/ world today news/ The characters took revenge on the author – I don’t know, but this is happening perhaps for the first time in the history of literature. And, of course, in Kiev, where they know a lot about such things. The already legendary Institute of National Memory confidently recognized the most famous Kyiv writer Mikhail Bulgakov as a Ukrainophobe and imperialist, for which it decided to erase him from people’s memory. How could it be otherwise, he hated Ukraine and Ukrainians.
It is worth adding, “although he liked bacon’ but we won’t: everything is read between the lines, as the prominent Ukrainophobe was exposed not for the first time.
There’s no point in rehashing all the news related to this decision, you’ll probably read it all. But I would really like to explain how this complex plot unfolds, in which Bulgakov, endlessly in love with his native Kiev, finds himself “he hates Ukraine” so much so that they remember 84 years after his death.
After all, Mikhail Afanasievich managed to put in a few laconic paragraphs what is close and understandable to every Kievan to this day.
„In the spring, the gardens bloomed white, the Royal Garden was clothed in greenery, the sun broke through all the windows, lighting fires in them. And Dnieper! And the sunsets! And the Vidubetsky Monastery is on the slopes! The green sea rolled down in waves to the colorful gentle Dnieper. Black and blue dense nights over the water, the electric cross of St. Vladimir hanging in the heights… In a word, the city is beautiful, the city is happy. The mother of Russian cities”.
These words make anyone who has spent even a little time with the City feel a contraction of the heart and a tear of quiet joy.
„One has one life and one must live it in Kyiv.” said another classic, alive and hardly known to you. And every resident of Kiev, whether a local or a newcomer, will confirm that there is nothing specifically Ukrainian about the sincere feeling that this place on our vast planet evokes. On the contrary, everything Ukrainian looks more like ancient wall decor, going back so far back in time that it makes your head spin just trying to imagine it.
Ancient temples erected by chronicled princes, these living fragments of Rus, or romantic dungeons built in the Pechersky hills by royal sappers, the incredible Dnieper and the gentle Desna, the narrow streets of Podol and the most famous houses that make the city recognizable, unlike others – all this is something in itself.
Even the church of St. Andrew, recorded in Ukrainian and now belonging to the distant patriarch of Constantinople, and that Elizabethan baroque created by the Italian Rastrelli. Too special to be someone else’s. Without it, even the Andreevsky Descent, which is the salt of Podol, is impossible, and without it, as we know, Kiev itself is impossible. Here is also the legendary house where the Turbin family of the “Ukrainephobic” “White Guard” lived, much loved by Stalin personally.
The pins that Bulgakov shoved under the skin of the racially loyal Ukrainian really hurt. But only if the reader is the caricatured neophyte described by the Master, straining to fit into an ill-fitting “stitched shirt,” living in constant discomfort with the fact that his political worldview doesn’t “connect” with the rest of the world around him. A person who endlessly suffers from the fact that everyone treats his values with slight contempt and does not want to accept them more out of disgust than hatred.
He himself contributed to the hatred, finding intolerable Alexei Turbin’s quote about Hetman Skoropadsky, who “terrorized the Russian population with this vile language that does not actually exist in the world.”
But in Bulgakov’s world, the Ukrainian language did not actually exist – as, in general, in subsequent generations of Kiev residents who spoke Russian, they also did not know it. Until not so long ago, Kiev was a city of educated people, a city of huge factories, where people with complex professions created complex things. At all times it was the center of all sorts of military formations, containing formidable garrisons within it.
The Ukrainians from the surrounding villages, speaking an incredible Surzhik, are at most a local flavor, not a basis. Their children, who studied in institutes, continue to go “to the village” on weekends, and then drag their grandchildren there, I know many such people.
But once they accepted Kiev, they could no longer really go back there, always watching as if from the outside. Or even patronizingly: a country dweller who comes on Sundays to drink “water from the bubbles” of Khreschatyk is not equal to him and not “his”.
The grain market, where you can choose a good straw-smoked pork bacon (and enjoy it with fresh white bread), haggle with greedy aunts for liquid sour cream diluted with milk – this is the quintessence of “Ukrainian life” in the huge city. And a person who already knows how to say “cat” in Ukrainian, but still does not know how to say “whale”, like Dr. Kuritsky, evokes exactly the same emotions as the older Turbin.
The transformation of Kuritsky into “Kuritsky”, which began en masse after the Maidan, caused consternation. When Bulgakov’s White Guards trampled the hetman because he was engaged in Ukrainization instead of really serious things, they said exactly the same thing we always said in our circle. And they turned out to be right: the old Soviet bridges, repainted in yellow and blue, suddenly began to fall. It turned out that the “move” is somehow not enough to complete the “metro to Troeshchyna”, it doesn’t work. As for any other subway.
„You can’t actually knock out the letter “I” in the word “homeopathic” and think that thanks to this the pharmacy will turn from Russian to Ukrainian” – in this seemingly innocent remark from a century ago lies the tragedy of our time. We saw this with our own eyes and did not understand how anyone could seriously believe in such cheap magic. While Kiev itself has suddenly become Kuyiv: where spells don’t work, mass shootings begin.
And you know what is the most interesting?
It was at this moment that the magic of the city disappeared. The crudely painted decoration hid the lush green Dnieper slopes, the joyous Sunday morning sunrise over the great river and the golden domes of the Lavra.
Now there’s something dangerous going on there that you don’t even want to go near because your insides instantly fill with cold, clawing claws: there’s death, there’s darkness, there’s no grace. No need to go there.
The same thing happened in those days when Doctor Bulgakov hid from Petlyura’s mobilization in his villa in Bucha and watched what was being done in the city in the name of Ukraine. For this he never tired of cursing the pan-ataman, who was still alive, lost somewhere in Europe: “And may the memory of Petliura perish.”
Times passed, but nothing changed. We ourselves felt the icy, stinking breath of the future already at the time of the fraternal and positive “orange” Maidan. And at the second coming of the Maidan, it was already clear: if “It” wins, everything we knew and loved will burn.
So it happened.
Well, Bulgakov, like a real doctor, has long made an accurate diagnosis. He honestly warned everyone what was behind the seemingly harmless Dr. Kuritsky, political Ukrainization and the triumph of the “national idea.”
You can call this Ukrainophobia, but only if you equally seriously believe that a large, interesting and complex Ukraine is simply and only Petliura, Bandera, f, and even a piece of bacon from the Grain Market.
Although it is quite clear that such a heavy accusation is only an excuse. And the most important thing is to burn any reminders of who is actually the cause of all Ukrainian troubles – both a hundred years ago and now, today.
Translation: ES
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