I have known Canadian philanthropist Petro Jacyk for nearly twenty years and League of Philanthropists Executive Secretary Mykhailo Slaboshpytsky for nearly ten. I first met Petro as a champion donor and fund-raiser for the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and Mykhailo as a first rank literary critic cum Ivan Drach’s right hand in his work with the Ukrainian diaspora. I like them both and have to congratulate them for a stroke of genius in organizing 172 donors from the USA, Canada, Europe, and Australia to fund a nationwide contest of schoolchildren to demonstrate the excellence of their Ukrainian language. Each donor has a specific prize in his name and can contact directly his or her laureate. This is not the first time their working together has borne fruit, but it is perhaps the best.
The point here is not whether Ukrainian is any better or worse than Russian, Polish, or any other language. The point that a state requires a community that in a sense feels a sense of ownership for it, that can appropriate it, in other words, building a political nation. States without nations are seldom either strong or stable. In Ukraine this means making Ukraine Ukrainian in the sense that France is French, the Czech Republic is Czech, and Ireland Irish. And one of Ukraine’s problems is that Soviet nationality policy from the 1930s, as did the tsars, did everything possible to make the Ukrainian language and just about everything else Ukrainian second- rate. Of course, you do not have to speak Ukrainian or even be of Ukrainian parentage to be Ukrainian. After all, most Irishmen do not speak Irish Gaelic, and a number of national movements in Europe were led by people whose ancestors did not belong the nations they led. But nations have to be held together by something, and one of those things is most often language. Offering schoolchildren a chance to bring home to papa an envelope with a few hundred or even thousand hryvnias for knowing Ukrainian is a lesson that the language is no longer second rate but can bring real benefits. That is something I call concrete nation-building.
Incidentally, the reader will note from the photo that each winner also received a book. Our journalist might not know it, but it is called The Apostle Andrew and was written by Natalia Dziubenko, my wife. And next year there will be one more prize, one in my name.
