About Kopilka
This website presents highlights from Kopilka—a collection of wartime protest poetry in Russian from Ukraine, Russia, other former Soviet states, and the diaspora. The site includes:
- References to Publications: A detailed list of all publications derived from the collection.
- Reviews: Critiques and feedback on these publications.
- Contributor Biographies: Short bios highlighting the expertise and notable works of each contributing author.
- Auxiliary Material: Bibliographies, commentary, and additional resources.
- Selected Poems: Featured works showcasing the breadth of the database, accompanied by translations and commentary.
The Contributors
Maria Bloshteyn, Andrei Burago, Richard Coombes, Yana Kane, Anya Krushelnitskaya, Dmitry Manin, Julia Nemirovskaya, and Josephine von Zitzewitz are volunteers dedicated to collecting, preserving, and sharing poetry of protest by Russophone authors with readers in the West.
Publications
The Kopilka database, which includes works by more than 300 poets across over 1,000 pages, has served as the foundation for several publications:
- Disbelief (Smokestack, 2022) – a bilingual Russian-English anthology.
- Dislocation (Slavica, 2024) – another bilingual Russian-English anthology.
- Non à la Guerre (Caractères, Paris, 2022) – a smaller French anthology derived from the collection.
The Goals of Kopilka
The goals of this extensive collection are multifaceted:
- Highlighting the War’s Impact on Art: The sheer number of anti-war poems written by so many talented poets underscores the profound influence of war on artistic expression.
- Affirming the Role of Poetry in Crisis: Poetry remains a vital form of resistance and reflection during times of tragedy. As V. V. Ivanov remarked in his lecture on Vladimir Vernadsky, large-scale tragedies create voids in the “noosphere,” which are filled by the works of poets, artists, musicians, and philosophers.
- Providing a Testament: Whether or not this phenomenon is universal, Kopilka stands as a testament to the intense intellectual and creative activity fostered during wars and revolutions.
A Personal Mission
Beyond its broader goals, this project serves a deeply personal purpose. It helps both the poets and the volunteers maintain a sense of sanity during these tragic times. The therapeutic effect of this work is deeply felt by all involved, and they remain profoundly grateful for it.
The Kopilka Project Mission
The Kopilka (Russian for “coin bank”) is a living, constantly growing collection of anti-war poetry written in Russian. The project was set up in response to the Russian regime’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. To date, the Kopilka collection contains over 1,000 poems by hundreds of poets from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the worldwide Russophone literary community.
Our mission is to amplify a wide range of poetic voices that stand up for human rights. These voices reflect the courage and the pain of Ukraine, oppose Putin’s war on Ukraine, and speak up against the suppression of dissent within Russia and Belarus.
The project is a curated resource: inclusion of each text is at the editor’s discretion; it is based both on literary merit and the fit with the goal of the project. With the authors’ permission, we make these texts available to the English-language reader by creating high-quality literary translations. We encourage and support efforts to translate Kopilka poems into languages other than English.
The Kopilka Project Today
The Kopilka uses a broad definition of “anti-war poetry.” It includes poems that speak about the horrors of the war against Ukraine, as well as the indomitable resistance of Ukraine’s people. It also contains poems that protest the increasingly totalitarian regimes in Russia and Belarus. Not all of these texts contain overt political messages. Much of the Kopilka content is poetry of witness: it reflects with honesty the experiences of people living through the upheavals caused by these events.
The Kopilka fulfils several functions:
· A repository reflecting the surge of protest poetry triggered by Russia’s violence.
· A safe haven for texts that are endangered and can endanger their authors: the vast majority of the poems in the Kopilka are unpublished or exist on closed social media feeds; authors who remain in Russia are at risk of persecution for speaking out against the war.
· An archive for the Kopilka team’s translations into English.
· A resource for the Kopilka team’s work with publishers and journalists interested in anti-war writing.
· An archival source for scholars researching what is arguably the most important phenomenon in contemporary Russophone literature.
The Kopilka has so far provided the content for two collections in English, in bilingual editions, Disbelief (Ripon (UK): Smokestack Books, 2023) and Dislocation (Indiana University: Three String Books/Slavica, 2024), as well as a volume of translations into French, Non à la guerre! (Paris: Éditions Charactères, 2022). It has been the subject of several scholarly and popular journal publications.
The Kopilka Team
Collecting, translating and editing the texts in the Kopilka is done by an all-volunteer, international team. The translations are edited collaboratively; the team works together on all tasks around the Kopilka project.
The founding editor of the project is Julia Nemirovskaya, a Moscow-born poet and author of four collections of verse and short stories, a novel, and a book on Russian cultural history [McGraw-Hill, 1997, 2001]. Her work has been translated into several languages; plays have been staged in theaters in Russia, the US and France. She is currently teaching and directing student theater at the University of Oregon.
To date, the Kopilka team includes: Maria Bloshteyn (Canada), Andrei Burago (USA), Richard Coombes (UK), Yana Kane (USA), Anna Krushelnitskaya (USA), Dmitri Manin (USA), Niles Watterson (USA) and Josephine von Zitzewitz (UK).