A poet and a soldier, Volodymyr, wanders the thorny roads of the early years of World War II. Before his eyes pass: the death of his commander, cut down by bullets from a German fighter plane; the execution of Roma by German occupiers; impoverished and exhausted people who, in order to survive, are trading “remnants of luxury”—samovars, icons, even underwear. At last, the poet joins a group of partisans attempting to blow up a fascist train.

Whether Volodymyr will return from the war to finish loving, we never find out. Yet for the thousands and millions of poets like him, what would remain after the war—in place of love—would be only the borrowed memory of others, marked by memorial stones and eternal flames.

Although Osyka is mentioned alongside Paradjanov and Illienko in the front ranks of Ukrainian “poetic cinema,” his debut feature film “Love Awaits Those Who Return” is frequently overshadowed in historical studies of Thaw-era cinema.

One reason for the exclusion of this film—and of Osyka himself—from the official canon may be the unexpected blending of the “poetic cinema” aesthetic with the most conventional and sacrosanct subject of Soviet socialist-realist art of the period: the theme of war. The result of this combination is one of the most hybrid and unrestrained films of the Ukrainian 1960s—one in which the poetry of the cinematographic image rhymes with the verse monologues of fallen poets of the wartime generation, and in which the theme of war is presented, perhaps for the first time in Soviet cinema, in the non-heroic register of a politics of memory.