THE ANESTHESIA OF NATIVE SPEECH

This is an introductory article to a special cluster devoted to contemporary Russo-phone Anti-War Poetry. The cluster's title, "Language in a Coma," metaphorically implies the complex state of current Russian literature: its bewilderment, its turmoil, its profound shock. The introduction focuses on the recent publication of an anthology Doomsday Poetry in Russia. It includes contemporary Russophone Anti-War poems by more than one hundred authors who reside in Russia, Ukraine, Europe, America, Near and Far East-their years of birth range from 1937 to 1997; all of them are united by their use of the art of poetry as the means of making sense of a collective trauma. The anthology opens with poems written right before the beginning of the military invasion of Ukraine by Putin's Russia and ends with those dated July 25. Surveying the reception of the book upon its publication, I claim that Doomsday Poetry stands as both a collective authorial statement and a mirror to the fractured state of Russian literature and society, echoing the broader discourse of war, cultural identity, and the role of art in times of crisis.