Ukraine Behind the Lines: A New Historicist Reading of the 2022 Russian-Ukrainian War in Ukraine Anthology

The present article traces the interplay of power, politics and history in Ukraine Anthology, an online anthology of poems written in response to the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, known as the Russo-Ukrainian War. The article approaches the selected poems from the perspective of New Historicism as a literary theory, using a qualitative method to compare the selections to their non-fictional context as represented by the official “Address by the President of the Russian Federation” and news headlines. The authors argue that the flux of anecdotal subtleties delineated by the poems dismantles the dominant historical narrative of the war, even modulates it at certain points. In terms of theme and technique, the selected poems attest that contemporary war poetry not only reaffirms the interdependence of literary and non-literary genres and transposes spoken and written discourses but also takes shots at the enactment of ideological and political change by evoking the insurgent undertones of an evolving global voice that speaks for the silenced and the disempowered.