Olena Rybka: Ukraine’s Literary Identity

Ukrainian literature, like Ukrainian identity, has developed and lasted into the twenty-first century despite centuries of repression under various ruling powers. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, during a long era of evolving Russian rule, printing books and teaching in schools in Ukrainian was banned. In the 1930s, when Stalin ruled Russia, Ukrainian poets and writers were arrested and sometimes killed, their generation now known as the Executed Renaissance. In 2014, Ukraine’s concession to Russian pressure to nix an agreement that would have brought the country closer to the EU sparked the Maidan Revolution, which toppled the sitting government and paved the way for a new, more independent Ukrainian government that has since made Ukrainian language (rather than Russian) compulsory in many public settings.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine earlier this year reopened difficult debates in the country’s literary scene about the ties between language and nationhood. With these histories in mind, I spoke with Olena Rybka, a member of the Ukrainian publishing house Vivat Publishing, based in Kharkiv. Vivat, the second-largest publishing house in the country, previously released hundreds of books a year. Since 2014, it has focused on releasing Ukrainian-language books; it also works to promote Ukrainian literature domestically and abroad, through book events and by selling rights overseas. Vivat’s publications include by Vakhtang Kipiani, a collection of interviews with dissidents under the Soviet Union; , also by Kipiani, about prominent Ukrainian women of the twentieth century; and by Pavlo Kazarin, a book of modern Ukrainian history.