It’s possible not to know what a “mondegreen” is, but it’s unlikely that one can completely defend against it. He who is blessed to live is also doomed to make mistakes. For example, to perceive select sayings in a distorted manner, and consequently - to misinterpret them, sometimes to absurdity. But is it possible, having moved as an adult from the Russian-speaking Donetsk to the hardly Ukrainian-speaking Kyiv, to quickly learn the Ukrainian language? Yes, possible. What’s more: one can even be someone like Volodymyr Rafeyenko, a Russian-speaking writer of significant age and renown, and then, having ended up in Kyiv, master Ukrainian to such a degree so as to write an amazing novel in it. In particular, a novel about the immersion of a Russian-speaking migrant into the joyous and sorrowful element of the Ukrainian language. And also, a novel about his not wanting to remain a passive object of Russia’s “protection”. But above all, it’s a novel about how poorly the different parts of our multilingual Ukraine heard each other, thus turning one another into an utter “mondegreen”. Is there still a chance to solve this misunderstanding? Unknown. But first we have to try, at the very least, to listen carefully to one another: maybe then we’ll manage to decipher all this distorted noise.