fan_ta
01-24-2009, 04:23 PM
Essay about Ukraine
Practical present-day philosophy in Ukraine
Ukraine – I had been wishing to visit this country for some years already when I finally decided to organize a trip in the summer of 2006. I had heard many stories about Kyiv and Ukraine in general from my Russian and Ukrainian friends, and after a trip to St Petersburg, my curiosity was all the more aroused, since I had been told Ukrainians are in many regards like the Russians and yet not Russian at all. This seemed quite intriguing to me – especially because I am myself a kind of French-Czech-Dutch culture mix. Thus, at the beginning of the month of August I left France, where I am a student at the Ecole normale supérieure of Lyon, and took off for Kyiv, resolved to discover this people’s double identity.
I suppose someone who is delighted at a place he or she has visited begins his account with a positive note which quickly evolves into a fairy-tale. Strangely enough, my first impressions of Ukraine were not equally fine, and I would consider it dishonest to tell you I was keen on Kyiv from the very beginning. Whereas I had fallen in love immediately with St Petersburg, it took me some time to feel wherein Kyiv’s appeal lies, but perhaps it is this hidden character of Kyiv’s charm that explains why I finally preferred it above the Baltic metropolis.
My first impression was based on the host family with whom I was to stay two weeks, and nothing can better reflect my thoughts on the first evening than a portrait of the lady. Her name was Lyuda, and she was the mother of an eighteen-years-old girl. Their apartment was located in the historic district of Podol in Kyiv, at less than five minutes on foot from the well-known tourist street Andreyevskiy Uzviz. I reckoned I was very lucky to stay in such a nice-looking place close to the large and beautiful river the Dnepr. The first place where my hostess took me was a little church on the riverbank, from whose location the vast expands of nature on the central island could be admired, in the very heart of the city - something you won’t find in a capital like Paris. Lyuda went there to feed the dead of her family, by offering well-cooked foodstuff. She was an exceedingly pious woman, paradoxically and monstrously racist, not afraid to dress skimpily and to glue fake flashy-coloured nails on her fingers, which transformed the use of a keyboard into a difficult task. At first, she really made me laugh, but I could not help thinking her ideas were tear-jerking, as she was probably not the only one to combine this shameful mix of extreme racism and apparent faith in Christian ideals. Even the worst French Le Pen-voter would not be able to “improve” these views on black people. She told me for instance that France had been forsaken by God since the 1789 Revolution, and from then on tainted by debauchery and poison, among which the arrival of the “nyegri” could be counted. This debauchery would find its expression in French cinema, where “sons sleep with their mothers”. After which my hostess concluded the evening by stating I could still be rescued if I decided to learn the etiquette and become a marriageable girl. All in all, virtue apparently resided in the fork you hold in your left hand and the knife that is in your right.
It took me some time to forget about my initial bad impressions, and to look unbiased beyond several aspects of life in Kyiv which at first displeased me. It now seems to me as if I had had only eye for the most negative views one can get in the Ukrainian capital city. The first few days I had the feeling Kyiv is one gigantic anthill, and by saying so I do not only hint at the noisy traffic, the countless building places and the ramshackle houses being refurbished. Human life seemed to be valued as little as an ant’s life – one could see the Ukrainians work for next to nothing until sunset, during the night in supermarkets, and late in the evening, when people normally wish to get a wink of sleep, I could still hear the drills, saws and
hammers building the “monstr” next to the apartment – i.e. a huge office centre in the middle of an ancient area. The railway station was to me the epicentre of this hellish anthill, with its extraterrestrial noise, amplified, as if it weren’t enough, by music from blaring loudspeakers. Customer-friendliness was based on the sole principles of exclusion, confusion and privileges. In the major hall of the railway station, there could be found about twenty counters for advantaged people, like the counter for “Members of Parliament”, but only three counters for common people, who became uncommonly annoyed at the endless queue. The queue I had decided to join finally proved as useless as any other, since the only tickets left to Sebastopol in Crimea cost more than fifty dollars. Later, I was told the cheapest tickets are often bought up in large amounts by some companies wishing to keep up the impression of privilege among their employees, who thus can benefit from the low prices to the most popular tourist resorts of Ukraine (among which, Crimea).
Those first days, I really got the impression people did not care for one another. In France, people at least try to conceal this by holding up an appearance of politeness, whereas Ukrainians not only omit to greet shop assistants, but also shout at people without even knowing them. It took me a few days before I realized this was normal in Ukraine, but then I was almost “honoured” to be treated like a real Ukrainian by a caretaker who snapped off my head. Finally, Sartre was right, for Ukraine in any case – “l’enfer c’est les autres”, hell is made by the others. I came to the conclusion that a country is what the people make it.
The turning point was probably the weekend, during which the big streets of Podol and the central street Khrechtchatyk are closed for traffic, and Kyiv suddenly changes into a quiet little sunny city, where everybody goes for a stroll in his most trendy outfit. The weather was nice and I went to Dnepr-beach with my hostess’ daughter, who, by the way, also had fascinating nails. We swam in the river, burned the whole afternoon in a surprisingly warm sun, and practiced our Russian / patience with a foreigner’s Russian.
After this first weekend, I can say that the more I got to know the Kyivlyani (inhabitants of Kyiv), the more I appreciated them. The city still seemed a disorder to me, with as many magnificent buildings as “monstry”, as the Ukrainians called them. But much more than in St Petersburg, I found the people themselves were a most interesting sight. Without knowing it, the Ukrainians are as eccentric and captivating as their capital city, and this impression would only grow stronger during the rest of my stay. One can find anything in Kyiv – young people chatting up in a rough manner, madmen wrecking their cars by driving down the central hill at break-neck speed, drunkards, twelve-years-old girls sunbathing on a square and drinking a pivo (beer) as early as eleven o’clock a.m., enquiring sellers whom you engage in a long conversation (I was even invited by one of them to visit her workroom), very hospitable talkative people and simple-minded individuals like my hostess, who believe Belarus is an excellent country because of their most excellent president, Lukashenka. In order to appreciate Kyiv properly, the visitor should open up his mind to what can snobbishly be called “human experience”, because the Kyivlyani are very interesting, impolite, and eager to learn something about other countries.
Very often, I had to disappoint the people I was talking to, when they wished to know whether the French really care so much about perfume and fashion shows. One of the biggest differences I could notice between St Petersburg and Kyiv consisted in the fashion-beauty-wealth obsession Kyivlyani have developed. The city is an uninterrupted fashion show, where people allow themselves to wear to most unsightly and flashy clothes one could find. Stiletto heels, pink miniskirts and fluorescent green leather jackets would not shock any Ukrainian. Very soon, I felt myself a doll, because appearances were more than ever a means to judge reality. Lyuda and her daughter wanted to see all my beauty products and cosmetics, my earrings, clothes and miniskirts (which I don’t have). I accepted to play my role of French
doll, but only because I knew it would not last longer than a few weeks.
Practical present-day philosophy in Ukraine
Ukraine – I had been wishing to visit this country for some years already when I finally decided to organize a trip in the summer of 2006. I had heard many stories about Kyiv and Ukraine in general from my Russian and Ukrainian friends, and after a trip to St Petersburg, my curiosity was all the more aroused, since I had been told Ukrainians are in many regards like the Russians and yet not Russian at all. This seemed quite intriguing to me – especially because I am myself a kind of French-Czech-Dutch culture mix. Thus, at the beginning of the month of August I left France, where I am a student at the Ecole normale supérieure of Lyon, and took off for Kyiv, resolved to discover this people’s double identity.
I suppose someone who is delighted at a place he or she has visited begins his account with a positive note which quickly evolves into a fairy-tale. Strangely enough, my first impressions of Ukraine were not equally fine, and I would consider it dishonest to tell you I was keen on Kyiv from the very beginning. Whereas I had fallen in love immediately with St Petersburg, it took me some time to feel wherein Kyiv’s appeal lies, but perhaps it is this hidden character of Kyiv’s charm that explains why I finally preferred it above the Baltic metropolis.
My first impression was based on the host family with whom I was to stay two weeks, and nothing can better reflect my thoughts on the first evening than a portrait of the lady. Her name was Lyuda, and she was the mother of an eighteen-years-old girl. Their apartment was located in the historic district of Podol in Kyiv, at less than five minutes on foot from the well-known tourist street Andreyevskiy Uzviz. I reckoned I was very lucky to stay in such a nice-looking place close to the large and beautiful river the Dnepr. The first place where my hostess took me was a little church on the riverbank, from whose location the vast expands of nature on the central island could be admired, in the very heart of the city - something you won’t find in a capital like Paris. Lyuda went there to feed the dead of her family, by offering well-cooked foodstuff. She was an exceedingly pious woman, paradoxically and monstrously racist, not afraid to dress skimpily and to glue fake flashy-coloured nails on her fingers, which transformed the use of a keyboard into a difficult task. At first, she really made me laugh, but I could not help thinking her ideas were tear-jerking, as she was probably not the only one to combine this shameful mix of extreme racism and apparent faith in Christian ideals. Even the worst French Le Pen-voter would not be able to “improve” these views on black people. She told me for instance that France had been forsaken by God since the 1789 Revolution, and from then on tainted by debauchery and poison, among which the arrival of the “nyegri” could be counted. This debauchery would find its expression in French cinema, where “sons sleep with their mothers”. After which my hostess concluded the evening by stating I could still be rescued if I decided to learn the etiquette and become a marriageable girl. All in all, virtue apparently resided in the fork you hold in your left hand and the knife that is in your right.
It took me some time to forget about my initial bad impressions, and to look unbiased beyond several aspects of life in Kyiv which at first displeased me. It now seems to me as if I had had only eye for the most negative views one can get in the Ukrainian capital city. The first few days I had the feeling Kyiv is one gigantic anthill, and by saying so I do not only hint at the noisy traffic, the countless building places and the ramshackle houses being refurbished. Human life seemed to be valued as little as an ant’s life – one could see the Ukrainians work for next to nothing until sunset, during the night in supermarkets, and late in the evening, when people normally wish to get a wink of sleep, I could still hear the drills, saws and
hammers building the “monstr” next to the apartment – i.e. a huge office centre in the middle of an ancient area. The railway station was to me the epicentre of this hellish anthill, with its extraterrestrial noise, amplified, as if it weren’t enough, by music from blaring loudspeakers. Customer-friendliness was based on the sole principles of exclusion, confusion and privileges. In the major hall of the railway station, there could be found about twenty counters for advantaged people, like the counter for “Members of Parliament”, but only three counters for common people, who became uncommonly annoyed at the endless queue. The queue I had decided to join finally proved as useless as any other, since the only tickets left to Sebastopol in Crimea cost more than fifty dollars. Later, I was told the cheapest tickets are often bought up in large amounts by some companies wishing to keep up the impression of privilege among their employees, who thus can benefit from the low prices to the most popular tourist resorts of Ukraine (among which, Crimea).
Those first days, I really got the impression people did not care for one another. In France, people at least try to conceal this by holding up an appearance of politeness, whereas Ukrainians not only omit to greet shop assistants, but also shout at people without even knowing them. It took me a few days before I realized this was normal in Ukraine, but then I was almost “honoured” to be treated like a real Ukrainian by a caretaker who snapped off my head. Finally, Sartre was right, for Ukraine in any case – “l’enfer c’est les autres”, hell is made by the others. I came to the conclusion that a country is what the people make it.
The turning point was probably the weekend, during which the big streets of Podol and the central street Khrechtchatyk are closed for traffic, and Kyiv suddenly changes into a quiet little sunny city, where everybody goes for a stroll in his most trendy outfit. The weather was nice and I went to Dnepr-beach with my hostess’ daughter, who, by the way, also had fascinating nails. We swam in the river, burned the whole afternoon in a surprisingly warm sun, and practiced our Russian / patience with a foreigner’s Russian.
After this first weekend, I can say that the more I got to know the Kyivlyani (inhabitants of Kyiv), the more I appreciated them. The city still seemed a disorder to me, with as many magnificent buildings as “monstry”, as the Ukrainians called them. But much more than in St Petersburg, I found the people themselves were a most interesting sight. Without knowing it, the Ukrainians are as eccentric and captivating as their capital city, and this impression would only grow stronger during the rest of my stay. One can find anything in Kyiv – young people chatting up in a rough manner, madmen wrecking their cars by driving down the central hill at break-neck speed, drunkards, twelve-years-old girls sunbathing on a square and drinking a pivo (beer) as early as eleven o’clock a.m., enquiring sellers whom you engage in a long conversation (I was even invited by one of them to visit her workroom), very hospitable talkative people and simple-minded individuals like my hostess, who believe Belarus is an excellent country because of their most excellent president, Lukashenka. In order to appreciate Kyiv properly, the visitor should open up his mind to what can snobbishly be called “human experience”, because the Kyivlyani are very interesting, impolite, and eager to learn something about other countries.
Very often, I had to disappoint the people I was talking to, when they wished to know whether the French really care so much about perfume and fashion shows. One of the biggest differences I could notice between St Petersburg and Kyiv consisted in the fashion-beauty-wealth obsession Kyivlyani have developed. The city is an uninterrupted fashion show, where people allow themselves to wear to most unsightly and flashy clothes one could find. Stiletto heels, pink miniskirts and fluorescent green leather jackets would not shock any Ukrainian. Very soon, I felt myself a doll, because appearances were more than ever a means to judge reality. Lyuda and her daughter wanted to see all my beauty products and cosmetics, my earrings, clothes and miniskirts (which I don’t have). I accepted to play my role of French
doll, but only because I knew it would not last longer than a few weeks.