“I saw boys on the street in Riga. Young schoolchildren. On their backpacks — Ukrainian ribbons. And they speak Russian. I walk behind and think — after all, these boys may simply forget Ukrainian in a few years. And I understood — something needs to be done,” says Artem Chuyko, a philologist and Ukrainian scholar from the Kharkiv region. He wants little Ukrainians, not only in Latvia, but everywhere in Europe, to have their mothers read fairy tales in Ukrainian — and he founded the first Ukrainian bookstore in the Baltics in Riga.
Before the war, Artem, a philologist by education, worked as a teacher of Ukrainian language and literature at a technological lyceum in the small village of Budy in the Kharkiv region. He says that he was not a strict teacher: he tried to reach an agreement with the children and interest them, thus realizing his calling — to preserve the native language.
In general, Artem can be safely attributed to the rare category of people who are able to change the consciousness of other people and thus influence events.
Once, back in 2022, he saw a group of elementary school students in Riga. They had yellow-and-blue ribbons on their school backpacks, but the children spoke Russian to each other.
“I walk behind and think - after all, these boys may simply forget Ukrainian in a few years.
And I realized that something needed to be done,” recalls Artem.
That's how Artem came up with the idea of the Ukrainian Bookstore. The main thing is that he wanted both toddlers and older children to be able to listen to Ukrainian fairy tales: "This is a language. It needs to be heard and spoken!" He believes that this is a good foundation for preserving the native language of young Ukrainians abroad. Of course, on the condition that the child will continue to hear, or better yet, learn Ukrainian.
It was done. Artem registered and ordered the first batch of books in Ukraine, mostly children's books. However, communication with buyers showed that adults also want to read. Moreover, Ukrainian books turned out to be interesting not only to Ukrainians, but also to locals: "Here, in Latvia, they are well aware of, for example, the books of Oksana Zabuzhko and Serhiy Zhadan. When we started putting our books up for sale at the Agenskalns market, the locals came specifically for these authors. And one day, Mara Polyakova came to us, who had already translated many books from Ukrainian into Latvian, in particular Zabuzhko and Zhadan."
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