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"Your Ukrainian is so beautiful - you must be from Lviv?" - this phrase will be heard many times by the protagonist of Nina Kuryata's debut novel The Bell. And she will constantly overcome other people's stereotypes about herself and her fellow countrymen from the Ukrainian South.

This book is about what it was like to be born a Ukrainian in the USSR, to experience first Soviet propaganda and language discrimination, and then the prejudice of countrymen from other regions. Dzvinka's family helps her to create and maintain her own identity - it is family stories and family upbringing that sow seeds of doubt in her about whether she should believe what is said at school, written in newspapers and "lies" on TV.

The protagonist's childhood falls on the time of late Brezhnev and the beginning of Perestroika, her youth - on the collapse of the Soviet Union and the infamous nineties, and her adulthood - on the final formation of Independence. After moving to Odesa, Dzvinka has to defend her otherness in a Russified environment, and later in Kyiv and western Ukraine, she has to prove that she is as Ukrainian as those born on the other side of the Zbruch River, that her mother tongue is Ukrainian, and that Ukrainians live in the Odesa region.

The characters in the book speak Ukrainian and Russian, Podillia and Galician dialects, and, of course, Surzhyk. There are words such as "strawberry", "tomato", "gabli", "kalyafyor" and "spizharka". Everything is just like in our life, which is so rich in unpredictable circumstances and various cultural codes."

The performer: Lyudmila Chirkova
Duration: 10:58:00