Analysis of Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky

Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky is a poetry collection in two acts about what happens to a community when the military moves in to control them. It is a tale of how the ethics of those who love, desire, or harmlessly gossip, can be transformed, under authoritarian pressure, into the machinery of rape, torture, and murder.

Power, as exerted through military might, has remained largely unchanged since the dawn of agriculture. The archetypes and structures that enable hegemonic systems have evolved to suit those in control, but the outcome remains consistent—in contemporary terms: the man with the largest army wins, even if—or especially if—that man is a fascist. Deaf Republic is not so much a cautionary tale of what might come, though it can certainly be read that way, but rather a reflection of what has already happened countless times. It follows in the rich poetic tradition of Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito and Osip Mandelstam’s Voronezh Notebooks.

The first act follows the lives of the townspeople of Vasenka, particularly Alfonso and his pregnant wife, Sonya (who gives birth to their son, Anushka). When a deaf boy, Petya, is murdered in the town square during a puppet show by invading soldiers, the townspeople revolt and “become deaf” as an act of insurgency:

“Our hearing doesn’t weaken, but something silent in us strengthens.” (“Deafness, an Insurgency, Begins”).

Silence becomes the revolutionary impulse of the people who gather around Petya’s body:

Observe this moment
—how it convulses—
The body of the boy lies on the asphalt like a paperclip.
The body of the boy lies on the asphalt
like the body of a boy. (“The Map of Bone and Opened Valves”)

The soldiers open fire—“may God have a photograph of this” (“Soldiers Aim at Us”)—and begin establishing control. Checkpoints are set up: “In these avenues, deafness is our only barricade.” Dissenters are rounded up. Yet amid occupation, life continues—people eat, sleep, and love.

Some of the most beautiful moments in the collection are the love poems between Alfonso and Sonya:

“You can fuck/anyone—but with whom can you sit in water?” (“While the Child Sleeps, Sonya Undresses”).

This is Eros—not merely carnal desire but the love of wisdom, the force that animates and breathes life into poetry. Eros, as a transcendental force, strives to move us beyond ourselves toward something unfamiliar and unreachable. Philosophers pursue wisdom, yet—as Socrates said—true wisdom lies in recognizing one’s ignorance.

When Sonya is taken by the soldiers and is subsequently raped and murdered Alfonso laments,

“You left, my door-slamming wife; and I,
a fool, live”
(“I, This Body”).

A modern-day Job, bereft and broken, scraping himself with clay shards—only here, it is the institution of state power that plays the role of Satan. The brutal machinery of the military state rolls forward, rarely facing consequence. In “Such Is the Story Made of Stubbornness and a Little Air,” Kaminsky writes:

There will be evidence, there will be evidence.
While helicopters bomb the streets, whatever they will open, will open.
What is silence? Something of the sky in us.

According to Andrew Davis, in his preface to the Voronezh Notebooks, “for Mandelstam the sky (nebo) suggests not paradise but a sexless, inhuman, asphyxiating emptiness. Air, conversely, represents the “freedom to move in a physical world.”—freedom denied to the citizens of Vasenka.

In Act II, Momma Galya becomes the leader of resistance, organizing escape routes for the townspeople. But eventually, she is targeted—not just by the occupying soldiers, but by the very people she seeks to protect. Fascism, when critically examined, often emerges as a manipulation—or misreading—of Platonic philosophy. Plato writes in Republic (458b): “If the rulers are to be worthy of the name… the latter will be willing to do what they are commanded and the former to command.” In Kaminsky’s poem “Search Patrols,” he writes:

a language—
see how deafness nails us into our bodies. Anushka
speaks to homeless dogs as if they are men, speaks to men
as if they are men
and not just souls on crutches of bone.

Momma Galya is the only one who acts in the face of the horrors of the occupying force, and for that she is at once heralded and then violently accosted:

“From the sidewalks, neighbors watch two women step in front of Galya. My
sister was arrested because of your revolution, one spits in her face” (“The Trial”).

Thus the arc of fascism comes full circle—from the dictator’s control through military power to the self-destruction of the citizenry, who turn on one another rather than confront the true source of their suffering.

At its heart, Deaf Republic urges readers to reclaim their agency. It invites each of us to become our own moral authority—not necessarily in opposition to the law, but not beholden to constructed systems of ethics either. It asks us to accept the burden of ethical decision-making and resist passing that responsibility to institutions.

From “Anonymous:”
from the funeral to his kitchen, shouts: I have come, God, I have come running to you— in snow-drifted streets, I stand like a flagpole without a flag.

Deaf Republic is not merely a collection of poems—it is a moral framework. It reclaims language not as a tool of domination but as a bridge to communication. Emmanuel Levinas writes that the duty of the I is “welcoming the other, as hospitality; in it the idea of infinity is consummated.” Compassion, not power, must be the guiding principle of our interactions. This is the ultimate message of Deaf Republic: the practice of infinite compassion and communication, or as Zbigniew Herbert wrote in Mr. Cogito:

“a subject for meditation:
the arithmetic of compassion.”
from “Mr. Cogito Reads the Newspaper.”

-Maria Garcia Teutsch, Berlin, Germany, 5 May 2025

Ilya Kaminsky was born in the former Soviet Union and is now an American citizen. He is the author of a previous poetry collection, Dancing in Odessa, and co-editor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, as well as translator for A Small Suitcase of Russian Poetry, 2014, with Katie Farris, among others. He has received a Whiting Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was named a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. His work has been translated into more than twenty
Published by Graywolf Press, purchase here
The New Yorker: We Lived Happily During the War
www.ilyakaminsky.com
books referenced:
Herbert, Zbigniew. Mr. Cogito: The Ecco Press, 1993
Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1961
Mandelstam, Osip, Voronezh Notebooks: New York Review of Books, 2016
The Republic of Plato