The orphaned orchard in Crimea, the dead poets, and the persistence of Ukrainian cultural legacy

This essay draws from the author's personal experiences to examine how forgetting and remembering operate in Ukrainian society following the totalitarian era, particularly under the ongoing full‐scale Russian invasion. It draws on ideas from Paul Connerton, Alexander Etkind, and Tamara Hundorova regarding memory and the effects of violence on both remembrance and oblivion. The essay considers the fate of those forcibly displaced, silenced, or eradicated by the Soviet regime, such as Ukraine's indigenous peoples, Crimean Tatars, and poets from the Ukrainian “Executed Renaissance.” The author also reflects on her personal losses during the invasion, arguing that her generation has its own version of this phenomenon. Despite the adversity it faces, Ukrainian society now holds the power and responsibility to remember and honor its deceased poets and their cultural legacy in its own idiom of distress and recovery.