Ada Wordsworth in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
SINCE RUSSIA’S FULL-SCALE INVASION of Ukraine in February 2022, Ukrainian cultural figures have been grappling with Theodor Adorno’s declaration: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” After the massacre at Bucha, the siege of Mariupol, and the seemingly endless stream of war crimes revealed every time a Ukrainian hamlet is liberated, artists, musicians, and writers are left wondering if they can possibly create something meaningful out of the barbarism—and, perhaps more pertinently, if they should. Theater critic John Freedman’s new anthology A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War: 20 Short Works by Ukrainian Playwrights is a response to this question.
More here.