For Charlotte Higgins, the Guardian’s chief culture writer, visiting Ukraine and meeting the artists, novelists and poets under fire changed her life. “It was even before I went home that I decided I needed to learn some Ukrainian,” she tells Helen Pidd.
Back in London, she began having weekly lessons with Olha Makar, who was living in the far west of Ukraine and squeezed in teaching between helping displaced teenagers.
Charlotte says she wanted to not just be able to navigate Ukraine when she returned to the country, but also learn to read poetry. But learning Ukrainian taught her more than she expected – about the war and the people surviving it.
“Learning Italian, you kind of learn what to order in a restaurant and you know ice cream and where is the cathedral. There was all this in Ukraine too, but a lot about sadness. I learnt all these words for drone and rocket and air raid alarm and bomb shelter. So everything was inflected by the war.”
Four years and multiple trips to Ukraine later, Charlotte has never forgotten how Olha introduced herself, “До війни я жила в Києві. Я дуже люблю це місто і хочу знову там жити” – which translates to “Before the war, I lived in Kyiv. I love this place and I want to live there again.”
“There’s so much sorrow in that sentence,” says Charlotte. “Baked into this phrase was the fact that you were actually displaced. Even in the first sentence that we shared together, there is a sense of loss and longing for home.”