I was already at work on an analysis of the Ukrainian word svoï, a little worried that it might be received as merely a linguistic exercise, a bit of pedantry, when I was unexpectedly assisted by the Ukrainian historian, writer, and public intellectual Olena Stiazhkina (whose novel, Cecil the Lion Had to Die, a linguistic puzzle of another kind, was recently published in the United States). In August 2025, she chose to give the closing lecture at the International Literary Festival Frontera in Lutsk on the theme The Formula for Our Nationalism Is The Word “Svoї.” This untranslatable word was exactly what I had been pondering, because I believe it has the potential to reveal a great deal about the Ukrainian character, and more. The credit for my inquiry goes to Marci Shore, an intellectual historian and a contributor to this journal, with whom I collaborated on a project about translation for last year’s book fair in Kyiv. She speaks Polish and Czech brilliantly, as well as Russian, and has a good command of Ukrainian. All these languages have the possessive pronoun “svoї” (the phonetics and spelling differ a bit from language to language, of course), unknown to English, or French, or German. During one of our conversations on untranslatability she mentioned svoї as a word that is lacking in English. It would be much easier to explain many things if English had such a word, she said. I was left thinking that svoï is so much more than a word. And that it also sheds a great deal of light about Ukraine these days, particularly about the galloping changes of Ukrainian society. So what does svoї mean? In Ukrainian and other Slavic languages it is technically a possessive pronoun. As a possessive pronoun svoї is used with the first person and the second person, and the third person if they are actors (for example, it replaces the “my” before “story” in the English sentence “I tell my story”). In such cases it is simple: you just translate the unique word as a possessive pronoun in English: my, your, his, hers, theirs, and so on. But the pronoun serves also a substantive term: svoї means a group of almost endless and barely appreciable features which is hard to explain but easy to recognize. It is close to “tribe,” and not accidentally: the root came from Old Norse svíar, which was “our tribe,” in contemporary parlance “Swedes.” In some cases, the closest translation into English would be “in,” as in the once-hip English phrase “the in-crowd.” A deep and natural belonging. But this usage of “in” denotes exclusivity, while the Ukrainian word is tricky: it is both exclusive and inclusive. Svoї could be used to describe someone you meet for the first time in your life and yet they are the opposite of “strangers.” They are always someone you can trust, even when you don’t know them. An anxious newcomer may be encouraged to speak freely in a new group in this way: “Relax, everyone is svoї,” meaning relax, you are among your own, among our own, no one will judge you. I once wrote an article in Ukrainian titled “Vsi svoї” — literally, “all are svoї” — and the title was translated for the English summary as “All in the Family,” a totally correct idiom for the context of the article but not the universal one. What would be the correct contemporary translation for the encouraging phrase to speak freely, I wonder? A “safe space?” Possibly. It can also be the increasingly familiar Danish hygge, owing to the image that it evokes: a small cozy party, a circle of friends, an informal gathering, one for which you need not dress up. Soon after the Maidan Revolution of 2014, when Ukrainians became less skeptical and more interested in their own culture, the words “Vsi svoї” became a name for the monthly market and later for the department store at Khreshchatyk — Kyiv’s main street — which sells only Ukrainian products, from our own manufacturers of clothes, souvenirs, home design, and so on.. (The concept was not original, as a year before the Maidan a media project called “Made in Ukraine” launched the trend.) Inflation hit the country after the Russo-Ukrainian war started in the east of Ukraine and Crimea was annexed by Russia, so it made perfect sense to buy Ukrainian goods instead of imported ones when possible. It would be imprecise to call it a case of economic nationalism; it was instead a glamorous form of urban middle-class patriotism. In fact, the word has a history of less glamorous usage in the context of economic nationalism. Most Ukrainians are familiar with “Svij to svoho po svoje,” the interwar slogan in western Ukraine (then Poland) in the 1930s — another untranslatable wordplay — to mean “each for his own.” Ukrainian cooperatives of the era (say, dairy) encouraged Ukrainians to buy from Ukrainian manufacturers, not Polish ones, and thus to support “svoї” and thereby create an economic basis for Ukrainian political parties and the Ukrainian national movement in general. It sounds positive, and most Ukrainians believe that the slogan and the campaign that popularized it were Ukrainian in origin. This is not so. In the second half of the nineteenth century, it was used by Polish traders to compete with German and Jewish entrepreneurs — particularly in Poznań, the territory of Poland that was annexed by Prussia in the partition of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century, which Germans dominated both administratively and economically. Unfortunately, Poles took to the slogan even when they were not a colonized nation: in the 1930s, when Poland was independent again, the slogan “Swój do swego po swoje” was revived in a nefarious way, as a call to boycott Jewish businesses. This nationalist and antisemitic revival of the slogan and the sentiment behind it is mocked in the novel Cosmos, from 1965, by the émigré writer Witold Gombrowicz, a difficult writer and the enfant terrible
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