Tainted love: how Ukrainians are ridding themselves of Russian-language books
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Version 0 of 2. Putin’s invasion has seen Ukrainian book lovers recoil from Russian literary dominance, by a range of means One day this summer, the Ukrainian artist Stanislav Turina took two of his books to his garden near Kyiv. One was a volume of poems by Alexander Pushkin. But Turina – a voracious reader, never without a couple of books in his backpack – had no plans to pick it up again. The 19th-century Russian has acquired a troubling resonance in Ukraine since the 2022 full-scale invasion of the country. He is frequently used by the invaders as a symbol of Russianness: huge posters depicting the writer were for example erected in the southern city of Kherson during its occupation. For many in Ukraine, it shows Pushkin is being co-opted as a cultural weapon in Russia’s war. Some would also argue that Pushkin’s poetry reinforced, and even helped form, Russia’s imperial ideology. Numerous statues of the writer have been dismantled since 2022 while many streets named after him (there were at least 594 in 2018) have reverted to their former names, or been given new ones. Turina knew he could not sell the book. “You couldn’t give it to a friend, you couldn’t give it to a library,” he said. So in his garden, Turina gently, experimentally, placed his volume of Pushkin on the bonfire. Feeding Pushkin to the flames was not some grandiose gesture of hate. It was an artist’s private and exploratory act, he said. “I’m afraid to burn books, to destroy them,” he said. “For me it’s symbolic of being barbarian.” He said his purpose was quite different. He wanted find out how he would feel. Would there be any catharsis? Grief? Anger? “I didn’t feel anything. I felt nothing good, nothing bad,” he said. The second book in Turina’s hand was a volume of poetry by the contemporary Russian writer Dmitry Vodennikov. For him, this represented a very different literary relationship. While a student in the western city of Lviv in the early 2000s, Turina saw Vodennikov perform his work. It was a revelation. “It was something new, a new voice. I understood he was gay: it was between the lines. It was so tender. It was very cool,” he said. “I started to be his fan.” He told his parents he needed extra money for sports shoes. Then he spent what amounted to more than half his monthly student stipend on a single copy of poems by Vodennikov. “In time, I knew all his poetry,” said Turina. “He was part of my way of thinking, my vision of my work.” But then, after 2022, Turina decided to check out Vodennikov’s position on the war – “and now,” he said, “I find he is a pro-war poet.” Turina decided to leave his former hero’s book in his garden – to decay. Across Ukraine, readers are facing decisions about what to do with their Russian-language books. Many people – and especially those in the creative and cultural community – have switched to using Ukrainian in their everyday lives. How best to “decolonise” from centuries of Russian and Soviet cultural influence is a frequent point of discussion. In many cases, Russian missiles have taken decisions out of individuals’ hands. On the morning of 23 June, for example – after a barrage of Shahed drones and cruise missiles – books in Russian, some apparently stained with blood, were part of the wreckage of an apartment block in the Shevchenkivskyi district of Kyiv. Ten people, including an 11-year-old, were killed in the attack. When Kateryna Iakovlenko’s apartment in Irpin just outside Kyiv took a direct hit in March 2022, all of the writer and curator’s books, including those in Russian, the language in which she was raised, were destroyed. So were all her other possessions. Three years on, she owns just two books in Russian, both translations from other languages, neither available in Ukrainian, and both gifts from their authors. Oleksandr Mykhed faced a similar situation when his house in Hostomel, near Kyiv, was hit in the first weeks of the full-scale invasion. In his book The Language of War, the writer, now a member of the armed forces, recounts visiting its ruins and finding his Dostoevskys and Nabokovs among the wreckage. The experience of losing his home has transformed his relationship to his possessions – including his books. “Once you have become a refugee, you are always thinking like a refugee,” he said. “Better not to feel sentimental about books. These are just kilos that you might have to think about what to do with, if you need to leave.” There are no Russian-language books, even translations of foreign literature, in his new library. This June, Mariana Matveichuk, a freelance journalist, took 90kg of Russian books to a recycling centre near her home town in western Ukraine. She was raised in a Ukrainian-speaking area, and attended a Ukrainian-speaking university in Kyiv in the early 2000s. Nevertheless at that point most inhabitants of the city, and many of her fellow students, were Russian-speaking. Many authors she was studying – the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, for example – were also available in translation in Russian, but not Ukrainian. She said she had “a book fetish” and would frequent Kyiv’s sprawling secondhand book market at Pochaina. When she graduated, she hauled her stash of books back to western Ukraine by train. These are the volumes that she has now recycled – sparing Anton Chekhov’s letters and diaries. “I have personal respect for him. Chekhov is funny, I like his sense of humour,” she said. “And they are also hidden at my mum’s, so no one will see Russian books on my shelves.” She considered trying to sell her books back to dealers at the Pochaina book market, but “I thought no, I don’t want to give them a second life.” Looking back at the number of academic texts she had read in Russian as a student – despite being a Ukrainian-speaker at a Ukrainian-language university – she had reflected, she said, on the “subtle Russification” of the culture that had surrounded her. Clearing out her Russian books (“I got rid of Tolstoy, of Dostoevsky, of 12 tomes by [poet and playwright Vladimir] Mayakovsky”) was also, she said, a way of “saying goodbye to some of my perceptions when I was 20. I am saying goodbye to what I thought was important.” Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion There are, perhaps, as many shades of opinion on the question of what to do about one’s Russian books as their are book lovers. There are those who have decided to keep them because they are part of a family story – perhaps reflecting parents’ or grandparents’ struggle to acquire them under the Soviet Union. There are those who have come to hate the Russian language, associating it with the thought-world and media bubble of the invading country, but have still held on to a book – a treasured Russian translation of Haruki Murakami, say – because it represents a part of their own past. In Kharkiv, for decades a principally Russian-speaking city, the artist Pavlo Makov uses Ukrainian in day-to-day life. But he does not intend to get rid of his Russian books. Many foreign-language titles still lack good Ukrainian translations, he said – a reflection of the relative dominance of Russia and Russian, compared with Ukraine and Ukrainian, in the post-Soviet global publishing market. And he was doubtful about the wisdom of destroying or recycling Russian-language books, since it can create associations with the actions of authoritarian regimes. “I think that for the image of Ukraine, it’s not a good idea to do things like that. OK, you hate the Russian language. I understand it. But a book is a source of information.” In fact, studying Russian books and literature was important, he said, “because this country is our enemy, and this is enemy is very close. We should examine, we should research it.” In Pochaina, the enormous secondhand book market in Kyiv, business is not very brisk. It is certainly the place to go if you want to buy books in Russian – although maybe not if you want to sell them. In one corner, there is what one secondhand bookseller, Dmytro Drobin, called “an Egyptian pyramid” of books that no one can sell – mainly Russian-language, Soviet editions of everything from Tolstoy and Chekhov to popular fiction and Stendhal translations. Another bookseller, who preferred not to give her name, sells secondhand and antiquarian books in Ukrainian and Russian. She said the choice of language was largely determined by generation. “Young people mostly want to read in Ukrainian,” she said. When people offer her Russian books to buy, she rarely takes them: demand is down. Occasionally, she said, customers ask for “new books published in Russia. There are very, very few of these people.” From 2016, importing books from Russia has been restricted, requiring a permit, and since 2023 it has been outlawed. Dmytro Drobin, a bookseller surrounded in his shop by thousands of Russian-language books, said he believed his government is pursuing “forced Ukrainianisation”. He compared the climate to the situation under the Tsarist empire, when publishing books in Ukrainian was severely restricted. Russian-language books by Ukrainian authors may be published, but, since 2023, are ineligible for state grants. Since 2023, books by Russian citizens may not be published. Ukrainian is the sole official language of the country, but Russian remains widely spoken; minority languages include Crimean Tatar. Business was slow, said Drobin. He attributed that to the millions of Ukrainians who have left the country, to the numbers in the army, and the hard economic times caused by the war. “The very nature of reading has collapsed,” he said. In a Ukrainian-language bookshop in a southern suburb of Kyiv, on the city’s left bank, the mood was more upbeat. Alpaca, a world away from the new hipster bookshops of central Kyiv, sells mostly children’s books. It has been offering customers a deal: if they bring in unwanted Russian books, they can get discounts of 20-30% on new books to buy from the shop. Any extra funds gleaned by the shop from selling the Russian titles for recycling are donated to the Ukrainian armed forces. “I wanted to give people the opportunity to get rid of their stocks of old books that are just lying around. You can’t give them away, you can’t sell them, it’s a shame that they are just lying there,” said the store’s manager, Maryna Medvedeva. She and her colleagues had brought their own Russian books to the scheme. “I’m not sorry. I was going to keep [some Russian books], but then I opened one, I thought I’d read it – but no, I can’t, it’s just a feeling of repulsion.” Yulliia Kavun was shopping in the store with her young son, Myron. Her family was displaced from the city of Kostiantynivka in the eastern Donetsk region after the Russian-backed takeover of parts of the region in 2014. The bulk of their home library – in Russian, the family language – was definitively destroyed along with their house on 26 February this year. Now she was contemplating taking advantage of Alpaca’s scheme to help buy the books needed for Myron’s education. For Kavun, choices about books reflect a necessary accommodation to her unenviable circumstances as a refugee. She planned, she said, to go to Poland, where her graduate daughter is already living – but that will require yet another linguistic and literary shift. “We are nobody here, and in Poland we are nobody either. So what’s the difference? We might as well just go there. So we’ll have to buy Polish books, once we are there.” |