Voices of Resilience: Exploring Agency in Contemporary Slavic Poetry

From July 12 to 15, 2026, we attended the RUTA Annual Conference in Uzhhorod, Transcarpathia, under the title “Rooted Knowledges and Dialogues for Change.” The conference brought together scholars, artists, and activists from various disciplines and regions to discuss the importance of place-based knowledge, embodied experience, and transregional dialogue for social change. As part of the conference, Dr. Mariya Donska (University of Graz) presented a lecture titled “Embodied Grass: (Re)Imagined Communities in Liubov Iakymchuk’s Abrykosy Donbasu.” The poetry cycle *Abrykosy Donbasu* (Apricots of the Donbas) by Liubov Iakymchuk, first published in 2015, challenges the common association of the Donbas region with coal and industry and instead paints a picture of the Donbas as a space shaped by nature—in particular, apricot trees, the steppe, terykony (coal spoil heaps), feather grass, and other plants. 

The name “Donbas” has economic and industrial connotations and is now coming under criticism, with the term “Eastern Ukraine” or the names of the regions Donetsk Oblast and Luhansk Oblast becoming more widely used. Yakymchuk reimagines the Donbas as an interwoven space in which nature, human bodies, social practices, and technology are closely interconnected. Coal appears as grass compressed over millions of years and—just like the grass itself—is metonymically linked to people’s bodies, their gender roles, and social practices. Through intertextual references to Ukrainian poets such as Volodymyr Sosjura, Vasyl’ Holoborod’ko, and Vasyl’ Stus, the Donbas is anchored as a genuinely Ukrainian cultural space, counteracting a common tendency toward “othering.” The lecture introduced a new concept of “selfing” to illustrate the decolonial redefinition of space and the emerging agency in describing one’s “own” region. Drawing on eco-poetic and postcolonial approaches, the lecture analyzed how Yakymchuk describes nature and social practices to reimagine the Donbas as a space of embodied, interconnected, and Ukrainian identity. 

From July 8 to 10, 2026, the international conference “Ukraine in the World” took place in Lviv, bringing together over 250 scholars from 38 countries for an in-depth exchange on the future of Ukrainian Studies.  

As part of the conference, Mariya Donska (project leader) and Julia Jahn (Ph.D. candidate) jointly presented the research project “Voices of Resilience: Exploring Agency in Contemporary Slavic Poetry.” Through a comparative analysis of two poems, they examined the poetic processing of war experiences and the construction of agency in contemporary Bosnian and Ukrainian poetry.  

First, the discussion focused on Bisera Alikadić’s poem “I molitva i kletva” (“Both Prayer and Curse,” 1992), which was written at the outset of the Bosnian War. The poem rejects a purely passive role as a victim and combines prayer and curse, through which the poetic voice articulates both suffering and resistance. The poem’s structure, characterized by imperatives and direct addresses to God, highlights agency: The speaker demands active action and identifies the aggressor using various terms, thereby regaining control over the narrative interpretation through semiotic agency. In the second part of the presentation, a poem by Halyna Kruk, one of the leading Ukrainian poets from L’viv, was analyzed. Here, too, the poem begins with an invocation of God and focuses on the voice (“голос”) as a central motif. Agency is evident both in practical acts of resistance and in the performative power of language. The voice advocates for those particularly affected by the war—the voiceless—and emphasizes a new solidarity among all those affected by the war (“серце б’ється за кожного”—“the heart beats / fights for everyone”). The syntactic structure — a single sentence without full stop at the end — reflects the ongoing unresolved nature and openness of the events. The poem performs agency by giving a voice to the silent community, thereby making visible the semiotic agency of the subalterns. 

At the invitation of the Department of Slavic Studies in Vienna, Dr. Mariya Donska, principal investigator of Voices of Resilience. Exploring Agency in Contemporary Slavic Poetry, presented initial considerations and findings from the ongoing research project in the lecture hall of the Institute for East European History. 

The lecture focused on the question of agency in contemporary Ukrainian and Belarusian poetry. Mariya Donska began by discussing the concept of agency from a theoretical perspective, exploring its applicability within literary studies. 

She then presented exemplary analyses of East Slavic contemporary poetry, highlighting agency as a central motif. In the final part of the lecture, she examined, based on qualitative interviews, the actions of readers of poetic texts as well as other actors in the literary field. 

The presentation paid particular attention to the genre-specific potential of poetry as a medium for strengthening (postcolonial) agency: How is agency represented in poetry, and to what extent can it be activated through poetry itself?  

As part of an interdisciplinary session at the PRO SCIENTIA scholarship foundation, Julia Jahn, doctoral candidate and project member, gave a lecture entitled “Transformation of Silence: Poetic Processing of the Trauma of Sexualized Violence in Bosnia and Ukraine.” 

In her presentation, Julia Jahn addressed the question of how sexualized violence, used as a systematic weapon of war—both during the Bosnian War of the 1990s and in the current Russian war of aggression against Ukraine—is processed in literature. She demonstrated that, in both conflicts, the female body becomes a site of violence, with the aim of weakening and humiliating entire societies. These acts leave not only individual suffering but also collective shame and deep trauma. 

The lecture also focused on how agency—understood here as the ability to act autonomously and raise one’s voice despite traumatic experiences—is constructed in the poetry of women from Bosnia and Ukraine. 

The analysis combined approaches from trauma studies (including Cathy Caruth and Judith Herman) with postcolonial theory, placing agency at the center. Particular emphasis was placed on how poetry functions as a medium of resilience and empowerment, opening up new spaces for female agency. The lecture was met with great interest and sparked a lively discussion among the attending fellows from various disciplines. 

Staff from the “Voices of Resilience” project also took part in the demonstration on 28 May against the planned budget cuts in the Austrian university system. Together with thousands of students and researchers from all Styrian universities, we drew attention to the serious consequences for research, teaching and Styria’s position as a centre of science. 

With “Voices of Resilience”, we aim to make a significant contribution highlighting the importance of Slavic literatures in the context of resistance and resilience.