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Which language – which narrative?. Michelè Kraft, CC BY-NC 4.0

Which language – which narrative?

On Multilingualism and Choice of Language in Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Since the Outbreak of War

Oxana Matiychuk

23.10.2024

Ukraine has been fighting for the independence of its territories since 2014, but the war escalated into a crisis of historic proportions on 24 February 2022. Alongside the military clashes, the conflict has led to the catastrophe for civilization that often accompanies awful brutality. At the same time, the struggle for Ukrainian identity has intensified, particularly with regard to language.

Many Russian-speaking Ukrainian writers face a dilemma: they have to decide whether to continue to use the language of their tormentors, and if so, how. The linguistic conflicts of authors such as Volodymyr Rafeyenko, Iya Kiva und Andrey Kurkov illustrate the painful effects of the war on the linguistic and cultural landscape of Ukraine.

Since 2014, Ukraine has been at war with Russia over its independence and its territories. On 24 February 2022 this war took on a new dimension and it is now considered the greatest political catastrophe in Europe since 1945. However, it has also revealed a catastrophe for civilization in terms of the atrocities and the brutality with which it is being waged by the Russians. For Ukrainians, it has called for not only a military defence of land but also a struggle for Ukrainian identity – which is fought simultaneously at several levels, including those of language, culture and art. Language processes, that is, changes in the use of Ukrainian and Russian, have probably been affected by the most profound changes over the past year. One of the stated objectives of the war was the supposed defence of the Russian-speaking population from repression by the allegedly ultra-nationalistic and far-right Ukrainian government. But its effect has been what the national language policy in Ukraine, such as it is, had hoped but failed to achieve since 1991. According to data released by the Institute for Behavioral Studies at the American University Kyiv, [after the outbreak of war] 17% of the population in the eastern, northern and southern regions of the country changed their everyday language from Russian to Ukrainian (as of July 2022). By way of comparison, in the period from 1991 to 2021, only 15% of the whole population did so (according to surveys taken by the Institute of Sociology at the NAN Ukraine).1

The initial reaction of many authors to the war was speechlessness. But the events of war are too awful to permit silence, although they are also too awful for words. It is a situation where language simply falls short. Many writers therefore see it as their duty, above all, to document, and this process is possible through non-fiction texts and essays. Poetry can also be useful – at least, in its shorter forms. In the meantime, a literary scandal has occurred. The novel “Butscha: Die Geschichte einer Gefangenschaft” (“Bucha: The story of an imprisonment”) by Daryna Hnatko (Julija Irhisova), considered a controversial writer of popular fiction, which had been announced for the end of 2022, was withdrawn by the publisher “Klub simejnoho dosvillja” (“Family Leisure Club”) following heavy criticism on social media. The publisher apologized that it had “hurt the feelings of” many people and “torn open unhealed wounds”.2

For many authors in Ukraine, in addition to the painful question of What shall I write? there is a further question that is no less painful and no less dramatic: In which language shall I write? This is the dilemma faced by Russian-speaking Ukrainian writers, whose mother tongue has become the language of murder.

Naturally, they are not the only ones affected by the issue of language choice, which is an indicator of social and political orientation. People and even whole companies are facing this dilemma in many sectors, e.g. in banking. The following quote, which sums up the dichotomy faced by Russian-speaking Ukrainians, is from a banker: “Businessmen may no longer communicate in Russian, since this language is [now] associated with those who commit murder, looting and rape in Ukraine. This does not mean that all Russian speakers are murderers, rapists or looters. But all murderers, rapists and looters speak Russian, and so I no longer want to communicate in this language in public“3, says Oleh Horochowskyj, co-founder of Monobank, one of the most successful neobanks in Ukraine.

Literary works are always a public means of communication, and their language – in addition to their content – is therefore an attitude, a statement, a position taken by the author. Moreover, in crisis situations, it can indicate how the person writing has been affected.

Until 2014, Volodymyr Rafeyenko (born 1969 in Donetsk) was a successful Russian-speaking writer and received several prizes from the Russian Federation. After the occupation of his hometown by pro-Russian separatists, however, he did not want to be “forcibly defended” and moved to a small town near Kyiv. In his essay “I Once Wrote – and Spoke, and Thought – in Russian… No more”4, which he wrote in July 2022 for the literary online magazine Krytyka, he reflects on the sham justification of Russian propaganda and, with his insight, speaks on behalf of millions of Russian-speaking Ukrainians: “Imagine a person like me, who had lived in Donetsk for nearly half a century—who spoke, studied, and wrote exclusively in Russian and had no problems doing so, suddenly being told that I needed to be protected from my own country. That is, the main factor and cause of the war, which began, of course, not now, in 2022, but then, in 2014, was declared to be me, a Russian-speaking citizen of Ukraine.”

His decision as a writer was initially to retain both languages for his writing activities:

From the moment I began writing my first Ukrainian novel, I decided that I was going to write in two languages: one novel in Ukrainian, the other in my native Russian. I really didn’t want to abandon the language of my parents. Although, in the end, I remembered the peculiarities of our familial language collisions. Russia was my parent’s native language, as it was mine. Because that’s how they’d been taught: Russian was the language of higher education, the language of the metropolis, the language that provided opportunities for professional career growth.

However, after 24 February Rafeyenko reconsidered his relationship to the Russian language and found it impossible to continue to use it:

…everything turned out differently. On February 24 of this year Russia brought their culture, on tanks, all the way to Kyiv. At that time, my wife and I were staying in a friend’s country house between Bucha and Borodyanka […]. We quickly found ourselves surrounded by a ring of Russian troops and soon began an incredibly challenging and frightening period for us. I will not describe what we had to live through or how volunteers saved us, taking us out of the occupied territories at great risk to their own lives. I will only say that after February 24, I decided that never again in my life would I write or publish any of my work in Russian. I no longer want anything to do with a culture of murderers and rapists.

Rafeyenko’s “reckoning” with the Russian language is one of the most ruthless in contemporary Ukrainian essay-writing. From a linguistic perspective, it is a particular kind of language erosion or attrition5, a deliberately controlled removal of language, a renunciation of language due to highly traumatic experiences.

Iya Kiva (born 1984, also in Donetsk) describes a similar process of disengagement with language. Like Rafeyenko, she left her hometown in 2014 and moved to

OpenStreetMap / Open Database License (ODbL)

Kiïv

deu. Kiew, ukr. Kyjiw, eng. Kiev, eng. Kyiv, pol. Kijów, ukr. KiÌv, ukr. Kyïv

Kiev is located on the Dnieper River and has been the capital of Ukraine since 1991. According to the oldest Russian chronicle, the Nestor Chronicle, Kiev was first mentioned in 862. It was the main settlement of Kievan Rus' until 1362, when it fell to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, becoming part of the Polish-Lithuanian noble republic in 1569. In 1667, after the uprising under Cossack leader Bogdan Chmel'nyc'kyj and the ensuing Polish-Russian War, Kiev became part of Russia. In 1917 Kiev became the capital of the Ukrainian People's Republic, in 1918 of the Ukrainian National Republic, and in 1934 of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Kiev was also called the "Mother of all Russian Cities", "Jerusalem of the East", "Capital of the Golden Domes" and "Heart of Ukraine".
Kiev is heavily contested in the Russian-Ukrainian war.

Due to the war in Ukraine, it is possible that this information is no longer up to date.

Kiïv in the Online Encyclopedia of the Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe (German)

Kiïv at Google Maps

. All she could take with her from Donetsk was her mother tongue, her own mixture of Russian and Ukrainian, which she attempted to rescue from the “Russian world”. In Kyiv she began to build a new linguistic home in the Ukrainian language, but at first did not think of giving up her Russian entirely. “Bilingualism was a natural condition for my generation, although in Donetsk there was no one to talk to in Ukrainian. When I write, I need to imagine an interlocutor.“6 In 2021 she published the volume “Wir werden als andere Menschen aufwachen“ (“We will wake up as other people“) (2021), which contains interviews with contemporary Belarusian authors. After the 24 February, “the Russians even took away my mother tongue...there, where there used to be Russian, I can now feel a dead, rotting, stinking animal” she said in July 2022 in a conversation with the news portal, “Ukrajinska Pravda”. For the present, it is also impossible for her to work on literary texts: “Today the role of writing is primarily to bear witness. War literature is a chronicler, a witness, a forensic scientist. I force myself to keep a war diary, not because I see any particular value in it, but rather because human memory is fragile and unreliable.“

A quite different position and a different approach to the Russian language is that taken by Andrey Kurkov, one of the most translated and read Ukrainian authors in the European West. Incidentally, the fact that he is so widely translated is due not least to the fact that he writes in Russian and not Ukrainian. Professional translators working out of Ukrainian are rare, and one of the best, Claudia Dathe, was a speaker at the conference and took part in the interview – otherwise they can be counted on the fingers of two hands.

“My Russian belongs to me” Kurkov stressed in “Welt“ on 19.8.2022:

I had a certain amount of luck. I have long ceased to be interested in Russian culture or contemporary Russian literature. I have never received literary honors either in Russia or Ukraine. I have no emotional relationship with Russia. I probably had one once, but that is a long time ago. In any event, I have been on a war footing with Russian literature for a long time. My books were banned in Russia for the first time following the Orange Revolution in 2005. After the annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the war in Donbas in 2014, their import from Ukraine for distribution in Russia become prohibited. I have never felt myself part of Russian literature, and I have never seen my Russian language as belonging to Russian culture or to the Russian Federation. My Russian belongs to me and is part of a phenomenon called Russophonia, that is, the use of the Russian language outside Russia. This phenomenon will gradually disappear in Ukraine as well as in other countries, and Russia is actually doing all it can to ensure that as many people as possible distance themselves from the Russian language.7
Andrej Kurkov: “Mein Russisch gehört mir”. In: Die Welt, 19 August 2022

Kurkov epitomizes the natural condition of many countries in the post-colonial world, in which, in addition to the national languages, the language of the former colonial or imperial power is still used or is the dominant language. In the same interview he commented on the statement by Rafeyenko quoted above and expressed a certain lack of understanding as to who Rafeyenko wanted to “punish with his announcement“ – the language, Russia, Russian-speaking readers or himself.

Presumably, when it comes to individual, psychic processes, reactions to language trauma are highly varied. They are connected to concrete personal experiences and mental states, and therefore depend on the individual. Rafeyenko’s life since 2014 has been characterized by material and intangible loss and a painful questioning of his own identity, while Kurkov, who lives in Kyiv and in the United Kingdom, has not had to go through any such existential crises. Life under Russian occupation, about which Rafeyenko has not yet spoken publicly, cannot be compared to the experience of Kurkov, who moved to the Zakarpattia region in Western Ukraine, where he is still based today.

Just how different reactions to language can be became evident when I read a Facebook entry by Liubov Yakymchuk. She spent some time at a literature residency in Vienna with her son in the summer of 2022. Russian had long been banned among her friends and acquaintances. When she saw a programme on YouTube in Russian in Vienna, she felt physically sick and had a panic attack. It is probably a predictable human response to look for similarities and as well as answers or partial answers to the events of the present in the past and in what is already known.

"I do not believe in bilingualism in poetry. […] Poetry – that is the fateful individuality of language…“8 In a letter to Hans Bender, Celan asserts that craftsmanship is the prerequisite for all poetry.

Handcraft – that is something for the hands. And these hands in turn belong to just one person, that is, a unique and mortal soul, who seeks a path with his voice and with his silence. Only true hands can write true poetry. I see no fundamental difference between a handshake and a poem.9

His compatriot Rose Ausländer had to go through a no less dramatic time during and after the second world war: “I could only return to the United States in 1946 and for several years was unable to write. About ten years ago I felt a sudden and unexpected urge to write a poem in English, and did so...“, she said in an interview for a New York radio station in 1959. This urge was followed by almost 20 years of composing poetry in a language that, for her, was far more foreign than for example Yiddish or even Romanian would have been. During this period, she often also wrote in German: “During one of my ‘English periods’ I am incapable of writing in German and vice versa. In this respect I have become a ‘split‘ personality, changing from one language-plane to the other. This does not mean, however, that the process of changing planes is painless”10.

The series of examples could be continued: in the middle of the 20th century, millions of European Jews found that their mother tongue had become the language of murder. It was particularly difficult for writers: the single most important tool for their work, their craft, became so contaminated that it could not be used in the short or long term. Even if the current situation is not identical to the second world war, certain parallels are indisputable.

Footnotes

Cf. Ukaine-Analysen: Sprachen in Zeiten des Krieges, No. 284, 10.05.2023, Graphic 1, https://laender-analysen.de/ukraine-analysen/284/ukraineanalysen284.pdf and “Der Krieg und die Sprache: Die russische Aggression treibt die Derussifizierung der Ukrainer rekordschnell voran. Es ist eine gute Möglichkeit für die Wirtschaft”, 24 November 2022, https://forbes.ua/lifestyle/viyna-i-mova-rosiyska-agresiya-rekordno-shvidko-derusifikue-ukraintsiv-tse-khorosha-mozhlivist-dlya-biznesu-24092022-8567.

Facebook page of the publisher “Клуб сімейного дозвілля” (“Family Leisure Club”), as of 1 November 2022: https://www.facebook.com/100063586573227/posts/567412425388305.

Oleh Horochowskyj on the Russian language, 18 July 2022: https://gordonua.com/news/society/sovladelec-monobank-gorohovskiy-ne-kazhdyy-kto-govorit-po-russki-ubiyca-nasilnik-i-maroder-no-kazhdyy-grabitel-nasilnik-maroder-i-ubiyca-govorit-po-russki-1673558.html.

Volodymyr Rafeyenko: „I Once Wrote – and Spoke, and Thought – in Russian… No more“, 29 July 2022, https://lithub.com/i-once-wrote-and-spoke-and-thought-in-russian-no-more/.

Claudia Maria Riehl: Mehrsprachigkeit. Eine Einführung. Darmstadt 2014.

Iya Kiva: „In meinem Inneren, wo früher die russische Sprache war, spüre ich ein totes Tier liegen“, 24 July 2022, https://www.pravda.com.ua/articles/2022/07/24/7359716/

https://www.welt.de/kultur/literarischewelt/plus240505317/Andrej-Kurkow-ueber-den-Sprachenstreit-der-Ukraine-Mein-Russisch-gehoert-mir.html

Paul Celan: Der Meridian und andere Prosa. Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 30.

Paul Celan: Brief an Hans Bender. In: Gesammelte Werke, Bd. III, Frankfurt a. M. 1983, p. 177 et seq.

10.

Rose Ausländer: Der Dichter in zwei Welten. In: Deiner Stimmen Schatten. Gedichte, kleine Prosa und Materialien aus dem Nachlaß, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 69.

Citation

Zitierempfehlung

Oxana Matiychuk: Which language – which narrative? On Multilingualism and Choice of Language in Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Since the Outbreak of War. In: Copernico. History and Cultural Heritage in Eastern Europe. URL: https://www.copernico.eu/en/link/6718c116508af1.09231766 (2025-07-13)

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