Motifs and Images of the Great Patriotic War in Modern Donbas Poetry (Based on the Collection The Great Checkpoint)

The theme of the Great Patriotic War is a significant component of contemporary Donbas poetry. The perception of the Great Patriotic War in Russian culture has formed a great tradition, as well as a certain matrix of understanding history, people’s actions, and moments of life associated with its civil interpretation; the events of the war have entered the historical memory of the people and become part of the national cultural code. New military poetry draws on this cultural matrix and thus appeals to collective memory, which gives its texts a special emotionality saturated with historical associations. The events, heroes, and place names of the Great Patriotic War have become extremely significant in contemporary poetry about the war. The book The Great Checkpoint: An Anthology of Donbas Poetry (2023), which is the subject of this article, brings together lyrical texts on Donbas issues written over a long period of time (from the 1980s to 2022), and this article will analyse those images and motifs that explicitly or implicitly refer to the Great Patriotic War — its history, its authors, and its poetic texts. It is argued that the military actions that have been ongoing in Donbas since 2014 and which, since February 2022, have spread beyond the region, are seen by poets involved in this reality as part of the ongoing struggle against neo-Nazism and are interpreted as events comparable to those of the Great Patriotic War. In particular, motifs such as the Great Victory, support for grandfathers and great-grandfathers who participated in the battles of 1943 in these same places, their invisible presence, the motif of generational continuity, the motif of memory, which is revealed through a whole series of images, including Saur-Mogila, the Debaltseve trench, family photographs, etc.