After almost 3 months of daily writing of my very first completely honest and direct work of scholarship in Ukrainian, I have no idea how I will go back to the cautious efforts to sneak in some glimmer of truth that the scholarship in English always is and the scholarship in Spanish is becoming more and more.

I went to lunch with a friend and she asked what if nobody wants to publish my book in Ukraine. I said I don’t even care at this point because the experience of writing complete, unadorned truth is nothing short of narcotic. It’s like being in a loveless, stunted marriage, and then falling in love and discovering what heights human love can reach.

Of course, the irony of having left Ukraine 25 years ago to experience freedom of the intellect and now having to go back to Ukraine in search of it isn’t lost on me.

Another quote, this time from Alexei Arestovych in Ukraine:

LGBT is not about “… people aren’t allowed to love each other and they need help”, but about an extremely aggressive ultra-left ideology that takes full advantage of the cancel culture and tries to install this culture and sexual deviations as a social norm for us in our country.

My position is clear:

– feel free to love whomever you want. Your rights are protected in the same way as those of any citizen of Ukraine.

But I will not allow sexual deviancy to be established as the norm.

Everybody everywhere civilized is against persecuting, hassling or bothering people for being gay. But stop sticking gender-fluid pronouns and “transitions” into books for first-graders, is what I say.

Leaving that aside, look at the way he’s wording the message. “I will not allow.” This is not an error of translation. This is a person expressing agency and taking responsibility for what is happening in his country.

Here is a quote from my new favorite writer Juan Manuel de Prada:

How do you convince a poor man on a pitiful salary not to notice that the system needs him to have few or no children and to have no natural impulse to lay down his life for them (which would lead him to need to demand a living wage)? To do this, it is necessary to erase from the brain of such a person the concept of rights arising from work (the right to a decent salary, the right to a stable job, the right to live on one’s native land, the right to feed and educate one’s children) and imbue him with a psychopathic belief that far more important are the rights of his genitals, from contraception to abortion. You also have to make this poor man believe that this unspeakable nonsense is not a chip that has been implanted in his shattered brain, but something without which he cannot be free.

Juan Manuel de Prada, Una enmienda a la totalidad

Klara has two mosquito bites on her forehead that blew up and look like little horns.

She’s so proud of her horns that she doesn’t even mind the itch. She struts around with a mysterious look and informs everybody she comes across, “I’m a baby goat. I have horns.”

It would be great if people could feel like that not only in childhood but as adults. A lot of time and energy is wasted in feeling unhappy about one’s appearance, and here’s a little human who loves having two red, itchy protuberances on her forehead. Because they are her protuberances.

Here is another great quote from Peter Pomerantsev. Surkov was the chief ideologue of the Kremlin at that time. He was also a bestselling postmodernist writer who had to write under a pseudonym, of course.

In the twenty-first century the techniques of the political technologists have become centralized and systematized, coordinated out of the office of the presidential administration, where Surkov would sit behind a desk on which were phones bearing the names of all the “independent” party leaders, calling and directing them at any moment, day or night. The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with twentieth-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd. One moment Surkov would fund civic forums and human rights NGOs, the next he would quietly support nationalist movements that accuse the NGOs of being tools of the West. With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying crosses, who in turn attacked the modern art exhibitions. The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime.

Pomerantsev, Peter. Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible

This is what happens when nothing really means anything. This is also why all – and I mean there are zero exceptions – of the children of the Kremlin dudes who can’t shut up about the degraded West and the dreaded gender confusion are extremely cosmopolitan, invariably living in the “degraded West”, and very often genderfluid.

In the previous generations, when women were completely helpless, who did stuff for them when their husbands died?

My mother is such a woman of olden times, and I can’t figure out who’s supposed to be managing her life now that she’s a widow. It can’t be me because it’s a full-time job. She doesn’t know how to listen to messages on her answering machine, send or receive an email or a text message, or pay bills. She has no idea where any of her paperwork is, she doesn’t know how to pay taxes, fill up the tank of her car, schedule a doctor appointment.

Honestly, it’s easier to list what she can that what she can’t do.

My father would have been just as helpless without her but in a different way. He couldn’t make a cup of tea, feed himself, or find his own underwear in the house, let alone wash it, or anything adventurous like that.

We aren’t talking about a helpless, senile woman who needs constant (or any) medical care. This is a woman who simply hasn’t been self-sufficient since 1974. I really don’t know what to do.

These complimentary marriage models are terrible unless the participants die at the exact same time.

Peter Pomerantsev uses the words “postmodern, fluid, shape-shifting, changeable, and in flux” to describe Russia. He spent years there, and he really figured it out. Russia is not an unwieldy, outdated, Soviet-style empire. It’s the highly fluid, very postmodern society of the future. Hopefully, not our future because it’s a bad place to be.

Everything there is completely fluid and nothing really means anything. Here’s an example. The occupied territories of Ukraine have been officially accepted into the Russian Federation. The Constitution of Russia was changed to reflect that.

But then everybody kind of forgot about it all and moved on. The Russian government never took charge or responsibility for these terrories. Putin keeps referring to them as Ukraine, which goes against the constitutional process he himself oversaw and signed off on.

That’s not how less fluid and postmodern countries behave. Do you want to know how a real nation-state acts? A nation-state takes the constitution and the citizenship seriously. For instance, who do you think has been paying social security to the people in the territories Russia occupied back in 2014? Ukraine, obviously. The logic is: they are our citizens, so we are responsible for them. You can see how this approach makes everything a lot more complicated. Responsibility and being grounded in reality are hard. It’s so much easier not to bother with these complexities. Pick up some citizens today, dump them tomorrow, and move on. Nothing is real, anyway. It’s all a game.

No, this is not like anything that happens in America. But it will be if we aren’t doing anything to prevent things from ending up in that exact place.

Everybody nods their heads to this. Yes, of course, it’s the school closures. I’m opposed to school closures but I don’t get how this is an obvious result. The kids who are 13 today, were 10 in 2020. During lockdowns, they weren’t at home alone. That person they were with at home could have taught them to read. There wasn’t much else to do anyway.

We keep hearing that schools exclude parents from decisions about their children and that the government treats parents as irrelevant.

Hmm, I wonder what’s causing all this. It’s not like parents are aggressively making themselves irrelevant by handing over all responsibility for their children to the schools and the government.

I taught my 7-year-old about tradeoffs. Everything in life is a tradeoff. If you want the good things, you’ll have to accept the bad things that come with them.

This is a tradeoff, too. If you don’t want to teach your own child to read, if you hand over control over that process to somebody else, that somebody else will control what the child reads. We can pout over it or recognize how it works.

And why not, if the international reaction to the blowing up of the Kahovka dam by Russia was limited to a few tweets expressing the usual grave concern.

I talked to the Ukrainian instructor who is coming to us from Bakhmut. She’s a native speaker of Ukrainian, for all that people keep chirping stupidly that the Donbass is Russian-speaking. She speaks so fast, I had to do this thing where I go into a zone when somebody speaks a language to be able to follow.

A wonderful young woman who has never been on an airplane and has never even been to Kyiv, let alone overseas. What’s even better, she wants to be a literary critic.

I’m very psyched.