100,000 Words About Love: Four Ways Beyond the Clichés

For Izdryk, replacing one word is enough to make familiar, elevated phrases uncomfortable. In “Love in:”, “love” becomes “indifference”: people are joyfully indifferent, indifferent beyond reason, overflowing with indifference. The constructions keep working even as their meaning turns upside down.

It is a good entrance into 100,000 Words About Love, Including Exclamations. The anthology does not assemble one grand explanation of a feeling. It lets us hear different writers use the same word, and notice what that word hides when it sounds too familiar.

Reading it as a collection of beautiful lines for greeting cards misses its most interesting work. There is irony, awkward domestic life, religious address, physicality and mutually dissimilar voices. They promise no convenient shared conclusion.

A word you can replace

Izdryk’s substitution exposes ready-made forms. If a phrase survives the replacement of its central word and still sounds solemn, perhaps its force came from familiar rhythm rather than meaning.

This is not evidence that love does not exist. It tests the language used to describe it. The piece also contains passages styled as sociology and psychiatry. Read them inside the experiment, rather than extracting figures or judgements as current facts about Ukrainians.

Alongside it, Andriy Bondar’s “Love Is Rhetoric. My Primer” appears to refuse a worn-out opening phrase while already uttering that very phrase. It is a witty trap: avoiding banality takes more than announcing that none is coming.

Both pieces interest a Ukrainian reader through their treatment of a particular language, rather than an abstract “eternal feeling”. They ask how language generates elevation and how sentimental formulas can displace experience. In 2026, readers can still test phrases against greetings, posts and their own explanations. There is no need to pretend the book predicted today’s social media.

When care grants permission to control

Natalka Sniadanko’s “Stale Biscuits” moves at another pace. After her husband’s death, Nadiya Petrivna continues cooking his favourite meals, drinking his preferred tea and following habits that have come to seem her own. He is gone; the order he established remains.

When Mr Orest enters her life, the pleasure of his company needs practical justification: he can repair things, help at the country house, make life more cheerful. She struggles to name a desire without listing household arguments. A friend responds with suspicion and reminders about her age, apartment and children.

Here the anthology moves from words to their consequences. Someone may sincerely call control care; someone else learns to explain her happiness in terms that will win permission. Sniadanko shows this through tea, repairs, kitchen conversation and an unpleasant gift, rather than a declaration about correct relationships.

The domestic setting will feel culturally familiar to many Ukrainian readers, without becoming a guide to every family. The story’s value lies in the precision of the situation: someone can live by another person’s tastes for so long that she no longer remembers her own.

The voices do not have to agree

After linguistic play and domestic irony, try Taras Prokhasko’s “Lord, Visit the Vineyard”. It takes the form of a prayer: gratitude, doubt, acceptance of personal limits, a request to retain the freedom to love.

It need not refute Izdryk or Bondar. It is another way to speak about the same subject. Juxtaposition adds value: the word dismantled into linguistic components in one piece is needed for a personal address in another.

Earlier literary voices do not become useless because they fail to describe Ukraine in 2026. Nor should the whole collection be called a mirror of the country today. Some cultural references and provocations require distance. Readers need not accept them simply because the authors are well known.

A route rather than a marathon

Read selectively. Start with Izdryk’s “Love in:”, Bondar’s “Love Is Rhetoric. My Primer”, Sniadanko’s “Stale Biscuits” and Prokhasko’s “Lord, Visit the Vineyard”. They offer four approaches: substitution, ironic examination, a domestic story and prayer. Then follow whichever voice interests you.

This route is not a ranking of every contributor. It answers a specific question: can intimacy be discussed without repeating ready-made phrases? Continuous reading is unnecessary for following a plot, because there is no shared plot.

Choose it for the variety of Ukrainian prose and the distance between a beautiful declaration and a lived situation. Skip it if you need relationship advice or light romance. The useful idea is that the same word can mean care, control, a formula or an appeal. Only the particular story reveals which.

Source and limits

100 тисяч слів про любов, включаючи вигуки, Ukrainian anthology, Folio. The analysis and recommendation concern four works checked against the local EPUB. Other contributors and pieces are not assessed by this route. Stylised figures inside literary works are not treated as external data. English titles here are descriptive renderings for the website; the source texts are Ukrainian.