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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Charlotte Higgins in Kyiv and Kharkiv

Tainted love: how Ukrainians are ridding themselves of Russian-language books

Russia Alexander Pushkin Kyiv Anton Chekhov Ukraine Tolstoy
A jumbled pile of books with Cyrillic on their spines, the most prominent reading ‘19th century Russian poets’
A book titled 19th-Century Russian Poets among many left at Kyiv’s Pochaina book market. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The Guardian

One day this summer, the Ukrainian artist Stanislav Turina took two of his books to his garden near Kyiv. One was a volume of poems by Alexander Pushkin.

But Turina – a voracious reader, never without a couple of books in his backpack – had no plans to pick it up again.

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