After victory, writes Ukrainian author Ivan Kozlenko, Ukraine will have to develop a vocabulary of its own, one that no longer borrows its terms from the Russian interpretation of history: "It is then up to the Ukrainians to undertake the ritual killing of the empire." The current defense against the Russian incursion is still widely referred to in Ukraine as a "patriotic war" or an "anti-fascist struggle," using WWII-era Soviet vocabulary.

But in future, “decolonization”, liberation from the clutches of the Soviet past, will also have to be reflected in the language.

Mark Siemons

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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How a new spiritual coordinate system is designed in the midst of the greatest distress is typical of the Ukrainian cultural magazine “Krytyka”, in whose latest issue this text appears.

The magazine was founded in 1997 by George Grabowicz, a Ukrainian literary scholar who teaches at Harvard, in order to provide a forum for the country's intellectual debates and "raise their level".

The English-language website was added in 2014, which is primarily concerned with making these debates known to the world.

And indeed: Whoever reads "Krytyka" gets to know the country's important intellectual actors and how their reflection on liberal universalistic principles goes together with the mental processing of their own nationhood under extreme external and internal pressure.

One of the basic themes that runs through the articles in the magazine is the question of how the country can become visible and audible.

Ivan Kozlenko, who calls for the new language after the victory, writes: "The sovereign voice of Ukraine has been hushed up." Until recently, Kozlenko was director of the National Film Archive Oleksandr Dovzhenko, which strives for the international distribution of Ukrainian films.

He points out that the current world order and legal system is based in large part on the experience of the Holocaust.

But the Ukraine, of all places, where the Holocaust mainly took place, as well as in Poland and Belarus, as a Russian colony had no part in the establishment of this world order.

What the writer and publicist Mykola Riabchuk wrote about in “Krytyka” in 2021 as the traumatic experience of Eastern Europeans with their Western siblings therefore still applies to Ukrainians: “It was overloaded with false expectations, bitter resentments and thinly veiled psychological complexes – feelings of inferiority , betrayal, abandonment, betrayal and lack of appreciation.” Riabchuk observes how even Milan Kundera’s influential 1984 essay urging a return to Europe of Russia-hijacked “East-Central Europe” ignored Ukraine because it was a part the Soviet Union was.

According to Riabchuk, the culprit is a "philosophical geography" that still has fatal effects today, which assigns this part of Europe to the "East",

that is, hitting the completely different one and thereby implicitly justifying the tyranny there.

Riabchuk speaks of a "love-hate relationship" with the West that would have produced such arbitrary assignments.

Reading this essay, one understands how long a history there is of the harsh tone that some Ukrainian politicians used, especially towards Germany, during that war.

“Krytyka” also discusses the delicate relationship between the Russian and Ukrainian languages ​​and to what extent the state should regulate their use.

"Nobody intends to ukrainize you personally," the author Otar Dovschenko said in 2015: "You speak the language you speak." The war has now changed many things.

“Krytyka” publishes an open letter from Ukrainian musicians and cultural scientists demanding that all engagement with Russian culture be stopped as long as the Russian hostilities continue.

An editorial note assures: "We keep calm and continue to defend Ukraine on the intellectual front." We ask for your understanding that no books from the in-house publishing house can be delivered at the moment.

All orders would be processed "as soon as we can".