East Slavic Languages ​​in Conflict: How War Destroys Words

The East Slavic languages ​​Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian are looking for a new relationship with each other. Two translators report on the challenges they face.

Dwar changes colors. Suddenly the world is black and white, strictly contoured. And the language is suddenly black and white for many,” writes Serhij Zhadan in his essay “Chaplains and Atheists”. When language loses its shades, it is destroyed. As literary translators – we translate from Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian – we are directly involved in this destruction. We observe how the use of languages ​​changes, how meanings shift, how the reading and writing communities react to these changes, how words or phrases become unusable.

Terms such as “fascism” and “Nazis” have been systematically undermined by Russian propaganda for years. In the language of state television, these terms do not describe a political system and its historical representatives, but simply everyone who “stands in our way”. At the same time, thanks to the cult of victory in World War II, which has reached a toxic concentration in Russia under Vladimir Putin, the vocabulary retains its emotional charge: fascists must be defeated at all costs, and the reward is not only the strengthening of national unity at home , but the status of a world power.