I wanted in this issue of ‘Ukrainian Pulse’ to highlight two short texts published on Monday by journalist Pavlo Kazarin and cultural figure Sofia Cheliak on their respective Facebook pages. They’re fascinating and wildly different testimonies of struggles about finding a place in Ukraine
Kazarin’s post, which begins with the words “It’s easy to be Ukrainian when your mom is from Lviv and your dad from Poltava” reads like a reminiscence on growing up in Crimea, a place where most locals had arrived a few decades earlier at most (“few of our parents were even born on the peninsula”), steeped into the nostalgia of its Soviet golden age, a place where people often pinned the woes of the 90s on the emerging independent Ukrainian state. A place that left Kazarin struggling about what it means to be Ukrainian: “It’s easy to be Ukrainian”, he writes, “when you do not wander between identities since childhood, when you clearly understand where you belong in your country”.
The post published by Sofia Cheliak, a Ukrainian translator, member of PEN Ukraine and program director of the Lviv Book Forum, is a direct reaction to Kazarin’s opening sentence. Cheliak, who is from the Western region of Ivano-Frankivsk, grew up in an entirely different environment—one, she writes, where her mother feared that she’d end up betraying her family by speaking Russian as she became older, and would tell her “your relatives went through the [Soviet] camps, have some respect”. Cheliak dreamed of becoming a journalist in the capital which, in the years before and immediately after the Maidan revolution, pretty much required you to speak Russian. “I did not have the career opportunities in journalism that Pavlo had because I speak Russian at such a level that, when I’m drunk, the main entertainment is to hear me read something in Russian”.
Two dramatically different experiences and, in both cases, the 2014 Maidan revolution as a turning point. For Pavlo Kazarin, it was because he saw the Maidan as “a story about values, about personal choices being more important than ‘blood and soil’, about the Ukrainian nation no longer being limited to ethnic categories”. In a twist of what he calls “an evil irony”, the annexation of Crimea clarified his identity: “The difference between Crimeans and people from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions is that we were driven from our homes for political reasons. We were not hit by shells, we were not fleeing the war. When we meet fellow countrymen in any region of the country, we know in advance that we are like-minded people. A pro-Russian Crimean has no place in Ukraine. Our residence has become a marker of identity.”
For Sofia Cheliak, the Maidan revolution was about the rekindling of Ukrainian identity which progressively lessened the domination of the Russian language in the intellectual and creative spheres, and allowed her to find a place where she previously felt she had none. “If not for the Maidan, I would have left, that was my plan” she writes. “I felt like I wasn’t needed with my Hryhoriy Chubai [Soviet-era Ukrainian poet and translator], my Mertvy Piven [rock band from Lviv] and my Andruhovych [poet and novelist from Ivano-Frankivsk]”.
Both messages drew a lot of attention and sparked even more debate—Kazarin’s post has received more than 400 comments, Cheliak’s more than 150 expressions of agreement, criticism and personal stories. It’s not surprising, both texts can so easily become invitations to discuss what it means to be Ukrainian.
The 40-year-old Pavlo Kazarin and 26-year-old Sofia Cheliak grew up in very different places, in very different times. Their individual stories show incredibly different experiences. Put side-by-side, they show complexity, friction and probably misunderstandings, the kind that inevitably appears when you talk about belonging. They show grievances and raise questions about how those incredibly different experiences can be reconciled, questions that have no easy answers. They show Ukraine, or at least a small part of Ukraine, as it is.