Language and national issue in Valerii Marchenko’s opinion journalism and epistolary

Abstract

A resistance movement of the Ukrainian intelligentsia which opposed the colonial state of Ukraine in the USSR and the Russification of Ukrainians emerged in the 1960s—1980s. The activists of this movement, namely writers, artists, teachers, journalists, and scientists, paid a great attention to the language issue in their creative, educational, and public activities due to severe oppressions on functionality of the Ukrainian language in the Soviet Union as well as losing its originality by assimilation. The goal of this article is to study current language issues raised in the opinion journalistic works and letters of a member of the resistance movement, Ukrainian dissident, journalist, and writer Valerii Marchenko, and to examine his views on the language situation in Ukraine and the national policy in the USSR as well as his activities in defense of national values. Marchenko’s opinion journalistic and epistolary heritage is of a great research interest from a linguistic perspective. In the articles based on his own observations and the stories of other political prisoners, he uncovers the situation of the Ukrainian language in Soviet Ukraine. He provides and analyzes the facts that highlight the language situation in the USSR, in particular in education, science, publishing, music, and film production, in the period from the 1950s to the mid-1980s. The author analyzes the reasons why Ukrainians reject their mother language. He concludes that the main reason for this was the dominant policy conditioning a higher social status of Russian and the lack of prestige of national languages. Another reason was the security factor since accusations of ‘Ukrainian nationalism’ were widespread. Marchenko’s works un covering interdiction policy in literary translations in the early 1970s are of particular importance for the study of the language situation in Soviet-era Ukraine. The author considers these interdictions as a political campaign against Ukrainian translators and the language of the Ukrainian translations. The creative heritage of the Ukrainian human rights activist confirms that the issue of the preservation, free development, and full-fledged public functioning of the Ukrainian language in Ukraine as an independent state was a central one for Ukrainian dissidents and their predecessors, namely past-centuries libertarians of Ukraine and national liberation participants of the mid-20th century. Keywords: Ukrainian language, Russification, resistance movement of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, language policy, national policy, language situation, Soviet totalitarian regime, cultural colonization, translation, Valerii Marchenko