Fighting Talk: Language and War in Ukraine

Join writer and historian Olena Stiazhkina and the literary scholar and writer Sasha Dovzhyk for a discussion of language and war in Ukraine as part of the ProLang Research Group Seminar, moderated by Uilleam Blacker.

Ukraine’s linguistic landscape has always been rich and complex: over the centuries, many languages have been spoken there, and today bilingualism is common. Yet language has also been the focus for political manipulation and misinformation. Most recently, Russia has sought to use the presence of the Russian language in Ukraine, as a pretext for its invasion and the atrocities that came with it – crimes that have very often targeted Russophone Ukrainians. In response to the invasion, Ukrainians’ attitudes towards language have shifted, with many who previously spoke Russian consciously moving towards Ukrainian, accelerating processes that began in 2014. This discussion, between two of the most powerful voices in contemporary Ukrainian cultural life, both of whom have made the switch from Russian to Ukrainian, will touch on changes in attitudes to language under conditions of war, Ukraine’s complex linguistic history, and the future of the country’s linguistic landscape.

The event will be followed by a reception at UCL SSEES, 16 Taviton street.

Speakers:

Olena Stiazhkina is a writer, public intellectual and historian from Donetsk. She is a researcher at the Institute of Ukrainian History, Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and, before 2014, was Professor of Slavic History at Donetsk University. Her fiction works include Cecil the Lion Had to Die (2021), Rozka (2018) and In God’s Language (2016). Her history works include The Taste of the Soviet: Food and Eating in the Art of Life and the Art of Cinema, 1960s-1980s (2021), Zero Point Ukraine: Four Essays on World War II (2020), The Stigma of Occupation Soviet Women and their Self-image in the 1940s (2019). Her book Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary is forthcoming with Harvard University Press.

Sasha Dovzhyk is a writer, literary scholar and curator from Zaporizhzhia. She is a Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies at UCL SSEES and Special Projects Curator for the Ukrainian Institute London. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, CNN Opnion, Open Democracy and others. As well as her work on Ukraine, she has written widely on fin-de-siecle culture, and is editor of Decadent Writings of Aubrey Beardsley (2023).

Uilleam Blacker is Associate Professor of Ukrainian and East European Culture at UCL SSEES and a translator of Ukrainian literature.