The stories of war are told most viscerally by poets. World War I, which marked the end of the Old world and the start of the Modern era, spawned a generation of poets, many of whom died in battle.

The war in Ukraine could be as epochal as World War I, either a reprieve for the world order or the bellwether for a new, oppressive map, with Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea in ascendancy.

Let us mourn one of Ukraine’s poets and fighters. Maksym Krystov deserves to be remembered, and though he died earlier this year, reading his poetry is particularly painful just days after Russia bombed a pediatric hospital in Kviv, killing 43. Surely we can obsess about Joe Biden’s words, where crisp or slurred and still pay attention to these words, too, from a man whose death should not be in vain.

This winter, the courtyard of Kyiv’s St Michael’s Golden Domed Monastery was filled with mourners bringing flowers adorned with blue and yellow ribbons, the colors of the Ukrainian flag, to commemorate the life and death of of Ukrainian poet and soldier, Maksym Kryvstov.

Kryvstov was thirty-three when he was killed by artillery fire in the Kupiansk area of the Khakiv region, one of the key fronts in Moscow’s winter offensive this winter. His death attracted little notice in the U.S., and only slightly more in Europe, but his poetry had attracted notice, both domestically and internationally the previous year. His first and last publication, Poems From the Loophole, published in 2023 by Nash Format Publishing, received high praise from Ukraine’s literati, and was included on PEN’s Ukraine Best Books of 2023.

His poems have been published in anthologies and magazines including 112 Poems about Love and War, What Lulls you to Sleep? and Between the Sirens.

Kryvstov joined the army in 2014 after Russia illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula. He later described his stint this way: “My position is a machine gunner. If there is a machine gun at the position, then I am a machine gunner, if there is a grenade launcher, then I am a grenade launcher!”

After street demonstrations, the Ukrainian military, strengthened by volunteers like Kryvstov successfully ousted a Russian puppet president in what came to be called the Revolution of Dignity. The 107 Ukrainians who died would later be known as the “Heavenly Hundred.” But that time, Kryvstov survived, only to fight again when Russia invaded two years ago.

“He took pictures, wrote poetry and fought. Talking to him was unlike anything else at all. I wondered what a person like him was doing in a place like this. Wherever I met him, whether at war or at home, this question was always relevant. It was like he was from another planet, in a good way,” wrote activist and soldier Marusia Zvirobii on Facebook.

After his death, Kryvstov’s mother, Nadiia Kryvstova, said: “My precious son will sprout violets…oh God,” recalling lines from one of her son’s last poems.

“My head rolls from tree to tree

Like a tumbleweed

Or a ball

From my severed arms

Violets will sprout in the Spring.”

Ukrainian filmmaker Iryna Tsilyk wrote on Facebook “I’m looking at the photo – the tattoo on his arm." Krystov had tattooed the words of another Ukrainian poet, Mykhailo Semenko, on his arm: “I will die in wild Patagonia.”

The reference had more than literary resonance, as Krystov well knew. Semenko, who established avant-garde cultural groups that sought to break with Soviet cultural policy, was arrested along with other cultural dissidents and shot to death by the Soviets in Kyiv in 1937. This was shortly after the man-made famine that many historians believe Soviet head Josef Stalin engineered to wipe out a Ukrainian independence movement. The Holodomor, as it was called, killed between 3.5 and 7 million people, and is given its due in the excellent, and, it turns out, prescient 2019 film Mr. Jones directed by Agnieszka Holland, released before Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The battle of Kupiansk of which Kryvstov was involved, was part of the Ukrainian Kharkiv counteroffensive that started in September of that first year of the invasion. That battle, according to news sources, changed the course of the war in Ukraine, giving the feisty upstart country a chance to beat back the Russian invader.

The theme of contrast between military and civilian life is a frequent motif through Kryvstov’s work. Not all of Kryvstov's has been translated, but here are some excerpts from his poems.

He moved to Bucha in mid-March 2021

rented a small apartment in the basement and got a cat

whose fur was the color of the fudge on eclairs.

He went to English classes, to the gym and to confession

he loved to watch the snow fall

and the street disappear in the fog.

He listened to Radiohead, old albums of Okean Elzy,

rain, thunder and the beating of a girl's heart

with whom he fell asleep in a small basement apartment

and woke up in a small basement apartment

kissed her warm face

snuggled up to her sticky body

dived with his palm into the waves of her hair

and floundered there like a fly on a web.

She left him in the fall

as the birds leave the forests

as the engineers leave the factory at the end of the shift

and went to Poland

to stay there.

He took the cat that looked like a pastry

and said: cat, you have to go

with us, as the morning

as your life

as a disease

Happened, cold as ice

War

the lesson called "Quiet Life" is over.

The street disappears in the fog

It rains,

they don't listen to him at all

the cat ran out into the field and his name is taken by the wind.

On the cross, as if on an ID card, it is written:

Here lies number 234, rest in peace.

When he falls asleep

slowly stretches his front legs

he dreams of summer

dreams of an undamaged brick house

dreams of chickens

running around the yard

dreams of children

who treat him to meat pies

my helmet slips out of my hands

falls on the mud

the cat wakes up

squints his eyes

looks around carefully:

yes, they're his people:

and falls asleep again.

"I'll turn my life around,

I promise."

Written with a marker on the wall of a

popular spot in Kyiv,

There is coffee, pastries, stylish clothes, music, and balconies with an incredible view.

I've seen

how the fog embraces the skyscraper

gently and quietly.

"Love doesn't exist,"

written on another floor of this spot.

Nor does the sea,

nor does air,

nor do dreams,

nor me,

but the coffee here is good.

Someone added below:

"Sunshine, what made you think that way?"

Listen, I'll tell you what:

the swamp, through which reaching the dugout is tough

shells falling nearby,

a frozen rope tightly knotted around a neck

parts of a person

scattered

lost in the field

whimsically and unkempt

a dream that forces you to scream

rain when you have a few days left to wait for change

and the sunshine

that descends into the basement

because of the air alarm

indeed,

who made you think that way, sunshine?

A short vacation,

a few days on the road,

I meet friends,

mold clay,

for the first time in two years, I bake a cheesecake

which turned out just OK,

with my friend, we watch

as the winter cat catches a street mouse

holding on,

I can breathe

a girl crosses the road

holding a big skinny dog on a leash

the last floors of Khrushchyovka apartments emerge somewhere

like butterfly swimmers

twinkling with garlands

a little more

and I wish to become a part of

the ordinary city again

walk a big dog

fry some eggs

drink coffee in charming bookstores with tall shelves

it's dangerous

it's very dangerous

a calm life is an illness

throw away those thoughts

like worn-out slippers

run away from here

to your dugout

to your swamp

to your shells

I'll turn my life around

I'll turn my life around?

I promise.

Tributes have poured in for Kryvtsov as many Ukrainians point to the now long list of artists whose lives have been cut short by the Russian invasion.

"They are killing the best of us," one commentator wrote.

While Kryvstov invoked a Ukrainian poet killed when the Soviet Union was responsible for the genocide of between 3.5 and 7 million people in the Holodomor, a man-made famine believed to have been engineered by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement.

But one also remembers Owen, who was killed in action serving in the British army on November 4, 1918, one week before the armistice. He was 25.

Makysm Kryvstov outlived him by 8 years. He died age 33.

As Owen put it: All we can do is warn.

Profits from sales of Kryvtsov’s book will be divided between the late soldier's family and a fund to purchase books for the Ukrainian military. Keep asking your local independent bookseller when the translation will be out.

From Reddit:

The cats living with the soldiers on the frontlines are extremely important, and the soldiers take very good care of them. The cats hunt and eliminate the mice and rats that infiltrate the trenches and living quarters along the front. The mice and rats damage the food sources the people need, and they also spread diseases that are dangerous in the frontlines. So cats are welcomed by the military there, the cats are cared for, and the cats enjoy the human company as much as the presence of kitties helps the soldiers to relax. However, I have read stories of soldiers who have sent both cats and dogs home to relatives so that the creatures can be safe and with a family.

Cat and dog soldiers at the front are just as critical to victory as any of their human counterparts.

They keep rats out of the trenches, can hear, and will alert to incoming shells before humans can perceive them, they smell and alert to unseen Russians nearby. Their very presence helps heal traumatic psychological injuries.

It’s a sad reality that we rely so much on animals to win wars, you are right that the cat should be cuddling up by a nice fireplace in peace; but genuinely, we can’t win without them.

David Breithaupt's work has been published in the LA Review of Books, Exquisite Corpse, and other magazines. Breithaupt has worked for Rolling Stone, The Brazenhead Bookstore and Allen Ginsberg as an archive assistant, and one of his essays appeared in the anthology One Last Lunch, edited by Erica Heller. Currently covering the Cincinnati Reds baseball team for the Reds Report. Lives in Columbus, Ohio, home of Two Dollar Radio. Getting new knees. Just got Medicare. Living the dream.