A sunset in kyiv

2022-04-22T04:22:22.511Z

Just six months ago he was enjoying the views from an elegant terrace in the Ukrainian capital: the war has turned the catalog of his sybaritisms into a wreck of yesterday's world

Located in the center of Kiev, the Avalon Complex offered all the complications that the contemporary vanity could require, from the tanning salon to the

spa

and from the sushi bar to fine cocktails or

karaoke .

In that mixed paella of pleasures, however, only one had given him his prestige: a terrace with views—truly splendid—at sunset.

It was certainly not the only watchtower in the city: kyiv likes to look at itself, and rare will be the roof that does not open a perspective to see the onion domes of its monasteries or the flow of its river in full majesty.

But the love of the Kievites for the contemplation of the sunset had—has—justifications that go beyond seeking the cool of the day in the summer: the literary historian Paul Fussell speaks of the rare quality of the twilight in plain areas such as precisely the one in kyiv.

Fussell specifically cites the astonishment of the soldiers, inside the trenches of the Great War, before that spectacle of celestial rocketry that, for lack of other consolations,

it was given to them with each sunset and each sunrise.

But there are places, I don't know who said it anymore, that the angel of history seems to have arranged as a battlefield.

And today the blood curdles at the thought of the twinning in tears of the Ukrainian plain with that other "dark plain" of Waterloo two centuries ago or the "painful and blurred" plain of the Pas de Calais only one century ago.

In a beautiful poem about the war of 14, John McCrae makes dead soldiers speak.

And that is what they remember: "We felt the sunrise, we saw the brightness of the sunset."

In a beautiful poem about the war of 14, John McCrae makes dead soldiers speak.

And that is what they remember: "We felt the sunrise, we saw the brightness of the sunset."

In a beautiful poem about the war of 14, John McCrae makes dead soldiers speak.

And that is what they remember: "We felt the sunrise, we saw the brightness of the sunset."

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Last minute of the war in Ukraine, live

Barely six months have passed since, like so many, I signed up to see the end of the day at the Avalon Complex: in just half a year, the war has turned the catalog of its sybaritisms into a wreck of yesterday's world.

And some Petronio will have to find the ostentatious place, emphatic as a revenge, but if I like to remember that light Ukraine, that Ukraine that came out and laughed, it is also because of what it had as revenge, of emancipation from the fatalities of history.

By stating that, until yesterday, the joys and worries of the Ukrainians were like those of any advanced Western nation, we are celebrating what the country had achieved in its three decades of independence: to separate its name from the tragedy.

Yes, Ukraine could turn the mute on Zagajewski and rightly claim that "no country suffered more than us."

These two months of Russian invasion have served us to reread the catalog of Ukrainian suffering from the 1900s to this part: civil and world wars, dictatorships, famines, purges, nuclear accidents, holocausts.

It is striking, however, that among Ukraine's pains we have barely weighed those after independence.

mass emigration.

hyperinflationary periods.

Some liberalizations that meant the change of public inefficiency for public-private corruption.

According to Serhii Plokhy, reading from those days in kyiv, between 1991 and 1997, the country was going to lose 60% of its national wealth: in the Great Depression, the US lost 30%.

Faced with those who justify Putin's irredentism with appeals to Kievan Rus, the terrace of the Avalon overlooked some of the holy places of Ukrainian identity: the Opera House that did so much for its language, the cathedral - museum of atheism in Soviet times - which attests to the tensions with Moscow.

But the success of contemporary Ukraine has been precisely moving away from the imposition of nationalism on its own to offer them citizenship: a country project capable of integrating, with problems but also with results, different ethnic groups, languages, creeds and regions.

It is the complete opposite of the monolithism according to which places where Russian is spoken and where people pray in an Orthodox church should pay tribute to Russia.

In the Orange Revolution of 2004 or in the Euromaidan of 2014,

the Ukrainians were determined to maintain the autonomy of their project.

They did so with solitary dignity, knowing, as has been shown, that no one was going to share the price paid for their freedom, from Crimea in 2014 to Mariupol in 2022. In the midst of disenchantment with the euro crisis, Seeing the Ukrainians with EU flags had quite a lesson from “the other Europe” —Milosz's expression— to ours.

That day in Avalon we saw how a boy proposed to a girl: it was a beautiful scene, in the middle of the kyiv sunset, with a ring and tears of emotion and some waiters who were quick to bring the sparkling wine.

We couldn't help but join in the toast: even the most zealous defender of singleness will recognize in marriage a beauty as human as the hunger for the future.

These days I have wondered many times about these young Ukrainians, then citizens of a free country, committed —literally— to months, just weeks, of a war.

And I have been reminded of what Herbert writes when Jaruzelski dissolved Solidarity: that whatever happens, their dreams would not be humiliated.