What Han Kang's novel is silent about

Listening to silence

The novel “Greek Lessons” remained in the shadow of Han Kang's more famous works for quite a long time. It was not considered a masterpiece and was not translated into other languages for a long time. But it is in this book that the themes that define the writer's entire artistic world are most fully reflected. These are language, silence, physicality, and the possibility of human closeness. The novel itself appeared several years before the writer's international success, when in 2016 Han Kang received the International Booker Prize for the novel “The Vegetarian.” And it so happened that the late translation of an early novel is now perceived as one of the key works of the writer's bibliography, rather than an early work. Without “Greek Lessons," it is difficult to understand how Han Kang's literary optics were formed.

At the center of the story is a woman who suddenly loses the ability to speak. A psychotherapist tries to explain her condition through a chain of difficult events: the death of her mother, a painful divorce, and the loss of the right to raise her eight-year-old son. But the heroine writes a short answer on a piece of paper:

— No. It's not that simple.

She had already experienced a similar condition in childhood and is convinced that her speech did not disappear because of one specific trauma, but because the path to words itself had disappeared. In the hope of regaining her voice, the woman enrolls in an Ancient Greek course — the most distant and foreign of all possible languages, as if it is precisely this distance that can lead her back to her own speech.

In the classroom, the heroine meets an Ancient Greek teacher who is gradually losing his sight due to a hereditary disease. One might assume that a love story should develop next. But Han Kang constructs their relationship as reflections of the same loss. The woman loses language, the man loses his sight, but both continue to seek a way to maintain a connection with the world.

In an interview with The New Yorker, the writer said that it was important for her to present the moment when people deprived of their usual means of communication can still understand each other. Such a moment became the almost wordless touch toward which the novel slowly moves throughout the narrative. And Ancient Greek turned out to be the book's third main character — a dead language that unexpectedly helps two people once again approach living speech and each other.

Language as a bodily experience and the impossibility of contact

In “Greek Lessons," Han Kang almost immediately breaks the conventional idea of language as a means of communication. For her heroine, speech is a physical action that requires the effort of the entire body.

— Compared to sight, language is a connection tens of times more physical. The lungs, throat, tongue, and lips move, sending sounds through the air to the interlocutor. The tongue dries, saliva fills the mouth, lips crack.

But it is precisely this physicality that makes language vulnerable. Words can cause pain and deceive. Then the loss of speech symbolizes the loss of a familiar way of existing among people. It is no coincidence that in childhood, the heroine felt that words were bursting into her dreams. Later, her ex-husband's language became a source of new trauma for her. In a conversation with The Independent, Han Kang said that in moments of intense pain, language is completely useless, and a person can only seek refuge in silence.

The heroine of “Greek Lessons” does not expect that a new language will help her get her son back or speak again. She is drawn to something else: Ancient Greek has long ceased to be a spoken language, and therefore does not carry the burden of violence that the woman associates with her own speech. Han Kang said that she deliberately chose a language that has almost no connection to Korean. For the heroine, it is completely foreign, and only this alienation gives her the opportunity to once again approach the very concept of language.

Another important idea sounds in the novel: the woman comes to classes to voluntarily reclaim language for herself. Its strict grammar, which the writer compares to an icy column, becomes a support for the heroine.

Silence in this novel also cannot be understood literally. Han Kang gradually shows that it is precisely beyond habitual speech that the possibility of real contact arises. It is no coincidence that the heroine achieves such a state of silence that even her breathing begins to resemble speech.

In “Greek Lessons," the writer compared language to an arrow that always flies a little past its target. Words can convey feelings, but they also cause pain. Perhaps that is why the characters increasingly prefer to express their thoughts and feelings not with words, but with gestures, glances, or touch. Their attempt to understand each other gradually goes beyond the limits of language and leads to something that in principle cannot be expressed in words.

This idea also determines Han Kang's own way of writing. The novel moves with the rhythm of language. Tension is created by short, repetitive sentences, pauses, syntactic repetitions, and barely noticeable changes in intonation. The very first scene in the classroom, where the teacher repeatedly asks the woman to read the text, is constructed like a poem. Her restless movements, repeated attempts to speak, and the man's brief replies form a particular pulsation in the text.

The key to all her work

At first glance, “Greek Lessons” stands apart among Han Kang's novels. There is no shocking physicality of “The Vegetarian” (2007), no historical catastrophe of “Human Acts” (2014), no open discussion of collective memory. However, “Greek Lessons” was published exactly midway between these two books. It seems to connect the main themes of both works. If in “The Vegetarian” Han Kang explores violence within the family and society, and in “Human Acts” — the violence of the state, then “Greek Lessons” shows how this experience destroys a person from within, depriving them of language itself.

Han Kang herself does not hide the fact that she sees a connection between the heroines of her novels. In an interview with The New Yorker, she explained that Yeong-hye from “The Vegetarian” tries to save herself by completely rejecting violence, and then food. The heroine of “Greek Lessons” chooses a different path. She simultaneously pushes language away and tries to bring it back. The writer says that there are moments when “our feelings are torn to shreds, and the language that should convey them is also torn.” Through this rupture (or tornness), “Greek Lessons” slowly moves toward the last page, where the woman for the first time utters “I” in the first person.

Moreover, this book also turned out to be the most personal for the writer. In the early 2000s, a conversation with a publisher about Ancient Greek grammar drew her attention to the so-called middle voice — a form in which the action cannot be completely separated from the one who performs it. At that time, this idea had not yet developed into a novel. Later, Han Kang almost stopped writing for a year. She said in an interview that she could not read fiction, only watched documentaries and read books on astrophysics because she was experiencing “complex feelings toward language.” When she returned to writing, Han Kang understood that this experience had inevitably entered “Greek Lessons.”

The release of the Russian translation allows us to see another feature of the novel. “Greek Lessons” is particularly difficult to translate because meaning here is born not only from words, but also from their movement, rhythm, pauses, and syntax. A literary text cannot be divided into form and content: the language of the work sometimes becomes its meaning. The translator recreates this movement in a different linguistic environment, rather than simply replacing one word with another.

This idea unexpectedly coincides with what Han Kang herself writes about. After the Nobel Prize, she is increasingly called an author of novels about trauma and violence. But in “Greek Lessons," there is another center of her work. This is a book about how a person does not stop seeking a path to another even when words no longer help.

Publisher: AST
Translation from Korean: Dzhau dat Fattakhov
Number of pages: 288
Year: 2026
Age rating: 18+

Ekaterina Petrova — literary critic for the online newspaper Realnoe Vremya, host of the Telegram channel «Булочки с маком».