Language Dance Act Five: Ukraїnska
But the hero of the year is Ukrainian. I first heard Ukrainian language spoken at age 10 in Crimea, on the same trip I first saw the sea. I didn't know words like "mutual intelligibility" yet. I just thought these kids my age in the street sounded funny - but I mostly understood them. Shortly after I got a pirated DVD of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix with an additional Ukrainian dub, which in the era of "alternative translations" also created a hilarious experience. My mom would occasionally use Ukrainian phrases and lullabies from her grandmother, who passed away before my birth. My world back then was small, and Ukraine existed safely somewhere beyond the horizon. In those times, mid-2000s, it still seemed to me that history is done, the world is static, the political maps reached their asymptotic state and will not change anymore.
While I was dealing with the petty personal dramas of my early twenties, someone hit back the Play button on world history. 2014. Crimea occupation. Odesa fire. "Referendum". Donbas. War. By then I had already moved to the US, so the action was far from me but close to home, close to the place where the history is so violently static. I spent several days glued to the screen, mostly the not-quite-reliable, clickbaity Russian-language websites from Ukraine. A few years later, I decided to learn Ukrainian in earnest. I picked up Mesopotamia by the inimitable Serhiy Zhadan, novelist, poet, and rock musician. As I was told later, learning a language by reading a novel is some sort of a power move.
In 2018 I visited friends in Lviv where I could speak Belarusian and they would reply in Ukrainian and everyone would be understood. They had a house rule that the Russian language is reserved for snarky jokes; any promise given in Russian doesn't need to be fulfilled. A monument to the glory of the Soviet army was surrounded by a fence, either to protect it from vandals or to prepare for takedown. At a post office a young man was mailing a stack of books with a title that would have raised eyebrows and banhammers in many other places. Yet this place was profoundly modern, the IT capital of the country host to a myriad startups and data science Master's programs. It is in a Lviv coffee shop that I learned such words as V60 and AeroPress, even though by friends' advice my order was different. Закарпатського п'ятдесят і шоколадний торт.
Among all this modernity, Lviv was hearing the echo of the Donbas war on the other end of the country. Many young people either were fresh war veterans themselves or had close relatives, some recently migrated from the occupied regions. Multiple buildings had posters in support of Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian movie director kidnapped by Russia in the annexation of Crimea. Too many people like him did not cross the border; the border crossed them. The topic of a line on the map, a line between people, a line that should not be crossed in one's actions was hanging in the air. In Lviv I picked up a copy of Zhadan's fresh novel about an orphanage crossed by the front line. I got it signed by the author at a double Ukrainian-English reading of Zhadan's poetry at Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, just before Covid.
The Ukrainian language has been a battleground of colonial and anticolonial forces for centuries. On one side, bans on usage, reforms to shift the language closer to Russian, and genocide of native speakers. On the other side, research conferences to standardize the grammar of the literary language, public education, and tireless creations of writers, poets, and musicians. Around the world, this struggle has endless manifestations for any local language ever displaced by empires. The Belarusian language has quite a similar story, defending from the same encroaching empire. I can only speak for the stories close to me, because who else would? In Zhadan's words, the history is being rewritten in Ukrainian.
Ukrainians have a lot to say on the nature of freedom - not just the abstract philosophical idea, but the ethos, the practice, the struggle for it. Modern Ukrainian culture is an example of how vibrant a community can be when inspired by its own history and not suffocated by censorship. Belarusians and Ukrainians are geographical neighbors, they share many beats and beatings of history, they have friendly relations - though the forced "brotherly" metaphor has exhausted itself. We need to stop projecting paternalistic quasi-familial relations on whole countries. Seen as an independent nation, Ukrainians are tremendously inspiring in how to build a free country in our shared Eastern European conditions. Yet I will never be one of them.
Ukrainian is a Slavic language, as are Belarusian and Russian. You can pretend that the three languages are not that far apart, that it is easy to build a bridge, that you can always jump across the language gap. But you never do that, you've never been on that side. I am not a professional in any of this. I am not a linguist, or a philologist, or a historian. As far as languages go, I have a lot to learn. But the people who say that Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians are one nation cannot say that in either Belarusian or Ukrainian.
Languages largely defined my experience of the decade of 2010s. One of my key reflections on the year 2012 was the number of languages I used, but the number just kept growing. In the 2010s I explored the world, learned a ton of things, got my degrees. This blog post series is a meditation on the 2010s and their rapid end. The 2010s could have just expired with the turn of a calendar page. But they had to go out with a bang. Covid pandemic. Belarusian protests. Russian war on Ukraine. These events mark the passing of time, the grind of history, of the definitive closing of the 2010s. We can learn what passed, make our resolutions, decide who earned our trust, find who inspires us, and move onward.