See, people always expect us, philologists, to write elaborate posts with lots of bookish references and philosophical iterations, because it’s our job. To describe, to find proper words, to put them together in a clear and (more or less) sophisticated way.
Today I can barely put a string of one or two sentences together in all the languages I know: I am simply out of them all. Everything that’s happening right now is horror that I, a scholar of horror studies, could never even fathom to imagine: none of the chthonic monsters could ever go closer to the main one, the monster of war.
Like many former Soviets, I have a mildly diverse background—Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish; nothing specifically peculiar about that. But today I feel like I, a person living my secluded and very modest life, was completely torn apart.
My Mum, who was half Russian/half Ukrainian, is buried in Zaporizhzhya. And so is my Babushka and my Dedushka, who was a true local to the area, a real Zaporoz’ky kossak. People who helped me to take care of him for the last years of his life—and who prolonged his life significantly—are not only personal friends of mine. They are now members of my family, and today I was in contact with them throughout all the day (I hate to sound even remotely dramatic, but their shock and disbelief were indescribable and so was mine).
My school classmates, my uni pals, my professors and lecturers—they all are in Zaporizhzhya right now, and the only one thing I can do for them (apart from money, of course) is to pray for their safety.
War is a bitch: it goes with death and mass destruction. May those who started it rot in hell. My Ukrainian friends, I’m with you. My Russian friends: I know for a fact that you hate the ongoing horrendous havoc as much as I do. Right now I don’t have any hope for a quick reconciliation and recovery. I’m lost in darkness. But I have a tiny hope that our collective remaining humanity will help us not to lose our minds completely. And one day despair will end.
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