Putin’s war in Ukraine has been met by outrage and disbelief around the world. Since the start of the war, writers in Russia, Ukraine and the Russian diaspora have been expressing their opposition to the invasion. An international group of poets and translators have been collecting these poems as the Kopilka project. Disbelief/ Немыслимо presents 100 of the most moving and hard-hitting of these poems by poets including Polina Barskova, Vladimir Druk, Tatiana Voltskaya, Mikhail Aizenberg and Tatiana Shcherbina.
In his lectures on Vladimir Vernadsky, Vsevelod Ivanov argued that in the noosphere – the intellectual cloud around the planet – wars and natural disasters create voids which must be filled by the work of poets, artists, musicians, and philosophers. This powerful tragic chorus is just such an attempt, expressing a shared sense of incredulity at a war in the heart of twenty-first century Europe that has left millions displaced and tens of thousands dead or imprisoned; that has triggered an international economic crisis, turned Russia into a pariah state and the Russian language into a tool of cultural erasure and oppression.
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