for discussion

[Kuchar, Martha]

Since I am presently in Ukraine, let me take a stab at this dicussion.

Yes, the language question is complicated. One thing we must say is that for all intents and purposes Ukraine is a fully bilingual country. There's a beauty in this bilingualism, in part because it's unique and in part because it's natural to the contemporary Ukrainian speaker. But it remains beautiful only if a fine balance between the two languages is maintained. The Yanukovich team's pro-Russian language politics are aggressive and ugly. And no less authoritarian than Farion's Misha/Mykhailyk polemic. 

But that's only one side of the matter. Here's the other: Switch on Ukrainian TV and three-quarters of the programming is in Russian. Where's the balance there? Broadcasters and commercial advertisers speak in Ukrainian, but the serials and films are in Russian. Who is learning what? Second, within days of Yanukovich's accession, friends in Kyiv were stopped in the street by people who asked, "Why are you still speaking in Ukrainian? Yanukovich has won."  Farion and others like her are pushing back.

In Western Ukraine, where I am, most everyone speaks Ukrainian, although they also know Russian. Yes, the schools did commemorate Ukrainian language week recently. I happened to be in some of the schools during that time. There were poster boards filled with examples of Ukrainian equivalents of long-held Russian expressions, and these were placed alongside quotations from Shevchenko describing the felicities of the mother tongue and advocating its mastery. This is like those quotes from Turgenev and Akhmatova that pop up everywhere (in Russia and in our American classrooms) speaking to the same point, about the beauties of Russian. There's no harm in this. The schools' Ukrainian Language programs are not unbridled nationalism; they are sound pedagogy. Incidentally, the week after Ukrainian Language Week, the schools here celebrated World Literature week. I attended several sessions. In one, children staged a play about the value of reading the classics (against the skepticis!
 m of some), and in another, they read their prize-winning original works (stories and poems), written in part as tributes to the great writers.  The play, the stories, the poems -- all written by the children in Ukrainian. But for how much longer, if the balance is broken by the language politics of the east?

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