Three languages for our Ukrainian Cinderella.

This week, the Ukrainian playwright Polina Polozhentseva writes about the tribulations of being a Russian-speaking Ukrainian. "Initially, I wrote in Russian about the Russian invasion of Ukraine!"

BY POLINA POLOZHENTSEVA

“You said this to me, and I don’t want to hear it, and I really don’t like it…”

I'm on a train heading to my London apartment, mentally having a showdown with my boyfriend (well, ex-boyfriend by now). And suddenly, I catch myself arguing with him in English! Yes, he was British - which might be relevant.

Now, let’s take a little detour. One night, we wake up to a loud crash, like something heavy had just fallen to the floor in the neighbors' apartment. The only catch here? We don’t have any neighbors. Our house is a lone wolf on this street.

"Did you hear that?" my boyfriend asks in English.

"Da," I reply, startled, in Russian.

Let’s take another detour. My mom and I agreed to speak exclusively in Ukrainian. But, like any good agreement, we break it occasionally. One day, I was on a double-decker bus from Richmond to Kingston, chatting on the phone. My concentration after a long shift (I am also a barista) was basically zero. I was tossing words around in Russian and Ukrainian like a linguistic salad. My mom was doing the same in response. After about ten minutes, the only Ukrainian left in our conversation was “Slava Ukraini” and “Dyakuyu.” Just as I was getting off the bus, a classic English lady in a hat and plaid scarf caught up with me.

“Excuse me, I'm sorry to bother you, but I was sitting behind you on the bus and couldn't figure out what language you were speaking.”

“Ukrainian,” I proudly replied (I wasn’t lying, right?). Since then, I made a rule: no matter how heavy my heart feels, I will never speak Russian in public places.

I can already see the phantom comment under this post: ‘The language is not to blame.’ And you'd be partially right! I have friends from other countries (not Russia) with whom I switch to speaking Russian, like my friends from Georgia, Lithuania, and Kazakhstan. But there are some I won’t. For instance, my former manager was from Bulgaria. When I first started working under him, he awkwardly suggested in broken Russian that we could skip English; it’s OK. I replied, “Not OK! We both need to improve our English!”

So, addressing that phantom comment: for me, Russian is the language spoken before the execution of Ukrainian soldier Oleksandr Matsievskyi*. You can find the moment of his death online. Russian is the language that, perhaps, is spoken to my two missing friends while they’re held captive. We all hope they are alive and in captivity. That Russian-speakers were oppressed in Ukraine (they weren’t) was Putin’s pretext for invading (though Russian propagandists haven't been talking about that much lately), so he could ‘save’ them (who knows who).

Last week, I wrote about how Russian propaganda affects the lives of Europeans. You can check out that piece here.

Moreover, in Zaporizhzhia, in South-Eastern Ukraine, where I grew up, almost no one spoke Ukrainian in everyday life, or during important conferences, press meetings, or premieres. Ukrainian was branded (with the help of television) as the language of the countryside.

I’ve been involved in playwriting since 2015. I don’t have a single text that doesn’t mention the war in Ukraine. Initially, I wrote in Russian about the Russian invasion of Ukraine! Talk about a paradox!

Then I started translating them into Ukrainian with the help of my friend Iryna Tsaplina. Hey, Iryna! Then I switched to writing in Ukrainian and using the ‘Spell Check’ website. At the next stage, I asked chatGPT to find my mistakes and sprinkle my text with some colorful Ukrainian words. Now, I’m on the journey of translating my texts from Ukrainian to English, thanks to John Farndon. Hey, John! It feels like an endless samurai language journey 😂 Sometimes, I don’t even realize which language I am writing a scene in.

Last year, one of my plays, “A Fan of War”, received two reader’s awards at the Ukrainian competition “July Honey,” but one jury member commented, “You can really tell that Ukrainian isn't the author's native language.” Do you think the author doesn’t know it? 😂

Recently, I stumbled upon a stand-up routine by some foreigner in London. He was talking about how hard it is to speak English and have sex at the same time. I laughed until I cried. Because, let’s be honest, you can have sex in silence if you want, just make sure to control your “Da. Da. Daaa.”😂

But did he ever live without an automatic language? Did some aunt from western Ukraine ever message him about the language mistakes in his stories? Or during arguments, did his dad from the East call his mom from the West a “Banderite” (a fan of Stepan Bandera) when they didn’t even know who Bandera was. Thanks to Russian propaganda, in the '90s, Bandera was painted as some scary terrorist from Western Ukraine who killed everyone. In reality, Stepan Bandera was one of the radical and prominent ideologists, practitioners, and theorists of the Ukrainian nationalist movement of the 20th century.

In conclusion, I can say that I’ve managed to break the language barrier in learning English, reaching a B1 level in three years. I’m even past the foreign comedian problem. But with Ukrainian? That’s a whole different beast. There’s no classic barrier there.

I feel ashamed because people expect me, as a Ukrainian, to speak fluent Ukrainian. So every time I forget a word, I want to disappear from the conversation, covering my eyes with my hands.

For us Russian-speaking Ukrainians, a new ethic has emerged in society. If you forget how to say something in Ukrainian, you say it in Russian and keep chatting in Ukrainian. When my English hits B2 level, I hope to replace ‘lost’ words with English ones instead.

* The Ukrainian soldier Oleksandr Matsievskyi - having been taken prisoner of war -was executed in cold blood by Russian soldiers in March 2023. A brutal 12-second video of the execution shows the soldier without weapons, smoking a cigarette, shouting “Slava Ukraini” (meaning “Glory to Ukraine”, in Ukrainian, of course) then being shot with automatic weapon from multiple sides.

Polina Polozhentseva is a Ukrainian playwright living in London. Her plays are full of humor, although audiences sometimes don't laugh - because 'you can't laugh about war, can you?' With Polina, we are adding the perspective of a Ukrainian woman, mother, refugee and barista abroad to our blog. Hopefully you will enjoy her sometimes irreverent musings.

If you want to know more about Polina and her work, have a look here.