This is one of my favorite Ukrainian writers. He survived months of terrible torture by Russians in Lugansk in 2014 (delivered courtesy of one Barack Obama), and now he’s on the front line.
Aseyev is one of the very few Ukrainian writers translated into English. He could be living it up in Boston but he freely chose the trenches.
I pray that he lives because too many of our artists have been killed already.
In Ukraine, the entire cultural elite went into the trenches completely willingly. Opera singers, ballet dancers, poets, painters. Even more shockingly, the financial elites went, too. Men with $100 million fortunes left their villas in the Bahamas and came to fight.
This is the power of the nation-state, and we want to abandon it in favor of isolated individuals moping about their identities and sexual fads?
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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