Authors

Discussion

There has been a tendency among Ukrainian writers to “compile” dictionaries of war, in which familiar words appear with unexpected interpretations and altered first associations, like in the non-fiction book of live stories of wartime experience, A Ukrainian Dictionary of War, compiled by Ostap Slyvynsky (2024). Slyvynsky’s technique as a compiler of the collection of people’s voices can be regarded as narrative volunteering. These accounts detail first-hand experiences of survival, volunteering work with internally displaced people and communication with fellow citizen-participants, including observations, auditory experiences and direct participation. The commonly used words are employed as dictionary entries, or lemmas. Each lemma organizes a segment of war experience into a discrete episode. Retaining the episode as a standalone unit enables the emotional experience to be recalled with greater ease, facilitating the cohesive integration of separate events into the overarching memory. The dictionary-style writing serves to facilitate the process of remembrance and helps to construct a series of images and a logical sequence of events in the memory of war.