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"You have such a good Ukrainian language - you must be from Lviv?" is a phrase the protagonist of Nina Kur'yati's debut novel, Dzvinka, will hear many times. - this phrase the main character of Nina Kur'yati's debut novel "Dzvinka" reads it many times. And she constantly dolatimises other people's stereotypes about herself and her fellow countrymen from the Ukrainian East.

This book is about what it is like to be born a Ukrainian in the Soviet Socialist Republic, to experience at first radyanskoy propaganda and language discrimination, and then - the superiority of fellow countrymen from other regions. Dzvintsi is helped to create and maintain her own identity by her family - it is her family history and family education that sow in her the seeds of doubt as to whether she should believe what is said at school, written in newspapers and "bullshit" on TV.

Ditinstvo of the protagonist falls on the pre-bu piznyogo Brezhnev and the beginning of "Perestroika", youth - on the collapse of the Radian Union and sumnozvisni dev'yanosti, and dear life - on the remaining formation of Nezalezhnosti. Having travelled to Odessa, Dzvinka has to defend her otherness in a grown-up environment, and later in Kiev and in the western part of Ukraine she has to prove that she is the same, she is as Ukrainian as those who were born on the other side of the Zbruch, her native language is Ukrainian, and Ukrainians live on Odeshchyna.

The heroes of the book speak Ukrainian and Russian, Podilsk and Galician dialect - and, of course, Surzhik. There are such words as "strawberry", "tomato", "ґabli", "kalafjor" and "spizharka". Everything is like in our life, so rich in unprecedented circumstances and diverse cultural codes.