and the truth belongs to the survivors and the traumatised. Dictionary of War as personal stories told by dozens of people in the first days of the full-scale war was compiled by the well-known Ukrainian poet, literary scholar and translator Ostap Slyvynsky and several other contributors. These are not only, perhaps even – not so much – individual feelings, expressions of the depth of emotional experience of the war, but already the first attempts to understand it more deeply, to find oneself in the present full of fear, uncertainty, to know oneself new in the new conditions of the destruction of existing axiological principles, the ongoing violence of the aggressor. After the terrible experiences, they try to build their own identity around them by giving new meanings to words. In the course of analysing the

Ukrainian discourse on Dictionary of War and considering the so far rather sparse manifestations of the Polish reception of the translation, which was published almost simultaneously with the Ukrainian edition, the paper discusses the issues of conveying the traumatic experience of war to those who did not empirically experience it. Finding words in moments of powerful upheaval, through which literature spoke, and the artistic documentation of contemporary Ukrainian reality not only performed an informative function for the democratic audience about the course of the war, but most importantly, through the reading, created an effect of engagement and empathy.