Lately, two books by Ukrainian authors I wanted to read were delivered by post. (Yes, the postal service delivers books to a frontline city… and does it in a couple of days despite the post terminal being bombed on one of the recent days. this is the country that “just works”)

So I have a mood for a thread about my Ukrainian reading/writing. It would be mildly interesting and only tangentially related to war.

I was a very “text-oriented” person as far as I remember myself. I read everything that I could find since ~5, always had book(s) with me in school, in public transport, in any situation. I also tried to write myself since ~6.

As a software developer/architect, it is all about language and reading/writing for me, too. So, besides programming languages, what languages I’ve been reading and writing in? That’s complicated!

I was born and raised and still live in mostly Russian-speaking Kharkiv. (Why is it “mostly Russian-speaking” is a complicated topic, but the answer is quite far from “because it is Russian!” Keywords: “colonial politics”, “russification”, “Executed Renaissance”, etc.)

Besides talking to my Donbas grandma and grand-grandma (who spoke local Ukrainian variety), I was exposed to the Ukrainian language only at school, as a “mandatory, but boring and not really important lessons”.

I still managed to find some texts in Ukrainian I loved (not that I looked for them consciously at that time), both written in Ukrainian (Intermezzo by Kotsiubynsky) and published in Ukrainian translations in late 80s (Lem, Azimov: my father is fond of sci-fi and I followed).

But mostly I was tepid/uninterested. Obviously, I wrote my own texts (poetry/short stories) in Russian for a long time.

I rediscovered contemporary Ukrainian literature by accident: after 2004s Orange Revolution, some computer magazine (!) I read published an excerpt of Russian translation (!) of Serhiy Zhadan’s “Anarchy in the UKR”, the text I immediately loved, found the book (in Ukrainian), and then other Zhadan’s books, and suddenly I discovered there is a vivid, diverse, modern culture happening right around me!

Since then, Ukrainian started to take its place in my relationships with texts. I got to know a lot of awesome points, got to read a lot of beautiful books, participated in a few festivals (and organized a huge online one, before COVID!).

To some extent, it felt like what I read about Black people re-learning their ancestral languages to build their identity in the void made by being stripped of their history. Obviously, the analogy is weak, but it rings something in me.

In 2000s, I still wrote mostly in Russian, but had some Ukrainian texts or Ukrainian elements in texts, it became my language for intimate, complicated feelings. At some point, I remember saying that Russian is a language of “common” (many books, quotes, acquaintances were available in Russian) and Ukrainian is the language of “intimate” for me.

In this picture (it is just books that were in my room, the house has many more), something like 40% are still in Russian (mostly old ones I am fond of), 40% is Ukrainian, the rest is mostly English (there are some Polish and Belarussian too).

Even after the war started in 2014, I still wrote in Russian. It was “my” Russian (there is a common line of thinking about decolonized “Ukrainian Russian” akin to “American English”), and I wrote my last huge cycle of poems in that language.

It is a hard thing to state, but soon after finishing that text, I understood that Russian is a lost cause for me. It is hard to explain, theoretically I love the idea of “decolonized Ukrainian Russian” (obviously co-existing with Ukrainian), Kharkiv mostly speaks Russian still. But for “me the text-centric person”, now English is the language of “common”, and Ukrainian is the language of intimate. In 2018, I wrote a novel in Ukrainian (still editing to be published, small excerpt here), this year I want to write one in English, and the next one is planned to be in Ukrainian again.

As you might see, my English is flawed. My Ukrainian, probably, is too. But that’s how it is.

UPD from 2024: My English-level novel was written through the 2022, and looks fot a prospective publisher. My Ukrainian-language one got published in September 2024.