Updating database to work with unicode

dear all,

Kevin Yank’s book Build Your Own Database Driven Web Site Using PHP & MySQL is a brilliant enlightning work and I read it and reconstructed on my desktop computer the ijdb (internet joke database) proposed by the author for the purposes of tutoring and was happy because the database worked so perfectly.

However, when I tried to use it for storing jokes in non-English language there came a moment of disappointment - the search engine on the Manage Jokes page did not return the jokes containing strings in Russian (unicode) which I typed into the form.
The Russian jokes are sitting in ijdb and they pop up when I dump the whole database but how can I get only them using the form on Manage Jokes page?

respectfully yours`
sehrguey ogoltsoff