ABSTRACT
This article discusses sociolinguistic aspects of belonging through the phenomenon of Russophone Ukrainian authors who have either switched to Ukrainian or continued using Russian during the Russo-Ukrainian War. It draws on a survey that the author has conducted over the past several months of 30 such authors. Fifteen respondents, who during the war have opted to withdraw from their main language of creativity in favour of another, are compared to a second group of 15 respondents, who continue using Russian as their language of creativity. The article engages with these authors’ reflections and reasoning as to why they have given up (or not given up) the Russian language in favour of Ukrainian, and it offers some considerations on the sociopolitical implications of making (or declining to make) such a switch, as well as questions of self-decolonization, linguistic affiliation, and sociocultural peripheries and marginality.
RÉSUMÉ
Cet article traite du phénomène de l’appartenance et de ses aspects sociolinguistiques à travers le cas des auteurs ukrainiens russophones qui sont passés à l’ukrainien ou ont continué à utiliser le russe pendant la guerre russo-ukrainienne. Il s’appuie sur une enquête que l’auteur a menée au cours des derniers mois auprès de 30 de ces auteurs. Quinze de ces répondants ont choisi pendant la guerre d’abandonner leur principale langue de création en faveur d’une autre, tandis que 15 autres continuent à utiliser le russe comme langue de création. L’article se penche sur les réflexions et le raisonnement de ces auteurs quant aux raisons pour lesquelles ils ont abandonné (ou non) la langue russe en faveur de l’ukrainien, et propose quelques considérations sur les implications sociopolitiques d’un tel changement (ou du refus de le faire), ainsi que sur les questions d’auto-décolonisation, d’affiliation linguistique, de périphérie socioculturelle et de marginalité.
Scholarship typically discusses the phenomenon of withdrawal from one language of creativity (normally, the author’s native language) in favour of another (acquired) in two contexts, practical and political: as related to migration or displacement experiences, or owing to the association of a language with forms of oppression. With regard to the former, there exists scholarship on the pragmatic experiences of immigrant writers, who often reflect on the process of switching languages and finding “hospitality” in a new culture as something painful but necessary for their integration into a new literary scene and market.Footnote1 As to the latter context, several studies address German-language authors’ withdrawal from their native tongue during or after the Second World War to dissociate themselves from the Nazi regime and its crimes.Footnote2 Recent studies on writers of Middle Eastern origin combine both approaches, analyzing these authors’ work and their transition to other languages (especially English) as a combination of political gesture and the experience of displacement.Footnote3 But other studies address a quite opposite process: certain authors’ transition from their mother tongue to the hegemonic language, which in their native milieu is often considered the language of the colonizer, as in the case of the Palestinian author Anton Shammas, who writes a significant portion of his works in Hebrew.Footnote4
Studies dealing with the political premises of language shifts often focus on decolonization, on a given postcolonial state’s attempts to dissociate from its former colonizer and weaken its influence. These typically foreground the state-initiated, institutional processes of either total withdrawal from the language of the former colonizer or limitations on its use.Footnote5 Less attention has been paid to hybrid and liminal cases occurring in the private and artistic spheres. Creative works can, of course, be of great sociocultural and even political significance, but initially, the choice of whether to produce such works in a new language is often motivated by private and quite emotional experiences.
Switching one’s language of creativity disaffiliates one from one’s cultural habitat: institutions, collegial connections, markets (publishing houses, literary journals), readership, and literary life (festivals, awards, etc.). Moreover, the manifestation of loyalty to a political entity or culture embodied by such a switch leads to a complicated process of inner re-tuning, often fraught with the difficulties of “assimilation” in a new language and culture, even as the writer making this transition may also face criticism, rejection, or vilification (as a defector or opportunist) from representatives of the abandoned language and culture. These complexities are crucial for an understanding of these authors’ positions and experiences, both in the context of the overall practice of changing one’s professional milieu and acquiring new skills (linguistic, literary or instrumental, institutional, etc.), and that of current geopolitical upheavals.
Russophone authors in Ukraine have tended to fall between definitions.Footnote6 They typically get less public attention because of the difficulty of classifying them, of determining their debatable affiliation. The survey on which this study is based has been kept anonymous, as some of the participants are in still-occupied territories. The identities of all the participants are known to me, as I approached each personally, but their questionnaires were submitted (either in Ukrainian or Russian) unnamed. Participants’ gender and age are represented relatively equally. Geographically, they naturally tend to hail from central, southern, and eastern Ukraine – regions with a greater Russophone population – but authors residing in the westernmost regions are also represented. For both groups – those who have switched to Ukrainian and those who have not – the questions pertained to their general background, their practice of writing in Russian before and after the invasion, their current linguistic affiliation, the status of the Russian language in their writings and perceptions, and changes in collegial relations with authors from Ukraine and Russia since the invasion. The questionnaire presented to those authors who have switched to Ukrainian focused on the reasons and circumstances related to this shift; the other asked about respondents’ motivations for continuing to write in Russian.
The term “Russophone literature” has recently become quite common, both in scholarship – for instance, in the titling of academic entities, with formerly “Russian” departments or professorships now “Russophone” or “Slavic” (itself a decolonial vector) – and in the self-definitions of authors who attempt thereby to dissociate the Russian language from the Russian state, but at times also themselves from the Russian nation/ethnos, as well as from the overall Russian literary tradition. Russophone literature is conceptualized as a literature that is written mainly outside Russia and that functions like a political and socio-literary “preserve,” maintained for and by Russophone authors to distance themselves from Russianness. Thus, the definition of Russophone literature is not limited to the fact that it is written in Russian. The question is frequently heard: Does the suffix “-ophone” (as in Russophone, Francophone, etc.) replace the national(ist) basis of the definition of any literature named after a country? Further complicating matters is the fact that, under the present circumstances, Russophone writing in Ukraine now harbours an uncomfortable (even political) ambivalence – the whiff of betrayal and possible expression of support for Russia as a polity. The term “Russophone” has thus often seemed vague – like perhaps just an attempt to avoid saying “Russian” – and of ever-diminishing usefulness. In analyzing my case study, I will try to answer these and other questions, with the caveat that this survey has been conducted at a time of the greatest political, cultural, and personal-emotional instability, a period of rapid changes (in geopolitics, affiliations, and beliefs). However, this study, precisely owing to these circumstances, represents a snapshot of the epoch, of the effervescence of peoples’ selves.
“This language is stained with our blood”: on Russophone authors switching to Ukrainian
Tearing the skin of a dragon that held me inside itself; recovery from a teratoma; feeling like there’s a dead animal in your chest, decomposing and stinking; being relieved of a monstrous tumour with eyes and teeth; a territory that ceased to exist; the implosion of one’s twin brother; the taste of a rotten tomato that makes you want to spit and rinse your mouth; killing yourself; partial anesthesia; awakening; a bud from which a flower will appear, then there will be bees and fruits, and seeds.
These are metaphors by which Russophone authors of Ukraine have described their withdrawal from the Russian language in favour of Ukrainian. The title of this section comes from a recent poem by Anastasiia Afanas′eva, a Russophone poet from Kharkiv. Called “A New Song of Silence” (“Nova pisnia tyshi”), this poem can be read as a manifesto. Embodying the transition in question, it begins in Russian and ends in Ukrainian:
The poem not only embodies the transition from one language to another; it also articulates a total renunciation of one’s past, caused by the invasion: “We left behind all our memories.” This line speaks of the enforced abandonment of one’s tangible memories owing to displacement, but it also addresses the abandonment and annulment of – the withdrawal from – everything related to Russia and Russian owing to the destruction caused by the war: “broken shops and streets / which were us.” This expulsion from one’s home, both physical/geographical and linguistic, is defined by a search for peace and quietude, for a location in space and time where one can be oneself. The motif of liberation in this poem is associated with purification from memories, from the colonial past, and from the language of the colonizer, against which one constructs multiple fences. The language is materialized, becoming a metonymy of aggression from which one needs to be shielded.
This poem resonates with responses to my survey. In particular, it defines the Ukrainian language as a shelter and shield; it wants to dissociate itself from Russian, and it seems to proclaim a sacred silence as a gesture of reverence toward what is now written – and from now on will be written – in Ukrainian. Both in this poem and in statements of the survey participants, language signals position and gains spatial dimensions. It offers shelter from aggression and from the anxiety of being attacked. This is one of the most glaring motifs in the responses of these authors, who refer to themselves as in search of a “refuge” (prytulok) or a “shelter for expression” (prykhystok dlia vyslovliuvannia).
Most of the respondents indicate that using Russian causes them anxiety, on an ideological and even physical level. Defining Russian as the more aggressive language of the two, one of the respondents, using military associations, states that “Russian currently feels louder and commanding.” Another author, likewise reflecting on the language’s perceived insensitivity, remarks that Russian feels, sounds, or acts like “reinforced concrete and a bulldozer”; another comments that the use and sound of Russian in general “causes pain.”
Under the circumstances, a changed attitude toward Russian – even personifying it as a loud, commanding bully – is entirely understandable; the language that the respondents have used in everyday life and in their creative work has become the language of the aggressor. As such, one respondent reflects on disappointment with this language, posing a rhetorical question that echoes Afanas′eva’s poem: “What makes sense inside me in the Russian language now?” It is as if anything ever written or said in this language, by anyone, has been completely overshadowed by the current invasion. All the responses associate the Russian language with the Russian Federation, metonymically transposing their revulsion with that state onto its language, within and beyond Russia. The Russian legacy, Russian responsibility for the present horrors, extend to everywhere where Russian is heard. To judge from these responses, it is no longer possible to detach Russian from Russia.
Motifs of search for escape and safety here are connected to the physical and metaphysical anxiety associated with the Russian language; they extend to the realm of the refugee, where one is deprived of home and forced from one’s territory. But in this case, one’s home territory is itself associated with (one’s native) Russian language, and, like a territory currently unusable because occupied, Russian is currently unusable, dissolved as it is in every possible association with a senseless aggression. One of the respondents self-identifies as currently “language homeless” (movnyii bezkhat′ko). The solution to this painful condition is seen to be the acquisition of a new home: “moving into” the Ukrainian language, where this respondent “feel[s] safe and homey,” or, as the poem states, where one “can hear / the movements of [one’s] own thoughts.”
This transition is defined in geographical terms, where Russian and Ukrainian compete, if not fight. In particular, this experience is described by one of the respondents as the “reduction of the space taken up by the Russian language, with Ukrainian growing in its place.” This recutting of one’s inner geography, which is defined by linguistic affiliation, also redefines one’s relationship to a national literature. Time and again, these authors voice the same sentiment: we don’t want to be associated with Russian literature, and if a total abandonment of this language is what is needed, we will do it. As one respondent puts it: “To write in Russian now, despite my own convictions, is to be a part of Russian culture.” Another writes that “I cannot bring myself [lit., ‘my tongue does not turn over,’ iazyk ne povertaiet′sia] to describe my inner state [in Russian]; I don’t know, perhaps my mind sees a chasm where Russian used to function, and bypasses it.”
The switch to Ukrainian is seen by some as a liberation from an overweening Russian culture, a bold gesture of self-decolonization:
I realized [writes one of the authors] that all these years I wrote and lived looking back at GREAT RUSSIAN POETRY, I read a lot of Russian authors, I thought how cool it would be to win the Grigor′ev prize and in general to be noticed by Lev Oborin or [Sergei] Gandlevskii, while contemporary Ukrainian poetry, and not only contemporary, was something too local and less valuable for me. I am very sorry for these feelings and views and I am sorry that I was working to develop a language foreign to me.
Clearly, the experience of war has closed off previous possibilities of self-identification and activated more relevant ones, associated with escape, relief, and self-decolonization. For these authors, Ukrainian has become the language of political and cultural advancement.
The shelter that is the Ukrainian language is often described as a sacral space, like a temple where one can find sanctuary. This language offers also a sense of purification through dissociation and release from Russianness, as in Afanas′eva’s poem: “Our land is purified / our memory is purified / our will is purified.” These lines reflect the dynamics between liberation and repression. Literary writing serves not only as a way to manifest one’s feelings, but also as a form of cathartic cleansing. Aristotle’s theory of catharsis as presented in the Poetics deals with activating the purgative and purifying effects of poetry for religious and medical purposes, which are closely interlinked. The term “catharsis” is rooted in a religious context, where it specifically referred to the cleansing of the spirit; its secondary meaning of “purgation” derives from the medical context of healing through the evacuation of harmful elements.Footnote9 This salutary combination is precisely the effect that these authors seek in undertaking to write their works in Ukrainian (as seen especially in the above-mentioned metaphors of tumours, anaesthesia, and surgeries). Beginning to write in Ukrainian becomes the solution to the problem of representing one’s indemnity through or in language.
Some authors reflect on their transition and first uses of Ukrainian for creative writing in terms akin to the uncanny. This
dream about the Ukrainian language – so it seemed to me at the time – accurately reflected the delusion between the Russian and Ukrainian languages as states of existence in the text; it reflected my difficulties with attempts to enter my native (Ukrainian) language.
A similarly almost paranormal experience is found in a poem (in Russian) by Nadiia Sukhorukova, reflecting her first encounter with the translation of her book #Mariupol #Hope (#Mariupol′ #Nadiia, 2022) from Russian to Ukrainian:
Oblivion, remembrance, recognition – these are the stances of self-aware decolonization. The author peers not at her text, but rather at the language of its performance, which is not unfamiliar to her, but rather re-recognized. The transition associated with and embodied by the language pertains also to the book’s translator, whom the author has never seen in reality, only in a photograph: “She has beautiful eyes. / They’re laughing. / And the words obey her. / They are real.”Footnote10
In these cases, Ukrainian receives, itself, the status of a lingua sacra, able to shield those who use it behind its walls, as in Afanas′eva’s poem. Per the respondents’ answers, when these writers use Ukrainian for creative purposes, they feel it requires a heightened degree of precision, even an attitude of religious reverence. One of the authors in fact gives this reason for not using Ukrainian previously: “Ukrainian was a sacral language, one that I couldn’t touch.” Another respondent expresses a particular caution when using Ukrainian: “I don’t want to stain it with my poetic experiments.” In a similar vein, another author describes the Ukrainian language as fragile and vulnerable, and as such in need of a higher degree of care when used for creative purposes, unlike Russian: “I used to choose only Russian – I treat it like a surgeon – I don’t mind cutting out a piece of a word and then patching it up – it’s painless to look at.” This respondent further likens writing in Ukrainian to the most intense and precision-requiring surgery imaginable:
It is painful for me to do with Ukrainian what I could do with Russian. I imagine myself as a surgeon in front of whom his own child lies on the operating table and [the surgeon] cannot allow himself to make a mistake.
Another respondent uses strikingly similar symbolism: “My Russian was like a skilful tool, while Ukrainian is like I am operating on an ant with scissors.”
Such reverential caution is associated in these responses with a sense of responsibility and solicitousness. One of the respondents compares switching to Ukrainian to “a blade of grass [sprouting] through asphalt”:
I stand and rejoice at the sprout! I did it! […] Ukrainian is something that has value and significance for me, something that might not seem like much but feels lacking when it’s not there. Like a deep breath, tall trees, light and warmth in the Arctic, in a deliberate exile!
These attitudes, of course, inevitably relate to these poets’ greater mastery in Russian and their fear of “failing” in trying to produce the same kind of poetry or prose in Ukrainian. But it would be hard to separate this “practical” consideration from the perceived magical specialness of Ukrainian. For instance, in comparing the two languages, one author ascribes to Russian the qualities of practicality, functionality, mundanity, harshness, and inflexibility, but to Ukrainian – sacrality and elegance.
My attitude toward the [two] languages is as follows: Russian is somewhat more functional, ordinary, “well-trod,” somehow not flexible enough, but as easy to understand “as cotton-print underpants” [kak sitsevye trusy, a set Russian expression for straightforwardness] … Ukrainian is a magic beyond words, like a tea ceremony, a subtle holiday-world [mir-prazdnik], something from the sacred, primally elusive, something that cannot be packaged, made utilitarian, like a bench or a bowl … it cannot be reinforced concrete or a bulldozer … rather, it is a unique, deep forest with a secret glade, or a sacred mountain. […] Russian, I think (for me), is like a kettle, a Kalashnikov rifle, a hammer, a ruler, a kilo of apples, the third floor, a gutter, a frying pan, a towel, a ladder; in short, an instrument, more a surface/field [poverkhnost′/pole] of obvious appearances. […] With Ukrainian, you have to be much more careful, cautious, respectful, lively. Ukrainian is a mountain (a place you CANNOT go three times a day), a wellspring, a gazebo in the garden, a beam of sunshine, the horizon, a quiet lake on a clear day, a fresh breeze, a forest. […] In other words, Russian is like the “densely packed mortal realm” [plotnyi/tvarnyi mir], Ukrainian, the “subtle/spiritual” realm.
In these responses, the rejection of Russian is explained with reference to tropes borrowed from the semantic field of war, which is quite understandable given the circumstances. Russian is associated with callousness, helplessness, disgust, pain, and danger. The search for a refuge in Ukrainian is connected not only to Russia’s aggression, but also to suspiciousness toward its language, in particular the pervasive sense that it betrays those who have used it and created in it – those who are currently being exterminated or displaced. These concerns, which of course seem broadly cultural and political, are metonymically transposed onto the Russian language, which, as one respondent puts it, is “to some extent flexible, quick, and sneaky-as-fuck [khitrovyeban], but at the same time narrow-minded, limited, and clumsy.”
And so the language is personified and bears human qualities – those of a betrayer, invader, and colonizer. Ukrainian becomes a refuge, untouchable by those who do not understand it. The sacralization of this shelter – with many respondents alluding to Ukrainian as a temple, a place one enters with great reverence, where one cannot just “go to three times a day,” but where one has to be respectful and cautious with one’s words – returns us to the title of Afanas′eva’s poem, “A New Song of Silence.” The silence referred to here is the quiet of the temple and within one’s heart at times when one cannot speak, but can only seek words for a new song, which is being composed all the time during the shellings and killings. The price for this new song is immeasurably high; it is unpronounceable, silent. The song is a memorial service, a “moment of silence,” minutes and hours of silence, a requiem for people’s lives lost, cities and villages destroyed. We can imagine a silent choir: millions of refugees deprived of home and homeland, on their way to shelters, where they silently tune their new voices and sing, not aloud, but in their hearts, from their hearts, “building internal fences/against everything hostile/even against the language [they] used to speak,/which is now stained with [their] blood.”
Interviewing Afanas′eva in depth, I asked her about her motivations for writing this poem and switching to Ukrainian. She stated that, in her view, it is crucial for Ukrainians, and for authors in particular,
to distance ourselves completely from the Russian cultural context, such that Russian culture might take a non-imperial position alongside other cultures, without special significance. We must separate ourselves from this [Russian] context in order to build a new statehood and European consciousness as a whole. We have to distance ourselves in order to look in a different direction and be part of another space, where there are national languages and English is international. My dream is that, in twenty years, our young people won’t know any Russian at all. As for poetry, we have to write in Ukrainian for the above-mentioned reasons.
As if rewriting her poem in prose, she voices similar motifs of the purification from and evacuation of Russian narratives, which were forcibly “implanted” in many generations’ heads by the colonizer: “The narratives about Ivan the Fool, about the tragic fate of intelligent people as an imperative, and everything else that was inscribed in our brains, we must forget, so that our descendants no longer harbour these narratives at all.” The rejection of Russianness and of the concept of a Russophone Ukrainian is associated with the war: “My loyalty and thoughts about the identity of a Russian-speaking Ukrainian ended with the first bomb.” Of course, the cultural and linguistic context in which Afanas′eva’s (b. 1982) generation and previous ones grew up, and memories of it, remain inescapable; but the current state of affairs enables people, according to Afanas′eva, to re-evaluate this context, to understand anew its causes and consequences. She considers the overall political passivity of Russia’s population (at least, that part of it not actively engaged in combat) to be a holdover of Soviet consciousness, which promoted submissiveness. In this regard, she believes, “liberal” Russians are even worse than the “obvious fascists,” because they are still “imperialists with a kind face, unaware of their imperialism.”
Usually, when interviewing authors, I ask them to define their inner state with a metaphor. Afanas′eva describes her experience of linguistic transition as an “awakening,” which echoes the above-mentioned authors’ allusions to dreaming or anaesthesia, revival, and remembrance. And these stances provide her (and other switchers, like the participants of my survey) with a sense of harmony and satisfaction – of the relief of finding one’s place and home:
Understanding one’s place in space and being in harmony with it – language is one of the harmonious signs, is synchronous with that space. It’s about transition. And also liberation from what was imposed very technically – so technically and for so many years that it was considered natural.
“So that the world in the Ukrainian language […] might remain in the draft of my courage”: on Russophone authors who continue to use RussianFootnote11
My approach in dividing these two groups of authors was purely technical, determined by the language they have been using for creative writing in the past year. However, reading through the responses of both groups (a quite sobering experience), I realized that the second group of authors experiences and cultivates a preference quite close to that of the first: to decolonize and dissociate from Russia. We might not have expected such a stance in writers who opt to continue writing in Russian. But in analyzing these authors’ self-reconceptualization – which takes place precisely amid global and personal disaster – I am happy to record such contradictions, as they bear witness to a process in progress, an inner pendulum of identities, and the sometimes amorphous and fragile work of selfhood.
Before I turn to the responses in detail, I would like to emphasize a few elements repeatedly found in them. Most of these authors state that they have ceased interactions with Russia, both in terms of interpersonal relations with former colleagues in it and in the broadest sense of “literary” life: publications, readings, participation in anthologies, etc. As one explains: “Speaking in your native language is natural, writing in your native language is natural. But publishing means allying yourself with a certain society; these are completely different mechanisms.” A second recurring opinion relates to the shaky status of the Russian language in present-day Ukraine. Time and again, the sentiment is heard: Russian must be dissociated from Russia, but it cannot be taken from these authors as a response to the invasion, as it is their native tongue, “the language they think in,” and the “instrument” of their art. A third common opinion forecasts the gradual disappearance of Russian as a language of creativity in Ukraine (with some authors envisioning its eventual move to the underground). This conviction that one’s own creative writing is doomed to sociocultural marginality places these authors in an ambiguous position: they voluntarily self-detach from “the Russian world,” but they still use its language as a means of expression and creativity.
Nearly all these respondents indicate Russian as their native tongue. (As one filled in the “native language” blank: “Unfortunately, Russian.”) But half identify as bilingual, whether passively (they freely understand Ukrainian, but cannot communicate in it), or actively (they possess equal mastery in both languages). Most of them have also been using Ukrainian occasionally in their works: as quotations of their protagonists’ direct speech; by way of reflecting on the “interweaving of different linguistic cultures” in Ukraine; prompted by a “desire to find new meanings in the [Ukrainian] language”; and, relatedly, as an experiment, literary game, or marker of irony. Some of the respondents have performed self-translations into Ukrainian, which also attests to mastery of this language. Authors who have never used Ukrainian in their art explain this avoidance with reference to their “inner thinking” in Russian, the unnecessariness of producing their creative writing in Ukrainian (even if they use Ukrainian in everyday life or work), their lack of adeptness with literary techniques in Ukrainian (which limits the scope of possible expression), or, in general, their insufficient knowledge of Ukrainian. Some of the respondents cite historical precedents for their position, alluding for instance to Franz Kafka’s having written in German while residing in Prague. The example of Kafka seems quite apt in this circumstance; he is the author, after all, through whom Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari introduced the concept of minor literature – a literature written by a minority in the hegemonic language.Footnote12 In these respondents’ framing, Kafka’s Jewishness correlates to their Ukrainianness, the German of his writings to the Russian of their own. Like Kafka’s deterritorialization of German-language literature, which manifests the severance of cultural practices from their native places and populations, Russophone authors of Ukraine attempt to detach their Russian-language writings from the specific cultural context of Russia today. The analogy is reinforced, of course, by Kafka’s Jewishness and his use of German, the language in which epoch-making aggression against Jewishness would later be carried out.
Most of the respondents in this group report that they have experienced no difficulties – for instance, no condemnation on the part of colleagues in Ukraine – in the course of using Russian as their language for creativity in the past year. They affirm the existence of such attitudes, but they personally have not been subjected to them. As one of the consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they reflect on significantly narrowed opportunities for publication, both within Ukraine and outside the country. In part, this relates to their voluntary withdrawal from publications and events in Russia and from interaction with Russian colleagues. In one respondent’s experience, attempting to write in Ukrainian brings more recognition – more “likes” on social media, for instance. Another reflects on the existence of an “inner censor,” which during the first months after the invasion kept this writer from writing in Russian at all.
The fact that these respondents have suffered no consequences for using Russian in Ukraine as their language of creativity contradicts the widespread notion of overall discrimination against Russian speakers in the country. (One of the pretexts for the invasion was that Ukraine’s Russophone population needed to be “protected.”) The survey included the following statement: “There exists the opinion that it is unacceptable for writers in Ukraine to use Russian, since it is the language of the aggressor.” Asked for their assessment of this opinion, many of the respondents advocated separating language from state (itself a decolonizing or deterritorializing practice), arguing that “a language cannot be guilty, even as some of its speakers are,” or that “the Russian language doesn’t belong to the Russian Federation.” As one author puts it, being able to write in Russian is a matter of “preserving one’s identity.”
Related to the general desire to “relocate” the Russian language from Russia to the place of its users is one respondent’s statement that the language bears greater poetic power specifically when used by Ukrainians in Ukraine, where “Russophone authors, and their works written since the beginning of the war, are much stronger than what is being produced on this topic [the war] in the Russian segment.” Regarding the above-mentioned survey question about the idea that it is unacceptable to use the language of the aggressor, this same author reports feeling “neutral” on this point, because
poetry, to some extent, is a psychophysiology, and the transition from one language to another means the restructuring of this psychophysiology; some are capable of this, some are not, but I think this practice in Ukraine will narrow down, and, to put it starkly: with the passing of the generation that lived in the USSR and used Russian as “the language of interethnic communication,” poetry in Russian will also disappear.
Two other respondents concur: if some now consider it unacceptable for an author in Ukraine to use Russian, this is understandable. “I respect and understand the logic and nature of such intentions,” or even, “I have a positive attitude toward such an opinion.” Some authors, to be sure, reject this idea, deeming it “unreasonable,” “nonsensical,” or “silly.” In any case, enumerating the hindrances of the transition in question (especially related to an insufficient mastery of Ukrainian for creative writing), one respondent emphasizes that while this switch is indeed inevitable, it cannot happen right away: “I consider this important – not an instant transition (which is difficult, if you ‘feel’ in Russian), but the pursuit of a gradual transition (to Ukrainian) of any writer now living in Ukraine.” Time and again, the “technical” difficulties of the transition are cited as its major obstacle.
Most of these respondents would prefer to use Russian in Ukraine as maximally dissociated from Russia and to see Russophone writing integrated into Ukrainian culture, but a few express views quite similar to those of authors who have entirely switched to Ukrainian. One respondent reports the onset of an aversion to the Russian language after February 24. Russian, moreover, has a negative influence on this author’s inspiration, and despite continuing to write in it, the author experiences this activity as “disgusting” and perceives the Russian language as, in general, something “alien.” This is an inner split and conflict: these authors (paradoxically enough) continue to use Russian, but they conceptualize it (again, in ways echoing the first group of respondents) as possessed of some destructive energy:
For me, writing in Russian now is like attracting the enemy even more strongly to my home. This is like how streets are now being renamed from Soviet to Ukrainian – for some, this seems like a mere trifle, but for me it is the delineation of the personal boundaries of our country. And language is our main boundary.Footnote13
Another author expresses skepticism regarding the future of Russian in Ukraine and envisions an eventual switch from it:
Since I live in Ukraine and am going to keep living here, I will have to retune myself to another speech system. I believe that, for reasons of a purely political nature, [Russian] does not belong here; otherwise, our neighbours will come back with their rigmarole [lit. “playing their bagpipes,” zavedut volynku] about adinnarot [a mockery of the Russian pronunciation of the propagandistic expression odin narod, “one people,” which asserts the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians].
Potentially reducing their use of Russian in their art is not the only step these authors see toward self-decolonization. Language, as the respondent just cited notes, is a boundary, or, as another respondent puts it, a marker of difference: “[Language] began to play a distinctive role; knowing [Ukrainian] (at least to some extent) is what distinguishes us from them [the Russians].” There exists a pervasive motif of deterritorializing cultural space in linguistic terms. Also changing these respondents’ attitude toward the Russian language are its various “discursive layers (let’s call it like this), connected to ideology, propaganda, journalistic clichés (the unfortunate term ‘narrative’), and highly romantic rhetorical constructions (heroism, sacrifice, etc.). This is repugnant, especially against the backdrop of a monstrous war.” The Russian language metonymizes the Russian invasion and likewise evokes mistrust and anxiety: “I used just to love this language. I had more trust in it.” Recalling Afanas′eva’s statement about the need to forget Soviet and Russian narratives, this response, in the same way, calls for the abandonment – through linguistic and cultural disaffiliation – of narratives and tropes deeply rooted in the Russian language and its users.
Leaving aside the invaders’ blather about “heroism” and “sacrifice,” Russophone authors of Ukraine, like Ukrainians generally, find Russian colleagues’ expressions even of sympathy or regret to be taxing. One respondent describes such statements as self-serving, self-redeeming, and typically proffered from positions of safety and security. In this view, Russian authors proceed from the
paradigm of “I am a good Russian poet, I am against the war, and I express the position of the good people of my country; look, we also have such people.” This strikes me as an attempt to win back the lost media field, that is, again pushing Ukrainians to the periphery of attention. This also goes for Western Slavists (who find it easier to work with Russian texts), which is annoying. Moreover, being in Ukraine, you can’t be against the war now, you can only be for the war to the bitter end. It’s a matter of different perspectives. Taking part in Leving’s anthology [the antiwar anthology Poetry of the Latest Period (Poeziia poslednego vremeni), edited by Yuri Leving and Irina Kravtsova and published in Russia], for example, for a Russian poet is an act of courage, like a self-denunciation, speaking openly in a totalitarian state; but for a Ukrainian poet such a publication would be a rather strange act. Ukrainian wartime poetry is free from a guilt complex, while Russian poetry is chock full of this; the two absolutely do not belong in the same space.
As with the first group, I asked each of these authors for a metaphor to describe writing in Russian in Ukraine today. Here again, I found a great ideological congeniality between the two groups, and sometimes even the same choice of imagery. One of the respondents describes using the Russian language as a growth that has gone from benign to malignant, that is spreading and must eventually be removed:
A cancerous tumour. Once it was a natural part of our body, although there were suspicions that something could go wrong. But we thought we could turn a blind eye to it; we seemed to coexist normally. And now we have what we have. And we have to go through severe treatment, to the detriment of our body, in order to expel it.
Another author uses similar symbolism of elimination, albeit in psychoanalytic terms: Freud’s concept of repression – a defence mechanism meant to remove undesirable and destructive elements from the conscious mind. Continuing this line of associations, two other respondents define Russophone literature of Ukraine as “voices fading in the fog” or as “a departing nature” (ukhodiaschaia natura). To another author, the dual or borderline experience of writing in Russian in Ukraine seems like an activity fit for a “salamander,” with connotations of the ability to survive in extreme conditions. Continuing the metaphorization of Russophone literature’s precarious existence in Ukraine and recalling (but with the circumstances flipped) the author from the first section who compared the transition to Ukrainian to “a blade of grass [sprouting] through asphalt,” one author who has not switched to Ukrainian describes Russophone literature in Ukraine as “a flower in asphalt.”
Reflecting on this gradual marginalization and the breakage of connections with Russia, these authors describe changes in their attitude toward Ukrainian-language literature. The generally positive attitude here ranges from a growing appreciation to a desire potentially to become a part of this process. Three of the respondents report that their interest in Ukrainian-writing colleagues has grown over the past year. Another finds it notable that an array of (mostly younger) talented authors have switched from Russian to Ukrainian. One respondent’s attitude toward literature remains unchanged, except that “Russian Federation poetry [rossiiskie stikhi] has become completely uninteresting to me, there are a lot of superfluous words.” Another author laments a tendency in contemporary Ukrainian writing toward opportunism and the politicization of literature, with a corresponding decline in quality: “Too many works and reflections are marked by agitprop [agitka], to the detriment of complexity and artistry.” The same opinion is expressed by two other respondents: “A lot … too many slogans have appeared, which, in my opinion, spoils literature even on current political topics”; and there has been “a large-scale shift toward opportunism and, in some cases, a decrease in the creative level of already established authors.”
As for changes in the perception of the Ukrainian language in general, these authors state either that no change has occurred (“I loved it before and continue to do so,” “I have always loved it, and love it now”), or that their appreciation for the language has grown – that they feel “closer to it.” One respondent explains this proximity to Ukrainian with reference to the ideological-discursive layers of Russian that have now become alien:
Now it feels more comfortable [mne udobnee] for me to read the news feed in Ukrainian than in Russian […]. I enjoy hearing Ukrainian, say, on news channels, on the radio, and so on. This means that I am at home.
Another author reflects in a similar spirit on the presence of Ukrainian in the public sphere, its dominance: “I am sorry that it took me so long to make personal compromises in order only now to realize the importance of the fact that Ukrainian should be the only national language in Ukraine.”
The resonances between these two groups are striking. Participants of both groups sense a disappointment, metonymically projected onto the Russian language. The reasons given by the second group for continuing to write in Russian pertain to the technical difficulty of switching and to the ideological or cultural realm. Technically, some profess an insufficient knowledge of Ukrainian, while others – even if they speak it well – feel that their mastery of literary expression in the language is imperfect. Ideologically and culturally, for many of the respondents Russian is a native language that Russia should not be allowed to take from them. Losing this linguistic “territory” would mean, for these authors, another defeat, another expulsion from one’s home – that of one’s native language and comfort, one’s identity. This last motif might be read as decolonial, because it insists on a radical dissociation between the language and the aggressor.
Conclusion
I would like to turn to the two poems from which the section titles in this article are quoted. Aleksandr Kabanov’s poem speaks of the death of his father and of “all the children killed at war.” He describes this experience as “a new hell born from paradise,” a hell that he will “erase” so that “the draft of [his] courage” will contain only “a blank sheet of paper”:
This catastrophe, then, is to be wiped from people’s memories, leaving in the poet’s “draft of courage” a blank sheet of paper. This statement differs considerably from Afanas′eva’s poem, which also speaks of forgetting, but of a different type – a decolonial forgetting, the abandoning of one’s repressive, colonial past, transitioning from catastrophe to a new existence, a new world where she can hear her own thoughts. Kabanov’s poem speaks of forgetting a trauma, erasing it from one’s memory, where the courage of writing about it remains in the drafts. Commemorating events, that is, will leave a blank page, an oblivion. And although this oblivion leads to a new “world in Ukrainian,” this world seems erected on emptiness. In a way we are dealing here with two different perceptions and cultivations of historical trauma: one that preserves it as a testimonial, a “song of silence,” a requiem; one that wipes everything out, leaving a blankness of memory, total oblivion. It would be difficult, for now, to extrapolate these positions into worldviews characteristic of the two groups, as the boundary between them can seem amorphous at times, with some shared opinions and judgements revealed. But these two poems can help us pinpoint different attitudes toward the inevitable – the coming “world in Ukrainian.” For the first group described, this is an experience already being processed; for the second, a quite likely prospect and a more traumatic one – even if “only” owing to the “technical” issue of these writers being as yet unable to produce literary writing in Ukrainian or, in some cases, to speak it at all. As such, the new “world in Ukrainian” seems more threatening and even, perhaps, to some extent, more alien to these authors. Hence such metaphors as a “departing nature” or “voices fading in the fog,” which signal the erosion and loss of identity, not a switch between identities, as in the first group.Footnote14
In my introduction, I mentioned the phenomena of Jews writing in (or ceasing to write in) German and Middle Eastern authors switching to English not as direct parallels to what is currently happening with Russophone writing in Ukraine, but as examples of how a language can be personified, and specifically how it can become an enemy combatant. Put another way, it can become a locus of conflict, with all the mechanisms of regulation, suppression, and hierarchy involved in the conduct of a war. As we have seen, however, none of the respondents who continue to write in Russian report any aggression or negative consequences for this choice. They note that “such a phenomenon exists, but I have never experienced it.” This does not mean that their “impunity” can be extrapolated to every corner of Ukraine. But it at least suggests that the notion of anti-Russophone reprisals may be fuelled by the propaganda of the “liberators.” These authors’ keen sensitivity regarding the future of Russophone writing in Ukraine, their sense that it must inevitably decline and eventually disappear, is likewise a barometer of their view of the deinstitutionalizing of such writing outside Russia and of their dispossession from their former literary life – publications, festivals, awards, etc.
Lastly, I would like to comment on the survey responses that envisioned the integration of Ukraine’s Russophone writing into the Ukrainian culture and canon. This is a highly debatable question, one that seems unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, if ever. But it does raise the issues of how to present, research, and teach this literature – a literature that, after all, deals with Ukraine’s present and past; its geographies and topoi; its horrors, catastrophes, and inspirations; its multiculturalism and multiethnicity. I do not know whether the desired balance can ever be struck between this literature being “embraced by” the Ukrainian canon and being seen as potentially threatening to it. However, this literature’s vector of dissociation from Russia (at least, as conceived by its current creators) is already a matter of decolonization and liberation, of unlocking and delimiting, as opposed to Russian literature, whose traditional and by now anachronistic definition invariably conjures up aspects of ethnonationality, the Russian state, and a specific Russian literary tradition. All this colonial homogeneity dissolves, at least in part, when we introduce Ukrainian literature as a multicultural and multilingual product – a phenomenon composed of several literary traditions and experiences, and their interbreedings.
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the survey participants for their sincerity and openness, and to Larysa Bilous, Gilad Sotil, Oksana Vynnyk, and my mother, with whom I discussed early drafts of this article. I would also like to thank the journal’s two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and Avram Brown for his editorial assistance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Alex Averbuch
Alex Averbuch is a scholar, poet, and translator. Currently he is the Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta. He earned his PhD in Slavic and Jewish studies at the University of Toronto with a dissertation on the history of the genre of solicitory poetry in Ukrainian, Russian, and Hebrew. Averbuch’s research explores commodity culture, gender and critical race theory, epistolarity, photography, theatricality and performance, translation, and creative writing in foreign language pedagogy. He is the author of three books of poetry and an array of literary translations between Hebrew, Ukrainian, Russian, and English.
Notes
1. On, for example, Vladimir Nabokov’s switch and his own reflections on it, see Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov, 472; and Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 54. On Nabokov and Joseph Conrad, see Ibáñez, “(In)Hospitable Languages and Linguistic,” 62–64.
2. For instance, Tamar Steinitz emphasizes the practical as well as emotional and political premises for such a transition (Translingual Identities, 8). Eugen Banauch similarly traces such a switch by Jewish authors in Canada who exist between definitions: on one hand, they are not able to assimilate fully in the target language and culture; on the other, they are neglected within the study of German exile writing (Fluid Exile, 12). Andrea Hammel discusses revulsion with the German language, associated with the Nazis (“Translating Cultures and Languages”).
3. For example, Al-Yasir and Al-Yasir discuss a range of Arab-American authors – in particular, refugees and immigrants to the US from Syria and Lebanon – who gradually abandoned Arabic in favour of English (“Oriental Version of Otherness”).
4. Kayyal, “From Left to Right.”
5. See, for instance, Pavlenko, “Multilingualism in Post-Soviet Countries,” on de-Russification of the public sphere and the general shift from the language of the colonizer in post-Soviet states.
6. Ukraine’s Russophone literature has been well explored in scholarship. See, for instance: Chernetsky, “Russophone Writing in Ukraine”; and Puleri, Ukrainian, Russophone, (Other) Russian.
7. From this line on, the poem shifts to Ukrainian.
8. This and all further translations from Russian and Ukrainian are mine.
9. Bennett, “Purging of Catharsis”; Schaper, “Aristotle’s Catharsis.”
10. Martynov, “Moiu knigu perevodiat.”
11. Kabanov, “Svet v raione otkliuchaiut.”
12. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka.
13. This author reports having already begun the transition. On the construction of boundaries from Russia, see Vozna, “Towards World Russians?”
14. However, this is not the case with Kabanov, who knows Ukrainian and sometimes writes poetry in it.
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