Illustration: Nataliia Shulga/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Illustration: Nataliia Shulga/The Guardian The long read Ukraine ‘The war leaked into every lesson’: learning Ukrainian in a country under siege Soon after my first visit to Ukraine four years ago, I began language lessons. It taught me more than I ever expected
Almost as soon as I returned from my first reporting trip to Ukraine , in October 2022, I decided to start Ukrainian lessons. Not as an act of solidarity, exactly, but as a marker that I was committed to returning. I wanted to know some Ukrainian in order to feel less helpless, to edge towards a better understanding of what I was reporting, and to be more courteous to those whom I encountered. And I hoped, in time, to be able to pull myself through a piece of poetry in the original.
I began meeting Olha, my teacher, by weekly video call later that autumn. She was in Ivano-Frankivsk, her home town in the far west of Ukraine, I was in London. With endless patience and humour, she led me by the hand through the unfamiliar letters of her language, those elegant, sensuous shapes of the Cyrillic alphabet.
I have not yet fully internalised them, as I have the Roman alphabet, whose shapes are so much part of me that I don’t see them any more. The unfamiliarity of Cyrillic characters, by contrast, allows me to enjoy the exhilarating ski-slope swoop of the Л (l), the generous expanses of the Ю (yu), and the majestic architecture of the Ж (zh), which spreads out its arms and legs like candelabra. (Enjoy, please, the extravagant double Ж in Запоріжжя – Zaporizhzhia – which has a particularly graceful etymology: it means “beyond the rapids”.) And, though I shrink from trying either to write or decode the curlicued Ukrainian cursive, just forming these letters is a joy for the hand: the twin sweep of a З (z) and the harsh angles of a Д (d), which I like to write as a triangle with a pair of sharp, inward-facing tails dangling from it.
Then there is the special category of Cyrillic letters reserved only for the Ukrainian language. You may see, for example, on a Ukrainian necklace or bracelet, or on a T-shirt, the letter Ї – like our letter I, surmounted by a diaeresis. The character, which expresses the sound “yi” – as in Kyiv (Київ) – is absent from the Russian variant of the alphabet, and thus operates as a subtle signifier of allegiance. In occupied Mariupol, in 2022, the letter Ї was seen scrawled in chalk on the streets – a single letter as an act of defiance. I enjoy the fact that in the transliteration of my surname, Гіґґінс, there is another Ukrainian-only letter, Ґ, which, from its jaunty upturned serif, one can tell is the rare hard g, most commonly employed for loan words; it was removed from the alphabet in Stalin-era reforms, and formally given back a place in the Ukrainian alphabet after the fall of the Soviet Union and Ukrainian independence in 1991.
There is a text artwork that I love, by the sculptor Nathan Coley, installed in a library in Edinburgh, which consists of the sentence: The Basic Material is Not the Word but the Letter. I often think of it when navigating a forest of Cyrillic signs. Thick accumulations of Ukrainian consonants conspire against my tongue and my memory: airless crushes of them, like the compressed folds of a concertina. I cannot tell you how many repetitions it took to memorise незважаючи на ( nezvazhayuchy na ) – “despite” in Ukrainian. It seemed important to master this phrase…