“Dark are the days ahead of us / and even darker—the nights.” These words—written just as Russian forces began to pour into Ukraine in 2022—were how Ukrainian American poet Oksana Maksymchuk described, in her poem “Genesis,” the bleakness of existing during times of war. Her poems and writings—collected in Still City—make clear that what defines the 21st century is catastrophe. Referring to environmental, nuclear, economic crises, she delineates a never-ending list of destructive fractures to the material and social world. Today is an uncertain global condition, Maksymchuk insists, a moment when faith in higher powers is no longer of use to the individuals surviving each night.

And yet, again and again, Maksymchuk’s melancholy promises nothing less than transformation. Rather than another crisis of faith, this is a necessary disruption. Something new appears here, “an opening up, like a wet / fragile butterfly breaking out of / its tomb of / a second skin— / a word—a formula.”

Still City came out of a poetic journal Maksymchuk kept while living in her hometown of Lviv in the months leading up to the 2022 invasion. Yet it also inhabits a broader time-space continuum, one that centers Ukraine and stretches its precarity over a long view of the modern era. Holy Winter 20/21, the latest book-length poem written by Maria Stepanova, is also a kind of poetic journal, but this time from the point of view of the Russian poet. Written when she was forced to return to Russia at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and translated by her long-time collaborator Sasha Dugdale, Holy Winter 20/21 explores this arrested development of the imagination, which characterizes life under the authoritarian regime in Russia and has led to the country’s attempts to rewrite its national borders through violence. Together with Yuliya Musakovska’s poetry collection, The God of Freedom, translated from Ukrainian in a collaboration between Olena Jennings and the author, these women poets paint a constellation of winters with their personal experiences of war and exile at the center.

Right now, many bad actors have their hands on history’s malleable edges. But, in response, Stepanova, Musakovska, and Maksymchuk offer their lyrical voices to the haunting figures and ghostly images that have returned from the shared past. These poems unsettle a collective sense of melancholy into a generative force, from which a transformed historical imagination can emerge.

Maksymchuk jump-starts this nearly still moment of time. It’s almost ugly, unsure of the form it must take, exhausted from the effort of simply emerging from its originary sheath. How does one begin again? How to begin again knowing that history has configured the circumstances for this release, but that an alternative world can exist? Imperfectly, irrevocably changed by the memory of the past, melancholic in the process of transformation.

“Having to accept that the unthinkable, what we have rejected from the collective imagination as both impossible and impermissible, could actually come to pass on an unremarkable winter’s morning would be a catastrophe,” wrote the Russian poet, essayist, and journalist Maria Stepanova about a month after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. People see images of dystopia—whether environmental catastrophes, war, or totalitarian acts—all the time in films and in the news. But that means that when personally faced with atrocity, she argues, people experience a crisis of reality.

Stepanova is widely known for her 2018 multi-genre memoiristic work, In Memory of Memory, which was also translated by Dugdale in 2021, and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. In Memory of Memory takes on a more modernist structure combining the elements of travelogs, ephemeral facts, and family letters and photographs—as well as the author’s repeated allusions to literary and artistic figures, namely Marina Tsvetaeva—to create a kind of living family archive. In Holy Winter 20/21, poetry allows Stepanova to move laterally across themes and offer a polemic against the ideological forces undercutting the poet’s ability to reconcile her identity with historically traumatic events.

Stepanova has often played with literary references throughout her writing. But in Holy Winter 20/21 she collects a true chorus of travelers and exiles, beginning with an epigraph from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Originally published in 1785 as Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of His Marvelous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, the novel was rumored to be based on the stories of a real baron. The narrative and its titular character grew bigger than themselves, larger than life, coy about what was real or fiction in their tales. Stepanova frames Holy Winter 20/21 through this novel, which satirized Russian culture and society in her own way about contemporary times.

These literary references and myths intertwine throughout Holy Winter 20/21 to emphasize a sense of displacement. Stepanova includes references to Ovid and to heroines from myths and fairy tales, such as Marie Stahlbaum from The Nutcracker and Pasiphaë. Like a literary treasure hunt, Stepanova avoids introducing these characters, instead dropping them into her narrative and allowing them to mingle with the lines of poetry to become inseparable from her own voice. This polyphonic narrative allows Stepanova to assume the characteristics of “the exiled one,” situating herself into a greater narrative of banishments and migrants.

But, Stepanova does not resign herself to wandering. How can she ensure her words reach the right people, unscathed and unaltered along the journey? Stepanova ports herself directly into the poem, binding herself to her words: “I would roll up into a scroll, carry myself to the / post office.”

How to begin again knowing that history has configured the circumstances for this release, but that an alternative world can exist?

One and the same with the poetry she writes, Stepanova reminds us that words always carry the weight of history on their shoulders. She continues writing, “As if it wasn’t my poems that got me holed up in the Far North,” turning inward without hiding away from facing Russia once again. The pandemic had frozen the world, but Stepanova uses poetry to untangle the ways that the authoritarian regime that was already on the surface used the moment to inscribe itself into the very fabric of reality. “And isn’t my own homeland the Greek tragedies?” she asks. With this question, she ambiguously positions her “homeland” as someplace in between her personal imagination and the Russian Federation that continuously forces her to be on the move in order to protect her safety. By invoking the Greek tragedies, Stepanova argues that historical imagination remains in an arrested development in Russia, resigning the nation to reproduce a mythologizing perspective.

Tragedies require a subject to invite their downfall onto themselves, to commit to a fatal choice. In this way, there is always a premonition of an end casting a shadow onto Holy Winter 20/21. This eschatological atmosphere is not a dead end, but instead it is a rupture and an opportunity: “There are no walls, no roof / Only the Northern Lights / And a few shared histories / Opened anew, like little doors.”

Finally, Stepanova ends her poem looking vaguely elsewhere in the future. Turning away from the Russia she returned to as an exile, the Russia she will leave as an exile, her poem ends, “Foreign words melt in the cheek / Like sugar cubes.” This is a quickly dissipating optimism; it affirms with a sweet note, but it does not linger.

Meanwhile, Yuliya Musakovska’s poetry collection, The God of Freedom, begins squarely in Lviv like “a hot lump in your throat; / It is without any halftones or relative meanings.” Musakovska, a Ukrainian poet and translator, originally published The God of Freedom in 2021—that is, before Russia’s full-scale invasion—as a reflection on the new Ukrainian reality after Russia’s war against Ukraine began in 2014. Temporally, this collection shares space with Stepanova’s work; but where Holy Winter 20/21 deals with the ancient and mythological past’s return, recent ghosts strain against the resistance put up by Musakovska’s poems.

Musakovska’s central depiction of the social struggles of women at wartime provides emotional intensity but mainly focuses on describing a burdensome new reality. The collection’s eponymous poem begins with the familiar figure of the meddling, gossiping mother but quickly twists and shuttles between perspectives traumatized by war. We catch a glimpse of an eerie, almost menacing shadow of a long-gone self: “The woman assembles her smile from white teeth … The woman fires off a machine gun at others’ lives / easily, like a mercenary.” In this scene of domesticity, a common conversation about matchmaking takes place between two women, only now it is poisoned by the sound of gunfire. This contorted image forces its reader to face up to it directly, to “look, don’t turn away,” to inhabit the discomfort.

Sorrow, anger, and disappointment suffuse this collection. These are deeply naturalistic poems, but their emotional resonance and ability to create the feeling of being in a new war-torn reality do not give way to a sense of development. Musakovska’s poems do not capture and analyze the systems of power that perpetuate war and transform people into exiles of who they once were, but they provide arresting glimpses of a fundamentally altered space.

Oksana Maksymchuk’s Still City, her debut collection in English, uses documentary poetics to narrate the building tensions, forebodings, and eventual breakout of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian American poet, scholar, and literary translator whose writing allows truth and a kind of somber beauty to coexist.

Just as they did in Stepanova’s poem, literary references percolate through Still City. But Maksymchuk uses them to connect and bring greater meaning to historical and personal events. In the mournful poem “Cherry Orchard,” a nod to Anton Chekhov’s play of the same name, Maksymchuk’s allusion sardonically recollects the disillusionment with her fellow writers and friends in Russia. She recalls a feminist poetry reading in which she shared her work alongside fellow writers; now, after the war, these same writers post messages supporting Russian nationalism on social media.

The memory exceeds the basic collegiality of a professional event; the political is personal, and before departing, the women writers share a kiss “that could land us in prison / in Mordovia.” This somber memory recalls and identifies countless political prisoners confined and hidden away for years in remote Russian facilities. Without being able to name them outright, Maksymchuk voices their presence and aligns herself with their transgressive struggles. Without skipping a beat, the poem recenters into the early days of the 2022 invasion as she wonders, “what supplies / you stocked up on / Are they the same as mine?” While these former friends succumb to nationalistic fervor, she wonders ironically if they still share anything at all. In the end, she severs the connection with these writers just as the war, fueled by historical revisionism, reveals a raw truth: “a gift from your hometown / no longer a place but / a name / on a map, a ridge of rubble.”

Stepanova, Musakovska, and Maksymchuk reject nostalgia for a foregone past. Contrary to the Soviet nostalgia that typically characterizes discourse about the contemporary Slavic world, melancholy offers these poets a creative space for historical imagination. Their works directly engage diverse haunting presences in order to ask, as Jacques Derrida had before them, “How to comprehend in fact the discourse of the end or the discourse about the end? Can the extremity of the extreme ever be comprehended?”

These poets demand that we not just look but take stock of the systems in place that construct our perceptions. They play with language to produce new lyrics for representing the deeply personal crisis of identity in exile and also an ongoing, collective feeling of unraveling social and political threads.

In order to reimagine our current reality, we need to accept that the unthinkable has come to pass. Perhaps we begin with poetry.