Ukraine, a family and three wars, in the Kyiv of Kostoukovitch “The story slams the head on the steps”

The “game of the world” – nine squares willing to file three designed on the sidewalk in front of the house in which the author was born and lived as a child – triggers the vertigo of which Master Umberto Eco, which Kostioukovitch translated into Russian, starting from “The name of the rose” in Samizdat before the publication of the book was authorized in the Soviet Union.

Kostoukovitch jumps from one era to another and in the city, going back and forth between great -grandparents – three killed in the same way, with a bullet to the neck, one from the hagkets of Stalin the other two from those of Hitler in the Fie di Babyn Yar- The grandfather Leonid Volynsky and the grandmother Yara, graduated in piano at the Conservatory and engineer who in the agener of 1941 Take one of the last trains departing from Kyiv, saving herself with her daughter Vera, mother of the author, and the mother -in -law, Liza, by the Nazis who will enter the city undisturbed a few days later. In his wandering through the city, he meets among others, “when the history of Ukraine’s independence began just to glimpse”, the imperator Maria Feodorovna, who from Palazzo Mariinsky – now residence of the president – tries to prevent his son, the Tsar Nicola II, to abdicate and Mikhail Bulgakov, whose imperial use of the Russian language the author unusual.

“The story rolls down for the centuries, banging the head on the steps. Ancient portals and arches, multicolored glass and swings for children hurling in the air with strawberry light in the dazzling fire of the fires. Habit and traditions jump, the balance of politics jump, go to be bless the boundaries between the normal and the impossible. The world no longer returns as before”, writes Kostioukovitch in the prologue.

There are also in Kyiv the author as a child, when she still lived in the city, in the apartment that the family had lived for some time, before moving to Moscow and then in Milan, where since 1987 she has lived and works, as a translator, author and literary agent. And the daughter of an imagined woman who had moved there later. That lived there when the Russian invasion begins on February 24, 2022, and which dies fooled in front of the entrance, right on the game of the world, two days later, for the injuries sustained in an explosion. “As my mother true could have happened to my daughter or me”.

The three squares that represent as many eras, the First World War and the years of independence, the Second World War and the Third War, are declined in the city in a swirling intertwining that gives sense to the news with which everyone is called to deal since 2014, every day since February 2022, but which is now in risk, if not accompanied, to give way to narrative without foundation.

The beginning is the word. A ten -year -old girl who, in the Soviet Union in the 1960s, listens to the grandfather. At the park that then had the name of General Nikolai Vatutin, Volynsky “shared some facts of his past with me and began to instill the sense of history and the habit not to trust official versions”.

To please Stalin and his desire to resume Kyiv control within the anniversary of the October Revolution, on November 7, 1943, between the end of October and the beginning of November of that year, Vatutin had ordered 50 thousand soldiers to cross the river in the middle under the fire of the German machine guns. In the forcing of Dnipro, “fifty thousand people entered, between six and the ten thousand came out on the opposite bank”. Only on the occasion of the anniversary of the beginning of another war, in February 2023, the “bloodthirsty general (the statue of Vatutin, editor’s note) was finally removed from the park of my childhood”. “Who expected the war conducted precisely in this way would be repeated after 2022 by the Russian army of Putin? After all the events of Bakhmut, Avdiyvka and Marynka seem to really be a theatrical re -enactment of the crossing of DNIPRO in 1943”.

The tragedy of the Soviet troops abandoned by their commanders and their government in the ‘Kyiv bag’ in the summer of 1941, after the start of the Nazi virgin of Ukraine, with a million Soviet soldiers who “ended up in the trap”, including Volynsky, also excluded from the official versions.

The scenographer, painter and art historian, relative of ‘enemies of the people’ and former prisoner of war, miraculously reinstated in the Soviet military forces when, who had been trapped in the territory left to the Nazis, the Gulag or the shooting were instead reserved, the author in May 1945 of the recovery of the ‘Madonna Sistina’ of Raffaello hidden by the soldiers of the Reich, speaks to his nephew, He is small but he understands what one could not yet say (and which in Russia again is struggling to speak). “That day, on the panoramic terrace, I listened carefully, warning that his idea was to transmit something forbidden and dangerous to me in our USSR who forced everyone to live with his mouth sewn and the ears stopped”. “Still in the sixties in the USSR we could not speak of German imprisonment”.

“The stories of Kyiv, the city where I was born, are dramatic stories. If I look backwards to connect today’s situation with the past, on the basis of books and documents, using the stories of my family, I realize that the transition from one era to another can be represented in some places of Kyiv as on a theatrical stage. It will always be illuminated by great lights and lights. Kostioukovitch.

The primary gash of the official truth triggers many others. The story continues with the great -grandfather Hersh Konstantinovsky, who already lived in that same house of Kyiv, railway engineer, but victim of the Stalinian terror that accuses him of having depended on the basis of the maintenance of the building structures in order to make them collapse, instead “remained standing up to the invasion of the Russian Federation in Ukraine”. Of Konstantinovsky it was possible to reconstruct history. Because in Ukraine the archives that instead in Russia are still closed to researchers have been gradually reopened. It was so possible for Kostoukovitch, returned to Kyiv after an absence of decades, request the great -grandfather’s file and learn, in 2017, which had been shot on February 16, 1938 at 24, two months after the arrest, on December 31, 1937, and rehabilitated in 1957. Pinzato at the sheet with the signing of the head of the platoon of execution, the ban on spreading, even after rehabilitation, even after rehabilitation, even after rehabilitation, even after rehabilitation, “The correct date and circumstances of the death of the accused”.

In Kyiv there is also talk of Bulgakov and the real characters who inspired his stories, of how the writer, son of a teacher of history of the Orthodox religious originally from the Russian province and transferred to the city where he was rejected by the local elites, transfigured them to replicate culture, but above all the pure Russian language, dominant on Ukraine. Bulgakov’s story crosses that of Volynsky who, together with the family friend Viktor Nekrasov, in the sixties discovered the writer’s Kyivian house, now a pilgrimage destination, and begins to reconstruct its Ukrainian history, stopping before arriving at the truth, unpronounceable in that period, of arrest and killing in 1919 by the Bolshevios Listovnichy, Ukrainian intellectual heavily mistreated by Bulgakov in his work. “It is paradoxical (and it causes in me a mixture of despair and anger) that it was Bulgakov, with” The White Guard “that legitimized the attitude of disgust and contempt of the Russian against everything he had to do with the Ukrainian language”.

“The famous XX Congress recognized that Stalin was a executioner and a bandit – well; but what concerned the struggle of supporters of the Ukrainian nation state remained covered by the seven seals, could not be appointed and it didn’t matter that there was the ‘derive’ or not”, underlines the author. The recent reconstruction of the history of Bulgakov by the scholar Oksana Zabuzhko “managed to upset my ideas on many things: on Listovnichy, on Mikhail Bulgakov as a man and writer and, more generally on the whole cultural environment in which I was born and raised, that of the Russian intelligence of Kyiv”, says Kostioukovitch, who has always lived in the family. Russo and started, she linguist, to study and speak Ukrainian only in 2014.

“At the beginning of the twentieth century, during the period of free and independent Ukraine (1917-1920), the behavior of Kyiv’s Russian elite weakened Ukraine, and the country’s leadership had to surrender to the Russians. For the seventy years in which Ukraine has been part of the USSR, the entire elite of Soviet Ukraine is formed by the Ukrainian language. And looking at the side of Russia. But now, people who only speak Russian in Ukraine are less and less.