Another battle Putin will lose. Fiona Greenland is Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia and a valued contributor to this magazine.
Language-killing, or linguicide, takes many forms. In her 2026 book on the topic (“How To Kill A Language. Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words“), British journalist Sophia Smith Galer points out that covert language death – typically, via murdering its speakers – is the most familiar instantiation but not necessarily the most representative. States have historically snuffed out language communities by failing to support their coexistence with majority languages. Her survey of linguicides includes a chapter on Ukraine, and a solid assessment of Russification policies, past and present.
But the history of Ukraine also includes another form of linguistic violence. A language can have millions of speakers and still be prevented from developing what literary critic and translator Iaroslava Strikha calls a “full literary life.” In other words, a language can be tolerated in conversation while being denied universities, publishers, newspapers, technical vocabularies, prestigious genres, or access to international readers. Under the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and contemporary Russification, Ukrainian-language writers have had to fight for recognition. To live a full literary life is to have the expressive freedom to write or read a detective novel, experimental verse, graphic novel, or philosophical tract in Ukrainian; to translate Proust or Aristotle into Ukrainian, garner international critics’ acclaim, and participate in global literary fairs. Literary standing, we might call it – recognition as a full participant in the institutions and relationships that allow a language to sustain an entire cultural world.
Soviet authorities did not consistently seek to eliminate spoken Ukrainian. During the period of Ukrainization in the 1920s, they initially encouraged Ukrainian-language education and publishing. The danger, from Moscow’s perspective, was what that success could produce: a confident Ukrainian intelligentsia capable of imagining Ukraine as a distinct historical and political community. Under Stalin the policy was violently reversed. Writers and intellectuals of the generation later called the Executed Renaissance were imprisoned, exiled, or killed; cultural institutions were purged; and Ukrainian was increasingly subordinated to Russian.
Linguistic intervention reached inside the language itself, and this is something that marks Ukrainian linguicide as somewhat unique.
Orthography and vocabulary were forcibly brought closer to Russian. Dr. Valentyna Savchyn is a professor of Ukrainian studies at the Center for Languages and Literature at Lund University. One focus of her research is the history and long-term impacts of lexicographic domination of the Ukrainian language by Russia. Dictionaries were an ideological battleground for Soviet Russia. They were, Savchyn argues, a means of language suppression that impeded “the natural process of language development.” The objective was larger than Russification in the narrow sense. It was to constrain Ukrainian’s ability to operate as the autonomous language of a modern culture.
This effort never entirely succeeded, and it’s what makes Ukrainian literary history so striking.
Writers, translators, editors, and publishers circumvented Soviet policies. They created texts and discursive forms that enlarged Ukrainian’s possibilities beyond the expressive limits established by Moscow. Translation was particularly important, into and from Ukrainian. Translators experimented with registers, recovered suppressed or forgotten vocabulary, and invented solutions for voices and experiences that Ukrainian had supposedly been incapable of expressing. Writers rejected the roles allotted by Moscow to a “minor” literature – the Little Brother to the great literary Russian brother.
Since independence, and with urgency after 2014 and 2022, publishers and translators have accelerated that work. Russian occupation authorities have replaced Ukrainian curricula with Russian ones, removed Ukrainian books from libraries, and made Russian the language of administration in occupied territories.
Ukrainian publishers and government agencies are cooperating to reject Russification and continue to fill out the full literary life of Ukrainian. Every year, the independent literary-media platform Chytomo recognizes creativity in Ukrainian publishing. The 2025 shortlist for Book Publishing Market Trendsetter featured five organizations building literary institutions under wartime conditions. One of them, the Litosvita School of Creative and Professional Writing, offers lectures on literature and workshops on reading for teen readers. It also supports budding writers as they develop their own literary projects.
Chytomo’s finalists remind us that heroic writers alone do not save a literary language. It survives through a professional literary ecosystem.
A manuscript requires an editor; an editor needs a publisher; a publisher needs typesetters and illustrators, paper, printers, warehouses, trucks, and a distribution system. The distribution must reach libraries, schools, bookstores, reviewers, teachers, and – above all – readers. Literary culture is a social network before it is a bookshelf. Russia’s warmaking practices reveal an understanding of this network. Russian missile strikes on book printers and warehouses have been rightly criticized as attacks on Ukrainian culture. This way of thinking about it, however, misses the broader point that Russia is also killing Ukrainian authors and publishing employees, destroying libraries, and forcing readers toward Russian-language books. A “full literary life” includes material encounters with print culture, and those encounters rely upon the people who bring books into the world.
A thriving Ukrainian literary culture is a hard-won victory against Russia. The struggle does not stop there, however. It encounters another hierarchy abroad. International publishing has never been a level marketplace among languages. A handful of “major” languages receive disproportionate attention, while literatures designated peripheral must continually explain why they deserve translation at all. Ukrainian has carried the additional burden of standing beside Russian, long treated by Western scholars and publishers as a privileged interpreter of Eastern Europe. Ukrainian authors are low in this pecking order. Long relegated to supporting roles as comic relief or keepers of rustic oral traditions, they are part of a linguistic culture assumed to be in need of external enrichment. Ukrainian writer Artur Dron makes this point powerfully in a recent Kyiv Desk interview about his latest book, Hemingway Knows Nothing. It’s not a Western author who helps Dron understand Ukrainians’ contemporary experience of war, Dron explains. “Our Ukrainian writers of the past know something a little more about us.” The full-scale invasion has disrupted that assumption and generated extraordinary interest in Ukrainian writing, classical and modern.
There is a final irony, and it concerns all of us. Ukrainian has established a full literary life just as literary life itself is becoming harder to sustain. Publishers everywhere are competing with streaming platforms, social media, and declining habits of sustained reading. Ukraine faces those pressures alongside war, displacement, destroyed libraries and schools, demographic loss, and the economic fragility of a comparatively small publishing market. The deeper task is to maintain the relationships that make reading consequential. A literary language is never finally, definitively saved. It exists because people continually choose to make things with it, build institutions around it, and use it to fuel imagination, desire, and ideas about past, present, and future. It exists because people read, share, and discuss books. Perhaps the most important thing we can do to recognize 35 years of Ukrainian freedom and understand the current fight for independence is to participate in the country’s literary life.
Fiona Greenland
Fiona Greenland is Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia and co-founder of the CURIA Lab, a research collective devoted to the study of cultural violence in times of war.
Header photo : David di Nota, Maksym Kryvtsov dans les rues de Podil, Kyiv, 2025.
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