Tamara Horikha Zernia on Ukrainian literature, language, and

Ukrainians have very strong horizontal ties, which is confirmed by the involvement of society and the phenomenon of volunteering. It's about people who take the initiative and do things. Tamara Horikha Zernia, a Ukrainian writer, translator, and volunteer, spoke about decision-making and its impact on the community, preserving Ukrainian culture and traditions at the end of the Soviet Union, and Kyiv at the beginning of the full-scale invasion. Watch the full version of the exclusive interview and read the shortened version about the "Ukrainian-speaking jaw," the right to talk about the war, action as opposed to talk, and loss.

Can we assume that Ukrainian literature flourished after the full-scale invasion?

I probably belong to that small cohort of people who have always been with Ukrainian books. At one time I was lucky enough to be born into a family where we read Ukrainians and Ukrainian authors from the time we were very young, which dates back to the Soviet era. My parents tried to buy everything on sale that they could find, and not only on the official shelves. We also had some oddball books, dissident ones.

I never had the feeling that Ukrainian literature was secondary, inferior. When it comes to the literature of our authors, writers. I was a student in the early 90s, when a galaxy of avant-garde, interesting, bright authors flourished. We went to poetry apartments in Kyiv, talked to very different, sometimes paradoxical authors at the Institute of Journalism, but it was a living process in which I was always at least an observer, a very interested one.

I really liked reading, I read everything. But the realization that the book market is not just a dozen poets and writers you personally like did not come at once. It is an infrastructure, a number of participants, without whom it is impossible to reach a professional, serious level. And it took effort to overcome this and make the leap from some kind of amateur, volunteer market to something organized, something that people earn money from and invest in.

This is a collective effort. The fruits of these efforts have begun to show in recent years, not because Ukrainians have now woken up and rushed to read and write at a record pace. It's just that the work has been done, and it has yielded results.

A very important part of this work was protecting the Ukrainian market from Russian smuggling, from Russian works, from Russian translations - everything that flooded our shelves without duties, taxes, black imports, and drove Ukrainians out of their bookstores.

We lived to see the moment when Russian pressure and Russian expansion were so serious that, for example, Kyiv bookstores were Russian bookstores. It was the Russians who opened bookstores in our country and completely closed them with their products, from children's books to educational literature, philosophical and applied literature.

Even our cookbooks were Russian. Ukrainians would buy cookbooks by these mediocre people who couldn't even fry a cheese cake. And they came to Ukraine and taught Ukrainian women how to cook for huge amounts of money. This is a comedy.

You mentioned that there was some resistance from your mother to preserve the Ukrainian family. Do you remember the stories she told about this?

I remember that we had a teacher of Russian language and literature who was also the head teacher. A very active woman, she interfered in absolutely everything. She knew all the children, teachers, and parents. That is, she essentially controlled everything that happened in our school. And she chose me as one of her favorites because I wrote well. She praised me, invited me to her house to drink tea.

There was a time when my mother came to pick me up. We met this head teacher, and my mother said something. She suddenly turned to my mom and said to her: "Can you speak a normal language?" In the presence of me, my mother answered that no, I speak Ukrainian.

Then they continued the conversation in very high-pitched, unpleasant tones. It was such a shock for me because this was a person we trusted. I realized that we all speak Russian at school for some reason. We are encouraged to do so, pushed to do so, four lessons are taught in Ukrainian, and during recess and everywhere else, Russian is spoken. And this realization, this kind of breakdown, this protest, did not bear fruit immediately. I mean, it was probably only in high school that I realized that I needed to consciously protect my Ukrainian language.

And then there was the moment at the institute. We had a professor who spoke primarily Russian. She was a philologist. And when asked why you speak Russian, she stood up and answered with great pride that she could not spoil her pronunciation of Ukrainian. It would harm her impeccably natural Russian pronunciation, the classical one. She has to cherish and protect it, because it is a kind of standard for her.

I was so impressed by this that I thought, why don't we cherish and protect our Ukrainian language? Why do we have to adjust our jaw from the time we are very young? Even from Ukrainian families.

Why was it possible to find a Ukrainian school in Kyiv, but not a Ukrainian kindergarten? That is, children who went to kindergarten from an early age were exposed to a purposeful Russian language environment. Even those who came from Ukrainian families went to school, by the first grade, they were already at least bilingual.

And sometimes they spoke Russian more vividly and correctly than Ukrainian. Because it was a state policy of the Soviet Union aimed at Russifying Ukrainians and Ukrainian children. They worked through children, through schools. And this pressure was felt constantly.

The echo of this pressure still reverberates today. Among other things, there is an absolutely absurd struggle for names, for figures, for the absolutely natural right of Ukrainians to read their own books, speak their own language, and focus on their own topics without being distracted by Russian.

People's linguistic identity is very deeply rooted. It is something that forms one of the pillars of personality. This is the language we speak since childhood. And it is very difficult for people to change it, to lose it. For them, an attack on their childhood language is like an attack on themselves, on their past. It is very difficult.

You realized the beginning of the war in 2014, after you arrived at the hospital. How did you end up there or what was your motivation for visiting?

It's absolutely normal when people call and say: "Tamara, our friend, or brother, or someone is lying in your hospital in Kyiv." You can go and visit a particular person. It seems to me that almost all Kyiv residents received similar requests back then.

Just as it probably happened here, in Odesa and Dnipro-where there were large military hospitals, people would look for acquaintances through social media, third or fourth hand, and ask to go and visit. Especially at a time when there was no developed hospital volunteering, when it was all very chaotic.

I remember my first visit to the hospital to see a complete stranger who had just been brought from the operating room after a serious surgery. I had to keep him awake for three hours, not to fall asleep, because he was bleeding. I had to sit by his side, try to talk to him and watch him so that he wouldn't bleed again. That's what my sister told me and asked if I could do it. Where would I go?

It's a small room, like my kitchen at home. There are four back-to-back beds with patients from the intensive care unit, in fact, from the operating room. And there are some relatives and people crowding around each other. There was no room to breathe, not to mention no space or air. Like in a train car, everything was very, very close. People were coming and going, and there was no peace or rest. This poor guy, he sees me for the first time in his life, and he's in pain, he's coming out of anesthesia, it's terribly painful. And he talks to me because he was told to talk, and I talk to him. That was my first visit there. And I also brought huge bags, some food - he is not allowed anything at all. We put it somewhere, gave it to someone. I was so impressed by how many people were wounded.

Up to a certain point, we hoped that a terrorist attack had taken place in Donetsk and Luhansk regions. That is, a local seizure of administrative buildings by some small group of terrorists. That was our impression. And we all expected that at some point the state, the army, and the security forces would intervene, that the country would show its strength and in just a few weeks eliminate all this, arrest whoever was needed, and that would be the end of it.

Moreover, when I later spoke to residents of Donetsk and asked about the seizure of buildings, for example, the SBU. Many said we didn't pay attention to it at all. A dozen thugs entered the building - it was not serious. And then it turned out that these thugs and homeless people were just the vanguard, followed by the Russian regular army.

I personally realized that we are at war after visiting this hospital. I saw a number of wounded that was absolutely unreal for me. At one point, it seemed to me that there were thousands of them. Although it is not usually the case, there were just these beds everywhere in the corridors and wards.

It seemed like the central Kyiv hospital was operating as a field hospital somewhere on the frontline. For example, no one checked or asked who was coming and going. It was clear that the staff did not care that they were so exhausted. That is, there was no security protection. There was so much workload and it was so hard.

Photo: Intent/Natalia Dovbysh.

Марія Литянська