Timothy Snyder: The Making of Modern Ukraine. Class 22. Ukrainian Ideas in the 21st Century

(somber music) - Alright, we're nearing the end. There is a conference that will deal with culture in a very broad sense. And then the next conference, which will be a kind of review of the

ideas

of empire and Europe. You may find that both lectures will help you reflect on some of the main topics in the class as you prepare for the exam. Because I understand that as Yale students, you would prefer not to be in class, but rather study for the exam, and I'm here to tell you that you can do both at the same time, right?

Especially the exam essay questions give you a lot of space to think and argue, right? Think and argue. And so, in these last two lectures, we will primarily do interpretation. So this conference is about culture. I'm not going to try to define what a culture is. We have the entire anthropology department for that, but what I have in mind here is the very broad notion of, say, a set of notions of the self, a set of mutually reinforcing notions of what a people might be. So, as for Ukrainian culture here, I'm not going to have time to go into, with a few exceptions, the details of Ukrainian literature and Ukrainian poetry.

What primarily concerns me is the notion of people. So I'll go back, if you remember, to September, in the first two lectures, when I tried to specify that the

modern

legal notion of genocide is based on the equally

modern

notion of a people or a nation. , and that these two things are in a kind of uneasy relationship with each other. And as we complete this course during a war, which certainly has genocidal aspects, it is worth thinking about that relationship. So the 1948 Genocide Convention assumes that there is a people, right? There is supposed to be a society that has a top and a bottom, that has some path, that has some kind of border where people enter or leave.

So the convention recognizes people before the law presuming that they exist. You can think of the act of genocide as a different kind of recognition, right? Something is not destroyed if it does not exist. You don't seek to destroy something if it doesn't exist. But the slightly complicated part about this is that very often, the act of destroying people begins with the explicit verbal denial of their existence, right? So one of the most important points that I want to try to make in this lecture, perhaps the most important point, is that Ukrainian culture, the notion of what Ukraine is, where it begins and where it ends, cannot really be done outside from Ukraine. of this broader notion of encounter.

It really can't be done outside of the notion of an encounter with the Russian Empire, with the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia. Now, as I try to make this argument, I want to make clear something very specific about this encounter, something that makes it a little different from the other encounters we've talked about in this class, which is that this is an encounter. who denies that it is occurring. Well. This is like, I'm sure you've all had moments like this in your lives, right? Maybe on a Saturday night, meetings where, well, that was like very low, very low, very fast (students laughing) very early at a very important point.

Alright. But there is a certain strangeness to an encounter, or there is this, let me say it, there is a specificity to an encounter in which one of the parties denies that an encounter is actually taking place. A third party watching will say, "Well, yes, the encounter is happening," but nevertheless, there is something specific about this. So, as a way to begin, I want you to remember that moment in the third quarter of the 19th

century

in the Russian Empire where the existence of the Ukrainian language was denied. It's something very specific, right? Going to great lengths to deny that something exists is a very specific form of action.

The Valuev decree of 1863 includes the famous passage that I quote now: "The Ukrainian language never existed, does not exist and will never exist," right? So, or as we say in Ukrainian, Української мови ніколи не було, нема, не буде Right? Then I do not know. That was kind of a joke. But there's something very specific that happens here when an encounter is denied, right? So if it never existed, why would you refer to it, right? If it doesn't exist now, why do they ban it? But perhaps most interesting is the claim that it will never exist. It will never exist. There's a very specific type of omniscience when I claim that something won't happen, right?

I am denying the basic unpredictability, or at least, the contingency of everything that is going to happen after I issue this decree. In other words, this decree is doing a very specific type of work. The relationship between the emerging Russian imperial culture and the Ukrainian culture, which existed at that time, is taking a very specific form. Because of course it's not as logically contradictory or silly as perhaps I'm suggesting, the idea that Ukrainian culture or language doesn't exist means that its existence can only be described as part of Russian culture, right? So it's not that it doesn't exist, it's not that there's nothing there, but it can only be described as existing as part of something else, right?

And so when I say that you don't exist, what I'm really doing is saying that I do exist, right? So there's a fancy term for this, which is like Constitutive Other, which you can write down and use to impress your friends. But the idea that you don't exist is how I show that I do exist. What you are doing has no character of its own. It's a version of what I'm doing, right? And so there is something very specific that is happening here, whereby Russian culture, as it emerges, is defined not exactly against Ukrainian culture, but somehow over and above Ukrainian culture.

Everything that looks Ukrainian is actually Russian, and anyone who denies this will be eliminated from history. So this is where the categorical part that it will never exist comes into play. So this class has been about encounters, a basic argument about the nation in this class has been that no nation arises from nothing, right? That's why all the founding stories are so implausible, like the one about the lady and the snake, and the one about the boy. The founding stories are all really far-fetched, right? They're funny, they're silly, they don't make any sense. All stories of ethnogenesis, including those involving aliens, are all implausible, right?

There is always some meeting. And the entire argument in this class about how something specific arose in the land that is now Ukraine involves the Khazars, the Vikings, the Byzantines, the Slavs, the Lithuanians, and the Poles. And, of course, it also heavily involves the Russians and the Soviet Union. But there is something very specific that is happening between the 19th and

21st

centuries, where this encounter has an ideological quality that the others do not have. Or in the Polish case, I would say, not anymore, not anymore, but in Russia clearly yes. So, in order to see this and perhaps get out of it, we have to look at some trajectories in the Russian encounter with Ukraine, not from the point of view of how a Russian national ideology would see them, but just to notice what this encounter looks like, TRUE?

So this is something so special, this is something special in general. There have been many European empires, right? But all of them have the characteristic, and write this down because it is important, of starting in Europe except one. You see, what is very different about the Russian Empire is that it becomes an empire upon entering Europe, right? Going to Europe. The Russian Empire became the Russian Empire in 1721, having passed from Asia to Europe as a result of the cataclysm of 1648 onwards. Remember that, and then there was that whole conference about the 18th

century

and the collapse of Poland-Lithuania, the collapse of the Cossack states, the collapse of the Crimean Tatar state, all those things that happened in the 18th century, leaving Russia in Europe. .

But it's not a European empire that went abroad, right? It is a state that was centered on the edge of Europe in this relatively new city called Moscow, which first headed south and east, and then its final stage of development was towards Europe. And the ambivalence of the relationship with kyiv is built into that. Because, on the one hand, you become European by claiming kyiv, right? Because kyiv has all those European things you might want. It has the ancient baptism, it has the history of northern Europe, it has the Renaissance, it has the Baroque, it has all the European references.

It's just that he's older than you. And by a lot I mean five centuries, right? kyiv is four or five centuries older than Moscow. It's a millennium older than St. Petersburg, right? That's a lot. So the ambiguity is that one becomes European if he goes to kyiv. But since you are the empire, you cannot recognize that the periphery is better than you. So this tension is built in from the beginning. On the one hand, we are European because kyiv, but on the other hand, the people around kyiv have to be the periphery and are therefore inferior.

That tension builds up from the moment kyiv, Chernihiv and these places enter the Russian Empire, and it's still very much present today, right? So the Russian Empire in front of Ukraine is simultaneously inferior and superior at the same time, right? It's superior because it's big and powerful and it's the empire, but it's also inferior because this is the place that really allows us to become European, right? This is the place that allows us to become Europeans, but we can never say that. You can never say that out loud, can you? So there is a deep tension inherent in all of this.

Well. So part of it is timing, right? Another part of this has to do with an encounter in religion. There probably hasn't been enough religious history in this class, and it is an important element of Ukrainian history, in particular, the difference between Ukraine and Russia, not only because there is a Greek Catholic church in Ukraine and not in Russia, not only because church involvement is much greater in Ukraine than in Russia, but perhaps mainly because in Ukraine there is no clear relationship between church and state like there is in Moscow, both currently and historically. For many centuries, the relationship between Church and State, including the last 30 years in the lands of Ukraine, has been difficult and unequal.

The church has been repressed by the state. It has been part of the State, but it has never been perfectly interwoven with the State, and that is an important difference. But from Moscow's point of view, curious things happen that I mentioned in the 17th century, but it is a very important example of this dialectic. The Russian Orthodox Church, as it is, and I am now leaning heavily on a dissertation by the wonderful Yale PhD graduate Ievgeniia Sakal, the Russian Orthodox Church, as it is, takes its own form and its own narrative. of what a meeting with Ukraine is.

So if you remember back to the 18th century, when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth collapsed, there were all these educated clerics in places like kyiv and Chernihiv and they had been having debates with each other, and they had been having debates with the Catholics and the Protestants. They have been besieged by the Counter-Reformation. They have been dealing with the Jesuits for decades. They are very learned men and, suddenly, they are faced with this new situation in which there is no longer to deal with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, there is no longer to deal with the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, all that no longer exists, but There are these guys in Moscow, and suddenly they are subordinate to them.

So what is the story you tell? There's a political story, I'll come back to that, but there's also a religious dispute taking place. And then this religious dispute, the Moscow authorities and the Ukrainian authorities have different

ideas

. And the Moscow authorities have the power. The Ukrainian authorities have arguments. But what happens over time, and this is all about to be a general truth, the people in power will eventually discover the arguments and eventually use them. Thus, in the space of a generation, the ecclesiastical authorities in Moscow are also using the same sources and the same type of arguments as the ecclesiastical authorities in Ukraine.

In other words, the ecclesiastical authorities in Moscow, across Ukraine, start reading French and Latin, and start borrowing the arguments of Western theologians, and start disputing and doing all the things that Ukrainians are doing. , and what they come up with is this interesting statement. They claim, well, that the reason we are different, and we are right on theological issues, is that we, the Russian Orthodox Church, are basically the unbroken continuation of the Byzantine church and that nothing has actually happened. It is just a placid set of non-events. "We are pure." Good? And this is, if you know anything about Western Orthodoxy, this is the story to this day, right?

That it is not, basically, a non-historical institution, but this argument that it is a non-historical institution arises as a result of the historical encounter with Ukraine, very similar to the political point that I raised in the conferences a couple of weeks ago. The idea that kyiv and Moscow are somehow connected, organically connected, that Moscow is realized in kyiv and vice versa. And all this, that is also an argument that Ukrainian churchmen made at the end of the 17th century in the face of a new position of can,TRUE? And as you may remember, it's a pretty smart argument, at least in the short term.

If you are in kyiv and suddenly you are ruled by Moscow, you argue: "Hey, you and Moscow, actually everything came from us in kyiv. Therefore, we are very important." or two, that argument will backfire and become something much more like how kyiv plays out in Moscow. It all started in kyiv, but everything is fulfilled in Moscow. And now, kyiv's role will be. subordinate to Moscow. But the point is, that whole argument never arises without Ukraine, right? So all of these important steps in the history of what will become Russian culture are deeply and organically connected to Ukraine, right? a literature.

Who is the first important Russian writer besides Pushkin? -Yes, who is he? - Ukraine. - As everyone knows, right? This Ukrainian Gogol is the turning point where bilingualism stops being Ukrainian-Polish and becomes Ukrainian-Russian, right? From the point of view of the 20th or

21st

century, one might think: "Well, Ukrainians and Russians have always been together, blah." No. Ukrainian-Polish was the normal situation for a bilingual character for a long time. In the 19th century, Ukrainian Russians start to become normal, and there are these Ukrainians who write in Russian. If you don't know Gogol, by the way, after the exams, I know, but you might want to start reading some of his stories.

If you like the grotesque, if you like things like Edgar Allen Poe or Kafka, it's something really extraordinary and wonderful. But the cliché is that we all come out from under Gogol's coat, which is a play on words because like a coat, but also, "The Coat" is one of Gogol's most important stories, one of the funniest and most important of the. But Russian literature emerges from this Ukrainian history, right? So at all these levels, we have the same problem. Another is that of the educated elites. Again, in the 20th century there are very impressive Soviet educational institutions.

And in the 19th and early 20th centuries, so did the Russian imperials. But when these two societies merge, the Kyiv-Mohyla and kyiv Academy are much more important than any educational institution in the Russian Empire. And so, during the 18th century, graduates of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy flooded Petersburg, which is the capital after 1721, with the educated elites who help govern the empire, right? So in all these senses, Ukraine is what it takes to make a Russian self-affirmation, but that Russian self-affirmation has to deny its own sources, right? He has to deny his own sources, or else he will appear incomplete.

Something similar happens at the level of history where Russian history, as I just described it, has to be a story about political legitimacy, right? And again, an extreme version of this can be seen in Putin today, where Russia exists and has the right to rule because of her baptism in kyiv in 988. Nothing that has happened between then and now really matters. What you have is an unshakeable right to rule as a result of some sort of metaphysical event that occurred long ago. It's a version of, I mean, it's actually very similar and it's a version of these medieval or early modern stories where a family says, "By the way, we are descended from wolves, and not from just any wolves, but from those who founded Rome," or whatever, right?

I think it's some kind of Habsburg joke. But when there are families, in families, there are families, it is possible that you know this. Families have this kind of, probably your family tells you this story, like you have this great uncle, he really invented the airplane. If you let the families go on like this, eventually they all come, they're descendants of some king or whatever. I'm

making

a serious point, or trying to, and that is that the story begins with a genealogy that legitimizes eternal power, right? So, if you are a family, you have problems maintaining power, getting power, not so difficult, blood and treasure.

Maintaining power is difficult, and that requires some kind of legitimizing ideology, and the idea that you are going to maintain power forever in the future makes more sense if you can explain why you have had power or should have had power forever in the future. . past, so there's some kind of story about how, what, where you came from, right? So a lineage of power, and that's where political history comes from, okay. So if you're in the 19th century and it's Ukraine, the move you have to make is to counter political history with social history, and that's Hrushevsky, right?

That's Mykhailo Hrushevsky. Then you say, "No. History isn't just about some kind of legitimizing story that makes sense to the people in power. It's about real continuities in culture." Good? That story is about people, okay. Then you get into this conversation, which continues to this day, where if I say, "History isn't about power, it's about people." Well. At first glance, this might seem like a question of justice. But the obvious question is: who are the people then? Are the Jews the people? Are the Poles the people? Are all those on the ground the people? Or is it just the people who know, if history is about songs, stories and language, what about the people who don't know the songs, stories and language, but live in the same territory, right?

So this is where it starts in Ukraine, but not only in Ukraine. It's just that Ukraine is a very interesting and clear case of this. And Ukraine starts this, excuse me, like this dialectic where none of these positions are, can be exactly correct, right? The idea that history is about people is appealing, right? But if we take it to an extreme that makes history focus solely on ethnicity and becomes ethnic nationalism, then there is a counterargument that says: "No, the people are defined by action. The nation is a daily plebiscite." . And so it doesn't matter if they're Jewish, German, Polish or whatever, it's about participation, cooperation and things like that.

That is the political nation. But if we take it to this extreme, then everything is politics. Why can't I make concessions with some other nation? Maybe I can accept money from this guy here. What's wrong with that? It's all part of my political being. And this is the political nation, right? Therefore, none of these positions can be entirely correct, at least taken to the extreme. They are in some type of communication with each other all the time, and that discussion continues today. It has to do in part with the Jews, the Jews in Ukrainian history, which is an example of culture that we should spend at least a moment on.

The Jews of Ukraine are there because of the currents of Polish history. Ukrainian Jews become imperial Russian subjects after Ukraine ceases to be part of Poland. Ukrainian Jews saw throughout the 19th century their traditional way of life essentially crumble as a result of military conscription and other things. And the Jews of Ukraine, or some of them at the end of the 19th century, built a kind of modern Yiddish literature. The most important example of this, which you may have heard of, if you come from these traditions, is all of Sholem Aleichem. Sholem Aleichem is basically, and now, I'm stealing the idea from my colleague, Amelia Glaser. but what Sholem Aleichem is basically doing is bringing Gogol and his portraits to the Ukrainian countryside,

making

them friendlier and putting the Jews at the center of the conversation, whereas Gogol, in the early 19th century, was very concerned with making provisions mystical -beliefs of the Enlightenment and their incorporation into modern literature.

What Sholem Aleichem was doing was adopting the Yiddish language. That is important. He is writing Yiddish. Literature in the Yiddish language and its use. Yiddish, which is an ancient language and recently a literary language, takes Yiddish and uses it to write about the problems of modernity. And what are the problems of modernity? The problems of modernity are socialism, romantic love, right? So the position in Tevye the Dairyman is that she has these daughters, and you know this, “Fiddler on the Roof,” right? "Fiddler on the Roof", right. So it's the problems of modernity from the point of view of a Jewish parent, basically, right?

And the girls, all the daughters, they all have some, they all do something unexpected, but every single thing they do represents modernity, like socialism, rejection of the church, but even romantic love itself is a modern idea. here. Well. So that's what Jews are like, if you're going to talk about culture in Ukraine, Jews and Jewish history have to be part of it, and that includes the widespread destruction of Jewish culture in the first place, not the second. But World War I, when Jews from Western Russia were deported, was one of the causes of the pogroms that occurred most intensely in Ukraine during the war.

We also have to talk about the assimilation of Jews in Ukraine to the Russian language before, but especially after the Bolshevik Revolution. And then in Ukraine in particular, and I refer very briefly to the material that you have read and that we have talked about, but the mass murder of the majority of Jews in Ukraine during the Holocaust. And after that, the return of the Jews, no, return is the wrong word, but the immigration or movement of Jews from other parts of the Soviet Union to what is now Ukraine. So Ukraine is now one of the most important Jewish countries in the world, numerically speaking.

It is one of the few countries, you can count them on one hand, that has a Jewish president. It is the only country in the world that will ever, now I'm going to make a prediction, ever have a Jewish president elected by 70% or more of the vote. I don't think that will ever happen, because it won't happen in Israel because there are always two candidates, right? So it's hard, see? I'm cheating. I'm using math. But this Ukrainian Jewish culture is a post-war, second, third, and fourth generation Ukrainian culture, but it's clearly part of what one might consider a political nation, right?

So the greatest, again, we are now in a situation where the greatest Ukrainian warlord in history is a Jew, which shows that God is Jewish and has a sense of humor. (students laughing) In the Soviet Union, there is a version, and we have talked about this, of how Ukraine becomes the Constitutive Other. The Soviet Union needs things from Ukraine. The Soviet Union needs Ukraine to be a nation, but then not to be a nation, right? This is what Ukraine needs. So Ukraine, Stalin, Lenin, know that Ukraine is a nation. They need Ukraine. They want as much Europe as they can, but they have to settle for Ukraine.

They need Ukraine to be a nation, but they also need it to not be a threat, and that is the dialectic of the 1920s and 1930s, where the Ukrainian nation, Ukrainian literature, and the Ukrainian people are educated. The literature receives support for a while and then breaks down in the early 1930s. Similarly, the Ukrainian economy has to exist and not exist. The Soviet Union needs the Ukrainian economy because, and this is a topic that literally goes back to a lot of things, people say, "Let's go back to the ancient Greeks," but mostly, we're just having fun.

In this case, it really goes back to the ancient Greeks. Ukraine is a barn, right? Athens depends on the grain of what is now Ukraine, just as the Soviet Union depended on the grain of what is now Ukraine. It's a bread basket. That's why they need the economy, but they don't want it to be the Ukrainian economy. It has to be part of a bigger project, right? If they had let the Ukrainian peasants simply grow the grain, they would have obtained higher yields than agriculture had not raised. But collective farming meant that everything was under control, and the Soviet Union would be in charge of distribution and exports, right?

So the Ukrainian economy has to exist and it doesn't have to exist, which is a very short way of referring to something we've talked about before, which is the death of about 4 million people in Soviet Ukraine during the 1930s. Something similar can be said of Ukrainian culture after World War II. And again, now I'm going over a topic. So we need it, but we don't need it. And this is what we needed during World War II, now we are the Politburo, right? We are Stalin. We need Ukraine because the war is being fought in Ukraine. And then, we will talk about the Ukrainian nation.

We will even talk about Bohdan Khmelnytsky as a hero as the war continues. When the war is over, all this will change. With Zhdanov, all this will change. Ukraine is going to be suspicious. The Western Soviet Union is going to be suspicious. And then Khrushchev will find this brilliant solution. And I mean, I don't say that ironically, and politically he's been very powerful. If you need the Ukrainian nation, you need the Ukrainian culture, but you don't need it either. What do you do for a living? You say it's real, but its reality is expressed in its merger with Russia into something bigger, right?

And then, the brilliance of this movement in 1954, remember, 1954, was when they handed out cigarettes, like millions of packs ofpolitical without being completely political, right? So his story about the gay club is a good example of that. Anyway, this eastern anchor point is very important because some people were doing it all the time, but then in 2014 on Maidan there was a turning point where important figures in Ukrainian culture realized that They were no longer welcome in Russia and they sort of folded. One of them was someone named Svyatoslav "Slava" Vakarchuk, who is the lead singer of Okean Elzy, which is the biggest rock band.

Traditionally, a large number of followers in Belarus andRussia. After 2014, this became uncomfortable. Another was the comedian and writer Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who until 2014 had a large following, a great career in Russia and appears on Russian television until, I think, early 2000s, maybe late 2013, early 2014, but then he realizes . something has changed, right? So this is a turning point for a lot of people. And then in 2022 we reach a more dramatic turning point, an extremely dramatic turning point and where things are happening so quickly and violently that it is difficult to characterize what is happening, but a dramatic example of this is the writer Volodymyr .

Rafeienko, who was here at Yale a couple of weeks ago. Volodymyr Rafeienko, who wrote only in Russia, who didn't even know Ukrainian, which is unusual, and who stopped communicating in Russian completely with this war and is now a writer in the Ukrainian language, which is not an easy thing to do, It is not an easy task. Things to Do. It's something extraordinary that you're doing. He said something very interesting when he was at Yale. He said, "We don't choose the language. The language chooses us." And it's a strange kind of freedom, that has depth, there is depth to that.

What's that? - You don't master the language. - Yes, it's not like that, is it? Yes. "You don't dominate the language, the language dominates you." Good. "You don't dominate the language, the language dominates you." Yes. Не ти володієш мовою, мова оволодіває тобою So another example of this would be another writer who just went to Yale, Stanislav Aseyev, also of totally Russian origin, a writer now in Ukrainian, and a Ukrainian writer whose most recent book deals about torture, and it's actually some of the best prison writing that's ever been produced, I think in Eastern Europe or maybe anywhere else. So the last point I want to make about culture is that we're looking for, well, two more points, let me.

We are facing a new centrality of kyiv, a kyiv is something that has not existed before. It is a kyiv that is affirming itself as the European capital and that is something new. kyiv has been many things, but a European capital among other European capitals in the modern sense is new, and a proud kyiv is something new. And I'm going to read a poem by Stus, which is about Soviet kyiv, and you'll see why I'm doing this. It's "kyiv of a Thousand Years," and this is from, translated by Bohdan Tokarskyi and Uilleam Blacker. "The kyiv of a thousand years, he imagined feeling young again.

Suddenly kyiv became aware of the hotels, the trolleybuses, the trams and trains, the Paton Bridge, the ungainly buildings of Khreshchatyk. kyiv licked the rough asphalt with its pagan language, the slopes of the Green Theater were invaded by martens, squirrels, aurochs and the roaring pagan laughter of the god Yarylo drove the waves of the Dnipro, coughing asthmatically, through the subway air currents, the electric trains rattled frighteningly like a dozen layers of white soil, of human bones, horse skulls and gray ashes from funeral pyres, wavy like the skull of an angry bull, Kiev struggled but then gave up, how on earth to erect all this set of new buildings, avenues, highways, and the majestic unborn wombs of the inhabitants?

May the sacred forces bring you down, the pagan kyiv cursed, but then he saw a group of pioneers and, ashamed, bowed his head without saying anything. Pioneers, you have to know. Pioneers means communist youth group, right? Then Kyiv finally submits. That kyiv no longer exists, right? The people who are now in charge of the government in kyiv, the people who are now in charge of culture in kyiv are from a different generation that is not just post-Soviet or anti-Soviet, it's just something else. And the last point I wanted to make is that, although it is too early to evaluate what this war means for culture, one of the most surprising things about this war is the production of culture within it.

Other people have noted that this is the most recorded war of all time, which is true. I would like to point out that this act of recording by a journalist is also an act of culture, which requires taking bodily risks as well as intellect, but what happens is culture itself. I don't want to sound too romantic or pathetic about it, but down to the trenches, right? I have colleagues who still give their lectures from where they are, right in the trenches, and the production of poetry and other forms of culture continues. So I'm just going to read you one more poem.

Please indulge me. This is from Yuliya Musakovska, a mother who works in IT. She wrote this at the end of March 2022 for her collection, which is published under the title "Iron." Her poem goes like this, this is March. "Poems so problematic, so gruesome, full of anger, so politically incorrect. There is no beauty in these poems, there is nothing aesthetic at all. The metaphors withered and shattered before they could blossom. The metaphors buried in the parks children under hastily erected crosses, dead in unnatural poses next to the doors of houses covered in dust. They prepared food over a bonfire.

They tried to survive from dehydration and died under the rubble, with colorful backpacks on their shoulders, lying face down on the asphalt. along with the dogs and the cats. I'm sorry to say, but those verses are all we have for you, dear ladies and gentlemen, theater viewers (somber music)