Paweł Próchniak: Reading Poetry in a Bomb Shelter Restores Its Human Voice [INTERVIEW]

gauden.jpg, default, Poems in Shelters, Drohobych, July 9, 2024, photo: Igor Feciak

The event series Poems in Shelters brings together distinguished writers from Poland and Ukraine, who, starting in 2022, have been coming to Drohobych to read poems in air raid shelters, thus countering the destructive power of war with the voice of poetry.

The series Poems in Shelters, held in Drohobych, has had 16 iterations so far, taking place between 2022 and 2025. The event participants were prominent authors from Poland and Ukraine, including Ryszard Krynicki, Yuri Andrukhovych, Adam Michnik, Oleksandr Irvanets, Iya Kiva, Wiera Meniok, Jacek Podsiadło, Jurko Prochaśko, Ostap Sływynski, Marek Radziwon, Tomasz Różycki, and Alfred Wierzbicki.

We spoke about the concept behind and the implementation of the series with its initiator Paweł Próchniak – literary critic, essayist, historian of literature, and professor at the University of the National Education Commission in Kraków.

Julia Marczyńska: Where did the idea to read poems in bomb shelters come from?

Paweł Próchniak: At the beginning of 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine and a full-scale war broke out, we were preparing the next edition of the International Bruno Schulz Festival. We weren’t sure we’d be able to organize the festival in Drohobych, where it has been held for years, but it was obvious to us that the ongoing war provided a key context for our activities and that addressing it was our fundamental duty. It is precisely this sense of duty that the idea of reading poetry in air raid shelters arose from. And it quickly crystallized when we decided that the 2022 Schulz Festival would take place, as always, in Drohobych after all, that we would hold it in Bruno Schulz’s hometown despite the war. And in defiance of the war.

Air raid shelters are a crucial element of everyday life during wartime. Being in air raid shelters is painful, associated with a suffocating fear, an all-too-real threat. But air raid shelters are also a place of life, a place of survival. They oftenliterally save one from death. They also provide a sense of being in another, distinct space, in another time – denser, flowing differently. A bit like participating in an intense liturgy. This was our starting point. We sought the simplest possible form – somewhat theatrical, evocative, yet well-attuned to the realities of war – that would remind us of the power of words spoken in the face of horror, in the grip of oppression, on the brink of despair. We decided that reading poetry in an air raid shelter could supply such a form. Today, after many iterations of this activity, we are certain that reading poems in air raid shelters combines art and the concreteness of life, that it restores a human voice to poetry, andthat it is also a symbolic act of singular power.

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Yuri Andrukhovych, Ryszard Krynicki, Poems in Shelters, Drohobych, July 8, 2024, photo: Igor Feciak

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I believe in the power of the symbolic act. And I am convinced that a genuinely symbolic act truly protects something precious within us and in the world, that it changes reality. A bit like a spell, or like a prayer.

JM: How does reading poems in bomb shelters differ from regular poetry reading?

PP: The bomb shelter is a special stage for a poem. Reading it aloud in the shelter reveals the existential core of poetry. It makes us realize that there are words that truly come to our aid, stand by us, and offer support.

In terrible moments, phrases normally hidden deep in our memory come back to us. They strive to support us – and that’s why they want to be spoken, to resonate. The specific words are important, the meanings they reveal are important, but the voice that carries them is also important.

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Paweł Próchniak, photo: Igor Feciak

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Ordinary poetry reading is usually silent reading. The stage for the poem then is a printed page. This theater of silent reading can be fascinating, and there’s something very intimate about it. The shelter creates a different space of resonance for the poem. Poems read there resound in a unique way. They are carried by a voice attuned to a specific acoustics, allowing us to hear that words are only seemingly powerless against the horror.

Of course, reading a poem in a shelter won’t stop the Russian bombs, won’t undo anyone’s tragedy, won’t bring the murdered back to life; but it is an act of freedom and preserves something deeply human within us, something that opposes the logic of aggression and brutality, stands against violence and refuses to conform to its dictates. This can also be heard in ordinary poetry reading, but when a poem resonates across the stage of the shelter, it is especially powerful.

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Poems in Shelters, Drohobych, July 9, 2024, photo: Igor Feciak

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JM: Do the authors read their own poems in the shelters, or do you also read the poems of absent poets

PP: We usually invite poets to read their own pieces. This is also how we create special acoustics for the poetry. The author’s voice carries the poems in a unique way. We also invite poetry critics to comment on these works. Their spoken-word essays commenting on the poems that have been read also contribute to building an acoustical space for poetry. They sharpen our hearing, allowing the poems to resonate more powerfully and fully.

But we also read the poetry of absent poets, including those recently murdered by the Russians, such as Volodymyr Vakulenko or Wiktoria Amelina, who read her poems with us during the Schulz Festival in July 2022. Almost exactly a year later, Wiktoria was killed by a Russian missile. Now we read her poems. They remain with us, alive, because they are carried by the human voice.

JM: There is a view according to which the poet, when writing a poem, is only a kind of intermediary, and the source of that poem is something else: some external force, whatever we may call it. Do you believe that the poet is the source of poetry, or are they merely Hermes, a translator into human language?

Wiktoria Amelina, photo: Osabadash / Wikimedia.org

PP: It’s often the case that the poet consciously writes a poem, constructs it, and controls it. Sometimes, however, the poem takes possession of the poet. And then they merely write it down. The poem guides them. In the former case, the poet is a craftsman. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The craft of writing is necessary in literature. But poetry is more than just craft.

What intrigues me about poetry are precisely those moments when the poet notes down the patterns of words that come to them, becoming their messenger. I don’t know where these words come from, but it’s in them, sometimes, that true poetry happens. We’re not always able to hear it. That’s why the space of resonance I just mentioned is so important. It’s crucial to create an acoustical space in which our hearing can attune to the voice resounding in the poem, to the music of the words written by the poet, to the music of their meaning.

I’m talking about the voice, about music, but a poem often grows not only from a musical seed but also from jotting down, from the movement of the writing hand, from those moments when thought and imagination begin to follow the writing, begin to follow the path marked by the written words. I believe this is how the best poems come to being, and it’s worth tuning your ear to them.

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Paweł Próchniak, Poems in Shelters, Drohobych, July 14, 2022, photo: Igor Feciak

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JM: You speak of poetry the way one usually speaks of music.

PP: Because poetry is music that comes alive in reading. The score of a poem patiently waits to be read, and the poem we read always resounds, even when we read it silently. A voice always emerges. Sometimes it’s even the voice of the person who wrote it. After all, it’s sometimes the case that if we heard a poet read their poems, we always hear their voice in them – the characteristic tonality, melody, phrasing. And I don’t mean that the author is the speaker in the poem. This usually isn’t the case; rather, the author says something through the poem, allows something to resonate in the poem, but doesn’t necessarily speak in it. I gave this example to show that a poem needs a voice, demands it, that it often reverberates in our ears, even during silent reading, as if it were being spoken.

Our words have an acoustic register. Their phonetic patterns are like musical lines. And that’s why every spoken word has something of a song to it, is the seed of a song. If words are to fully speak to us, we must hear them. All poetry is an interweaving of rhythms, arranged acoustically. This way, it gives us a cue that we need to listen closely. That’s why I emphasize this acoustical dimension of poetry, why I find it so important.

JM: A poem resounds with a person’s voice. Do you think it’s possible to translate poetry?

Wiera Meniok, Poems in Shelters, Drohobych, July 15, 2022, photo: Igor Feciak

PP: It’s a difficult question. Translation from one language to another is possible. Many texts written for a practical purpose can be translated without significant loss. But is it possible to translate music? And a poem is a musical structure. And I’m thinking not only of sounds but also of musical arrangements of meaning, the music of meaning.

Miracles do happen, after all. We have wonderful translations of poems. When they prove attainable, it’s probably because they are guided by hearing, a kind of resonance that harmonizes the poem and its translation. Rhyme works on a similar principle: that of aligning rhymed words like two chords, linking them and their meanings, the perspectives they open up. The poem and its translation are also two harmonized chords.

That’s how I interpret it. And that’s how it sounds during our reading of poems in the shelters, because we often read Ukrainian and Polish poems – in the original language and in translation. In this way, a musical bridge is created, connecting the two versions of the same poem. It’s also in their meeting that the idea of Poems in Shelters finds its form.

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The events comprising the Poems in Shelters series are organized by the Polish Studies Research and Information Center of the University of Drohobych and the Bruno Schulz Museum and Festival Foundation (Drohobych) in cooperation with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, the Polish PEN Club, the Polish Institute in Kyiv, the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Lviv, and the Anthropology of the Word Workshop [Pol. Pracownia Antropologii Słowa] at the Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre Center in Lublin.

The first edition of Poems in Shelters took place in July 2022 during the 10th International Bruno Schulz Festival. The edition held in June 2025 was part of the cultural program of the Polish presidency of the Council of the EU.

https://teatrnn.pl/wiersze-w-schronach/

https://teatrnn.pl/wiersze-w-schronach/virsi-v-ukrittah/

Translated from Polish by Michał Pelczar

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