PoEthics East: The Ethics and Poetics of Remembering. Eastern European perspectives

 
The 2025  Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowship application round was extremely competitive and I am really lucky to be within the 9.6% who received the funding.

I am very grateful for the support that I have had from my family (Mahendra Mahey) but also colleagues and professionals both in Estonia and in the UK.

I am sharing some fragments of my proposal in order to build a community around the topics. I am very interested in dialogues and future collaborations. As my MSCA proposal states, I want to build an interdisciplinary research network for pursuing further grants and collaborative interdisciplinary endeavors.

When the project starts there will also be a separate homepage poethics.eu dedicated to it, but if you would like to receive regular updates in a form of a newsletter or give any other kind of feedback, please use this form to inform me.

  
Fragments of the MSCA PF proposal "PoEthics East: The Ethics and Poetics of Remembering. Eastern European perspectives"

Both the full-scale war in Ukraine and the Gaza war with its attendant humanitarian catastrophe have not only shaken societies to their core but posed significant new challenges for memory scholars. One can observe that some in the scholarly community are taking a stance and action: for example, the RUTA Association for Central, South-Eastern, Eastern European, Baltic, Caucasus, Central and Northern Asian Studies was formed “in response to Russia’s 2022 escalation of its war against Ukraine” and in April 2025 the Genocide and Holocaust Studies Crisis Network was formed as a response to what is happening in Gaza and how universities relate and react to this. Thus, one can say that many scholars have, as part of societies witnessing war crimes taken a moral stance.

In the literary field one can see an emerging wave of war literature testifying about the impact of war on people. Many of these literary testimonies, both poetry and prose excerpts can be described as moral witnessing, taking a moral stance in and through literature. A moral witness who incorporates both the roles of a victim and a survivor differs from the historical (eyewitness), legal (in the court) and religious (martyr) witness exactly through his/her survival and the proximity to death.

Moral witnessing involves testifying to total evil (a criminal regime) and putting oneself in danger through one’s testimony. This happens “in stories of the aftermath of war and repression, in other words, where it is shown what happens to and within a person when they have to make difficult ethical choices”. Thus, the testimony of the moral witness is not a “useful” testimony in respect that it does not give an account of what happened, however it importantly can encapsulate the impact it has had on the individual in ways that are otherwise difficult to articulate. It is simultaneously a form of commemoration of those who are deceased or unable to speak for themselves and a form of future-directed hope. Thus, lines of poetry such as,

“I would like to die, but I must speak
with a mouth full of stones and nails,
with a mouth full of blood.
Utter the words in place of those
whose souls have been taken”

by Yuliya Musakovska can be understood as a form of moral witnessing. In this poem, the author is testifying for and on behalf of those who have perished or been left speechless. As a bystander, she is obliged to speak about what she and her compatriots experience with the hope that there will be a “moral community that will listen to their testimony”. As a piece of literature this poem combines both the ethics (moral stance) and the poetics (specific ways of literary expression) of remembering. Shedding a light and giving a voice to examples like these, revealing their power and impact on the human condition is important to building an ethical society, more than ever.

Paradoxically literature as an artistic medium is capable of giving voice to what seems and feels unspeakable in terms of physical as well as mental experiences. After World War II (WWII) the limitations and possibilities of poetic language were extensively discussed as well as the acceptability to write poetry in German at all. Theodor Adornos’ claim that to “write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” was challenged by Paul Celan, who not only wrote poetry in German but also about Auschwitz. Ingeborg Bachmann for example, stated that there are things the languages of science and philosophy will never be able to express but literature might come close to giving voice to them, referring to making visible the invisible aftermath of fascism in peoples’ internalised behaviours and fears.

In addition to voicing the unspeakable, literature also has a reconciliatory purpose and it has the capacity for re-imagining the past. In this, metaphors or images play a crucial role because they help to convey the ‘unspeakable’ or put the current situation into a wider and universal context; for example, through referring to mythology or creating a comparison with mythical figures.

In proximity to the current situation, Ukrainian war literature draws attention not only to what is happening today but also to the complexity of remembering and to the difficult and disputed memories in Eastern Europe where, next to victimhood and the “double genocide”, “the uncomfortable questions of collaboration and coparticipation” are yet to be untangled. Some scholars have stated there is a Western European centeredness in memory studies and called both for the need for engagement of Western scholars with Eastern European topics and emphasis and acknowledgement of different Eastern European perspectives.

PoEthics East aims to analyse the interconnectedness of poetics and ethics of remembering from Eastern European perspectives departing from current Ukrainian war literature while widening it towards other relevant Eastern European literary examples.

For this it will first create a theoretical framework on moral witnessing and put it into dialogue with contemporary Ukrainian war literature combining the ethical perspective with concrete literary examples. Secondly, it will deliver exemplary analysis on the role and suitability of the concept of moral witnessing for comparative literary analysis and thus deepen the understanding on interconnectedness of ethics and poetics. Thirdly, it will offer a comparative analysis of thought-images of remembering, more specifically of moral witnessing and their role in conveying the unspeakable, highlighting the relevance of poetic language in ethical matters. Fourthly, it will synthesise accumulated knowledge into a book draft on the ethics and poetics of remembering in Eastern European literatures.

The innovativeness of PoEthics East lies both in focusing on the under-researched Eastern European perspective in analysing the ethics and poetics of remembering as well as in bringing together the theoretical analysis on an ethical stance with the hands-on close reading of literary texts to demonstrate and showcase the two-way relationship between ethics and poetics of remembering. The beyond the state of the art of this approach lies in the emphasis of highlighting the original Eastern European literary voices in philosophical and ethical discussion of remembering. It will thus enrich the academic memory studies dialogue through poetic thinkers.