I was born and raised in Ukraine, but I grew up on Russian culture.
As a teenager, I was obsessed with Dostoyevsky’s novels and memorized the lyrical poetry of Alexander Blok. I discussed the mysticism of Bulgakov with friends and devoured Chekhov’s short stories like sweets.
That was then. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukrainians have toppled statues to Pushkin, Russia’s national poet, and others. They have changed the names of many streets. In 2023, residents of Kyiv voted to change the city’s Pushkin Park to Bahrianyi Park, after the Ukrainian writer Ivan Bahrianyi. The cancellation of Russian culture in Ukraine is well underway.
I understand the discomfort some people feel about that. I do not share that discomfort. It reflects a reality that I have come to see differently, too.
Let me explain.
For the first half of my life, I saw Ukrainian literature as secondary and inferior to Russian literature. At school, I don’t remember anybody ever saying this directly. Instead, it was communicated through what we read and what we overlooked.
Then the Iron Curtain fell, and in 1991 Ukraine gained independence. By the time I started college in the late ’90s, the curriculum included writers who had been marginalized or excluded in Soviet times.
I started reading the writers of the Executed Renaissance — Ukrainian literary artists who were killed in Stalin’s purges. I read the novels of Bahrianyi and the poetry of Lina Kostenko.
In the prose of Serhiy Zhadan, I found precision that reminded me of Chekhov, and for a while I thought of him as the “Ukrainian Chekhov.” Then I caught myself — why was I treating Ukrainian culture as something that needed validation through comparison?
One day, back at my parents’ house, I realized that some of the writers I’d only recently discovered, and many others, were there on the bookshelves. In fact, they had always been there. I’d just never reached for them.
The sense that Ukrainian culture was somehow lesser had not come from nowhere. That’s what a Russified education did. It did not forbid access to my own culture — it didn’t need to — it just quietly weakened my instinct to reach for it.
At some point after 2022, as a journalist reporting from towns devastated by the Russian occupation, I reread Blok. Only now some of the lines from his 1918 poem “The Scythians” — “Are we to blame then, if your ribs should crunch, Fragile between our massive, gentle paws?” — no longer seemed like metaphor.
For years I had written everything in Russian and translated it into Ukrainian. But I started to notice that I no longer needed that step — it had become more natural for me to just write in Ukrainian.
This war is a tragedy. One of Russia’s many errors is to have insisted so loudly and violently that Ukraine does not exist.
Ukraine exists. If it didn’t, Russia wouldn’t have to try so try to destroy it.
Vladyslav Holovin is a former deputy editor in chief of Forbes Ukraine. Anna Ivanenko is an artist and illustrator.
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