Kopilka

The Kopilka (Russian for “coin bank”) is a living, constantly growing collection of anti-war poetry written in Russian. The project was set up by poet and scholar Julia Nemirovskaya in response to the Russian regime’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and I have been involved since 2023.

To date, the Kopilka collection contains over 1,000 poems by hundreds of poets from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the worldwide Russophone literary community. The Kopilka has so far provided the content for two bilingual 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 texts in the Kopilka are collected, translated and edited by an all-volunteer, international team: Dmitri Manin, Maria Bloshteyn, Anna Krushelnitskaya, Yana Kane, Richard Coombs, Andrei Burago, Nils Watterson, Olga Zveryeva and myself.  Translations are edited collaboratively; the team works together on all tasks around the Kopilka project.

To date, the Kopilka team are working on a third collection of bilingual poetry under the title Solastalgia, and – in collaboration with a large group of scholars – the first-ever scholarly volume exclusively dedicated to the phenomenon of Russophone anti-war poetry, of which I am co-editor.

Anthologies

Anti-war poems by various poets in my translation

Scholarly Insights

Cover of a book titled "Dislocation: An Anthology of Poetic Response to Russia's War in Ukraine", edited by Julia Nemirovskaya and Anna Krushelnitskaya.