Ukranian pianist Svjatoslav Richter
The German newspaper Die Zeit has decided to refer to the Ukrainian capital only as Kyiv and no longer to print the name according to the Russian transliteration, as was previously the case. The editors say that it is time to do this, because over the past 200 years the rulers in Moscow have deliberately used the language to suppress Ukrainian culture and identity. And this is still the case today.
Some time ago, Pizzicato decided to return musicians from Ukraine, who are still wrongly referred to as Russian musicians, to their homeland.
Let me put it this way: if someone was born in 1943 in Luxembourg, which was annexed by Nazi Germany, and, let’s say, was educated in Munich after the Second World War and then worked in Paris, that doesn’t make him a German or a Frenchman, but a Luxembourger. That’s why David Oistrakh, who was born in Odessa, is a Ukrainian violinist.
And it is actually bad, very bad, that the Western world has only realized because of Putin’s barbaric war that Ukraine has had its own cultural and national identity for centuries, but for most of that time it was occupied by the Russians, who annexed the country, its people and culture and subjugated them.
So welcome home, David Oistrakh, Serge Prokofiev, Svjatoslav Richter, Nathan Milstein and all the others who were and are (not here) falsely called Russians.
