Ukrainian Quotes

Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children. In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.

And we are not pursuing military information on this trip. At least not about the Russian mafia exchanging Russian-Ukrainian tanks and electronics for their benefit in Syria.

And like all good plans, it required a crazy Ukrainian guy.

As Romeo and Juliet found to their cost, marriage is never just about two people falling in love, it is about families.

Every war casts up certain small groups among ethnic populations: minorities too cowardly to fight openly, too insignificant to play any independent political part, but despicable enough to act as paid executioners to one of the fighting powers. In this war those people were the Ukrainian and Lithuanian Fascists.

We're often silent. We don't yell and we don't complain. We're patient, as always. Because we don't have the words yet. We're afraid to talk about it. We don't know how. It's not an ordinary experience, and the questions it raises are not ordinary. The world has been split in two: there's us, the Chernobylites, and then there's you, the others. Have you noticed? No one here points out that they're Russian or Belarussian or Ukrainian. We all call ourselves Chernobylites. "We're from Chernobyl." "I'm a Chernobylite." As if this is a separate people. A new nation.

Every Ukrainian photographer dreams to take a photo which will stop the war.

Таких гандонів часто бачив я, Що всім пиздять: я – гуру, я – учитєль! Несіть мені усі по три рубля І мудрості вам дам я дохуя. А сам читать уміє по складам І голосно пердить в компан’ї дам.

Ukraine is truly resisting tyranny... As the Russian forces get closer to Poland, many Ukrainians go--not further west from the border--but back into Ukraine...don't think it couldn't happen here. Vigilance has been required of us, but nothing like the vigilance that has been required of the Ukrainian people. It may yet be.

Take these sunflower seeds and put them in your pockets' said one Ukrainian woman to a Russian soldier on her street, 'At least when you die, something will grow.' Others ask soldiers, 'How do you explain to your mother why you are here?' The soldiers are disheartened, no shock and awe, no Zelenskyy slinking off to another country, not what Putin expected.

Нi! я жива! Я буду вiчно жити! Я в серцi маю те, що не вмирає.

An old Ukrainian proverb warns, “A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil.” That is a risk we have to take.

But by the end of it I had a plan. And like all good plans, it required a crazy Ukrainian guy.

When I saw the car pulling into the driveway and I saw her getting out and walking towards the house, can you imagine Nadezhda, I performed involuntary excretion in my trousers.

If we believe that the Holocaust was a result of the inherent characteristics of Jews, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, or anyone else, then we are moving in Hitler’s world. —

I had no idea what the juice was, but I went ahead and drank it. Turns out it was reconstituted carrot-apple juice. It tasted like shit. Who the hell puts those things together? Ukrainians, apparently.

In the nineteenth century the Industrial Revolution created new conditions and problems that none of the existing social, economic, and political models could cope with. Feudalism, monarchism, and traditional religions were not adapted to managing industrial metropolises, millions of uprooted workers, or the constantly changing nature of the modern economy. Consequently, humankind had to develop completely new models—liberal democracies, communist dictatorships, and fascist regimes—and it took more than a century of terrible wars and revolutions to experiment with these models, separate the wheat from the chaff, and implement the best solutions. Child labor in Dickensian coal mines, the First World War, and the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33 constituted just a small part of the tuition fees humankind had to pay.

Не буду більше пити я, хоч, правда, яка розумная цьому альтернатіва?

If you don’t play, you lose. There was a Ukrainian woman at the market selling big red apples. ‘Come get your apples! Chernobyl apples!’ Someone told her not to advertise that, no one will buy them. ‘Don’t worry!’ she says. ‘They buy them anyway. Some need them for their mother-in-law, some for their boss.’

In a new Russian colonialism that began in 2013, Russian leaders and propagandists imagined neighboring Ukrainians out of existence or presented them as sub-Russians. In characterizations that recall what Hitler said about Ukrainians (and Russians), Russian leaders described Ukraine as an artificial entity with no history, culture, and language, backed by some global agglomeration of Jews, gays, Europeans, and Americans. In

There’s an old Ukrainian proverb: He who licks knives will soon cut his tongue.

He walked upon 'earth that is as unsteady as the sea,' and found the remnants: photographs of children in Warsaw and Vienna; a bit of Ukrainian embroidery a sack of hair, blonde and black.

The archival record backs up the testimony of the survivors. Neither crop failure nor bad weather caused the famine in Ukraine. Although the chaos of collectivization helped create the conditions that led to famine, the high numbers of deaths in Ukraine between 1932 and 1934, and especially the spike in the spring of 1933, were not caused directly by collectivization either. Starvation was the result, rather, of the forcible removal of food from people’s homes; the roadblocks that prevented peasants from seeking work or food; the harsh rules of the blacklists imposed on farms and villages; the restrictions on barter and trade; and the vicious propaganda campaign designed to persuade Ukrainians to watch, unmoved, as their neighbours died of hunger.

There were Italian neighbourhood and Vietnamese neighbourhoods in this city; there are Chinese ones and Ukrainian ones and Pakistani ones and Korean ones and African ones. Name a region on the planet and there's someone from there, here. All of them sit on Ojibway land, but hardly any of them know it or care because that genealogy is wilfully untraceable except in the name of the city itself. They'd only have to look, though, but it could be that what they know hurts them already, and what if they found out something even more damaging? These are people who are used to the earth beneath them shifting, and they all want it to stop-and if that means they must pretend to know nothing, well, that's the sacrifice they make.

Erich Koch, chosen by Hitler to rule Ukraine, made the point about the inferiority of Ukrainians with a certain simplicity: “If I find a Ukrainian who is worthy to sit with me at table, I must have him shot.” Even

Kyiv is a bilingual capital, something unusual in Europe and unthinkable in Russia and the United States. Europeans, Russians, and Americans rarely considered that everyday bilingualism might bespeak political maturity, and imagined instead that a Ukraine that spoke two languages must be divided into two groups and two halves. "Ethnic Ukrainians" must be a group that acts in one way, and "ethnic Russians" in another. This is about as true as to say that "ethnic Americans" vote Republican. It is more a summary of a politics that defines people by ethnicity, proposing to them an eternity of grievance rather than a politics of the future.

- оу! Тут говорять російською? Я теж знаю кілька слів! - Нєт!!! Але професора вже було не стримати. - Baba, vodka, ogurets! - видав астрофізик і, не чекаючи, поснив: - Кохана жінка, стакан віскі і стейк. Цьому мене навчив один російський інженер у Г'юстоні. Це все, що йому було потрібно у вихідні. - Технічно, ви абсолютно праві, - сказав я, не в змозі більше будь-що пояснювати.

Stop calling it war, for war implies faults on both sides. It's an invasion, where the state of Russia is the aggressor and the people of Ukraine are the victim. And stop saying that your prayers are with the Ukrainian people, for prayers may give you comfort, but it does nothing to alleviate their suffering. Shred all hypocritical advocacy of human rights and be involved in a meaningful way that actually helps the victims of Russian imperialism.

Stalin’s policies that autumn led inexorably to famine all across the grain-growing regions of the USSR. But in November and December 1932 he twisted the knife further in Ukraine, deliberately creating a deeper crisis. Step by step, using bureaucratic language and dull legal terminology, the Soviet leadership, aided by their cowed Ukrainian counterparts, launched a famine within the famine, a disaster specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians.

Just forget for a minute that you have spectacles on your nose and autumn in your heart. Stop being tough at your desk and stammering with timidity in the presence of people. Imagine for one second that you raise hell in public and stammer on paper. You’re a tiger, a lion, a cat. You spend a night with a Russian woman and leave her satisfied. You’re twenty five. If rings had been fastened to the earth and sky, you’d have seized them and pulled the sky down to earth

Небезпека примушує зробити крок їй назустріч, а невідоме притягує тим, що може бути небезпечним.

Ask us for water, we won't let you go unfed, but do not mistake our gentleness as fear. If you so much as lay a finger on our home, we'll defend it with our blood, sweat 'n tears.

I return one last time to the places of death all around us, the places of slaughter to which, in a huge communal effort, we close our hearts. Each day a fresh holocaust, yet, as far as I can see, our moral being is untouched. We do not feel tainted. We can do anything, it seems, and come away clean. We point to the Germans and Poles and Ukrainians who did and did not know of the atrocities around them. We like to think they were inwardly marked by the after-effects of that special form of ignorance. We like to think that in their nightmares the ones whose suffering they had refused to enter came back to haunt them. We like to think they woke up haggard in the mornings and died of gnawing cancers. But probably it was not so. The evidence points in the opposite direction: that we can do anything and get away with it; that there is no punishment.

For twenty years, Peter had been playing with soldiers; first toys, then boys, then grown men. His games had grown from drills involving a few hundred idle stable boys and falconers to 30,000 men involved in the assault and defense of the river fort of Pressburg. Now, seeking the excitement of real combat, he looked for a fortress to besiege, and Azov, isolated at the bottom of the Ukrainian steppe, suited admirably.

it required a crazy Ukrainian guy. ... “Svoboda” I said. “Condoms only cost fifty slugs. Why would anyone buy this?” He grinned. “It’s reusable!” A disturbing thought popped into my head. “Wait. Have you used this one?” “No, but it wouldn’t matter if I had. The cleaning process renders it sterile.” “Are you kidd—” I stopped myself and took a breath. Then, as calmly as I could, I said, “It would matter, Svoboda. Maybe not biologically, but psychologically.

Everyone knew Russia’s ambitions extended to the Crimea, but a few years earlier some steam was let out of the kettle when the pro-nationalist Ukrainian president was replaced by a pro-Russian successor. The fate of the Black Sea fleet in the port of Sevastopol seemed secure, and Russia went about its business.

that the Ukrainian choice is a choice between nonexistence and an existence that kills you, and that all of our hapless literature is merely a cry of someone pinned down by a beam in a building after an earthquake—I’m here! I’m still alive!—but, unfortunately, the rescue teams are taking their time and on your own—how the hell are you supposed to get out?

Не вір, мій сину, цьому підорасу. Канхвету ту тобі він в жопу встромить.

Life is beautiful. Cherish every moment, appreciate what you have, and find joy in the present.

Ну а згодом? Про наслідки можливі не подумать? Один лиш тільки раз, і вже крадеться піздець з своєю усмішкою хижой.

Ukrainian proverb: The fear of death takes away the joy of living

Ukraina: he sighs, breathing in the remembered scent of mown hay and cherry blossom. But I catch the distinct synthetic whiff of New Russia. Her

...the wind in Ukraina blows very hard and cold at this moment. But it will not always be so. And where there is love, there is always enough warmth for the human soul to thrive.

Paradoxically, the timid rumors circulating in Washington in favor of arming Ukraine are creating an incentive for Moscow to escalate the war now, to attain the desired territorial gains before it becomes too costly. Once Ukrainian forces possess, for instance, anti-armor weapons, Russia’s advantages decrease and the costs of its intervention increase dramatically.

Mourning a place is even more difficult than mourning a person. Losing a loved one is a tragic but inevitable part of human experience, but war is not. Seeing our familiar landmarks sink into violence, we grieve for ourselves as we once were and we question what we have become.

The Nazis chased the dream of a racially pure society through occupation and conquest, thus ensuring intimate contact with people of many non-Germanic nationalities and races. The Communists insisted that national identity was irrelevant but obsessively persecuted men and women because of who they were: Latvians, Poles, Ukrainians, Armenians, Finns, Chechens, Koreans, and Turks.

We must thank fate (and the author’s thirst for universal fame) for his not having turned to the Ukrainian dialect as a medium of expression, because then he would have been lost. When I want a good nightmare I imagine Gogol penning in Little Russian dialect volume after volume of Dikanka and Mirgorod stuff about ghosts haunting the banks of the Dniepr, burlesque Jews and dashing Cossacks.

When Luba was born, her parents named her after the Ukrainian word for love. Lubov. Moya Luba. Lubochka. Every letter Roman had ever written Luba started out with a different variation of her name.

Ворогування - то диявольська версія любови до ближнього. Любов вимагає великої роботи душі й тривання на висоті. Для ворогування досить опуститися до неґативних емоцій, роздратування чи просто нестриманості.

Nadia, if all women were to wear paint on their faces, just think, there could be no more natural selection. The inevitable result would be the uglification of the species. You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?

Ukrainian boxer Vasyl Lomachenko set a record for the fewest fights needed to win world titles in three different weight classes. Lomachenko, who took four years off boxing as a kid to learn traditional Ukrainian dance, reflected, “I was doing so many different sports as a young boy—gymnastics, basketball, football, tennis—and I think, ultimately, everything came together with all those different kinds of sports to enhance my footwork.

in response to discrimination and persecution in the Holy Roman Empire. They had moved further east into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and, despite the violence directed against them during the 1648 Ukrainian revolt, had continued this eastward pattern of migration and settlement into the eighteenth century. With the partitions of Poland, the areas of densest Jewish settlement came under Russian rule,

Кохання - як вода, - плавке та бистре, рве, грає, пестить, затягає й топить. Де пал - воно кипить, а стрiне холод - стає мов камiнь. От моє кохання! А те твоє - солом'яного духу дитина квола. Хилиться од вiтру, пiд ноги стелеться. Зострiне iскру - згорить не борючись, а потiм з нього лишиться чорний згар та сивий попiл. Коли ж його зневажать, як покидьку, воно лежить i кисне, як солома, в водi холоднiй марної досади, пiд пiзнiми дощами каяття.

Vitali Fedorovich,” Scherbitsky began, and Sklyarov braced himself. It was always a bad sign when the First Secretary used your patronymic. “You need to go there yourself.” Sklyarov, who had almost no interest in seeing a blazing nuclear plant at close quarters, tried to object. “The station is under the supervision of Moscow. It doesn’t belong to us,” he said. “The station might not be Ukrainian,” Scherbitsky replied, “but the land and the people are.

One objective fact is that in 1939 there were 28 million Ukrainians, compared with 31 million in 1926, at a time when (barring famine) the birth rate was often twice the death rate. Deaths are calculated on this basis at anywhere between 2.4 and 4 million. More sophisticated studies give a figure nearer to 5 million. OGPU’s tally from December 1932 to mid-April 1933 give a figure of 2.4 million deaths from famine and cannibalism; by extrapolating these

Political calculation and local suffering do not entirely explain the participation in these pogroms. Violence against Jews served to bring the Germans and elements of the local non-Jewish populations closer together. Anger was directed, as the Germans wished, toward the Jews, rather than against collaborators with the Soviet regime as such. People who reacted to the Germans' urging knew that they were pleasing their new masters, whether or not they believed that the Jews were responsible for their own woes. By their actions they were confirming the Nazi worldview. The act of killing Jews as revenge for NKVD executions confirmed the Nazi understanding of the Soviet Union as a Jewish state. Violence against Jews also allowed local Estonians, Latvian, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Poles who had themselves cooperated with the Soviet regime to escape any such taint. The idea that only Jews served communists was convenient not just for the occupiers but for some of the occupied as well. Yet this psychic nazification would have been much more difficult without the palpable evidence of Soviet atrocities. The pogroms took place where the Soviets had recently arrived and where Soviet power was recently installed, where for the previous months Soviet organs of coercion had organized arrests, executions, and deportations. They were a joint production, a Nazi edition of a Soviet text. P. 196

But within those numbers, there are other stories. For one, the statistics show a sharp and notable drop in life expectancy over 1932–4, across a wide range of groups. Before 1932, urban men had a life expectancy at birth of 40 to 46 years, and urban women 47 to 52 years. Rural men had a life expectancy of 42 to 44 years, and rural women 45 to 48 years. By contrast, Ukrainian men born in 1932, in either the city or countryside, had an average life expectancy of about 30. Women born in that year could expect to live on average to 40. For those born in 1933, the numbers are even starker. Females born in Ukraine in that year lived, on average, to be eight years old. Males born in 1933 could expect to live to the age of five.6 These

Albanian dogs go “ham ham.” In Catalan, dogs go “bup bup.” The Chinese dogs say “wang wang,” the Greek dogs go “gav gav,” the Slovenians “hov hov,” and the Ukrainians “haf haf.” In Iceland, it’s “voff,” in Indonesia, it’s “gong gong,” and in Italian, it’s “bau bau.

The sign at the door was written with a backward R, to make it look Russian, which caused a minor echo of panic. Was it a reference to Merchenko? No, surely Westwood knew the difference between Russia and Ukraine. But were there Ukrainian-themed bars, for a pedantic tormentor?

THE BEET IS THE MOST INTENSE of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious. Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets. The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip . . . The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies. The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes. In Europe there is grown widely a large beet they call the mangel-wurzel. Perhaps it is mangel-wurzel that we see in Rasputin. Certainly there is mangel-wurzel in the music of Wagner, although it is another composer whose name begins, B-e-e-t——. Of course, there are white beets, beets that ooze sugar water instead of blood, but it is the red beet with which we are concerned; the variety that blushes and swells like a hemorrhoid, a hemorrhoid for which there is no cure. (Actually, there is one remedy: commission a potter to make you a ceramic asshole—and when you aren't sitting on it, you can use it as a bowl for borscht.) An old Ukrainian proverb warns, “A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil.” That is a risk we have to take.

The historian Stanislav Kulchytsky has argued that this telegram, coming from the party leader himself at that overwrought moment, was a signal to begin mass searches and persecutions. His view is an interpretation, rather than solid proof: Stalin never wrote down, or never preserved, any document ordering famine. But in practice that telegram forced Ukrainian peasants to make a fatal choice. They could give up their grain reserves and die of starvation, or they could keep some grain reserves hidden and risk arrest, execution or the confiscation of the rest of their food—after which they would also die of starvation.

Ukraine, in contrast, had deep ethnic, cultural, and economic ties to Russia—and to Putin. It was the historical root of Russia itself: Kievan Rus, the medieval fief whose leader, Vladimir the Great, adopted Christianity in 988, and the frontier of the tsarist empires that followed—its name translated literally as the Ukraine, or “the border.” Its borders had shifted over time: Parts of its western territory had belonged to Poland or the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Stalin seized some of it with his secret pact with Hitler in 1939 and the rest after the end of the Great Patriotic War. Ukraine’s modern shape took form, but it seemed ephemeral, subject to the larger forces of geopolitics, as most borderlands have been throughout history. In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev decreed that Crimea, conquered by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century and heroically defended against the Nazis, would be governed by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic from Kiev, not from Moscow. No

...це там ми, дiвоньки, оповiдаємо, в любовно-чуло зверненi до нас лиця, що трапилося за день, а чужим — чужим треба вмiти таке накручувати, аби їх не знудити, треба вмiти завинути весь той послiд, як цукерка, в сухозлотяний фантик гумористичної новелетки, пошарудiти ним знадливо — глядь, i проковтнули, i вважається, буцiм повеселила публiку,...

Пишіть власну історію, чесно пишіть, бо інші на тому місці напишуть вам свою історію... А наші діти її вивчатимуть.

No one can see me, no one knows me; All men are deaf, no ears disclose me

Pappa, just stop and think for a minute. Is this really what you want?” “Hmm. What I want?” (he pronounces it ‘vat I vant’). “Of course to father such a child would be not straightforward. Technically it may be possible…” The thought of my father having sex with this woman makes my stomach turn. “…Snag is, hydraulic lift no longer fully functioning. But maybe with Valentina…” He is lingering over this procreation scenario too much for my taste. Looking at it from different angles. Trying it for size, as it were. “…what do you think?

Only the image of my father is unclear, as if something obscure but vital has been blotted out, and only the raging surface is left. Who is he, this man whom I have known and not known all my life?

The independence of Ukraine is indispensable. A Russian-Ukrainian confrontation would make Bosnia look like a Sunday-school picnic. Moscow should be made to understand that any attempt to destabilize Ukraine - to say nothing of outright aggression - would have devastating consequences for the Russian-American relationship. Ukrainian stability is in the strategic interest of the United States.

Перегортаю записник, Коли нестає сил. Люди зо зброєю: — Вірші можна писати олівцем, На старих ґазетах, кривавих сорочках, Вугликом на бетонній стіні, В окопах, Коли на тебе плюють І стають чоботами…

Ireland, like Ukraine, is a largely rural country which suffers from its proximity to a more powerful industrialised neighbour. Ireland’s contribution to the history of tractors is the genius engineer Harry Ferguson, who was born in 1884, near Belfast. Ferguson was a clever and mischievous man, who also had a passion for aviation. It is said that he was the first man in Great Britain to build and fly his own aircraft in 1909. But he soon came to believe that improving efficiency of food production would be his unique service to mankind. Harry Ferguson’s first two-furrow plough was attached to the chassis of the Ford Model T car converted into a tractor, aptly named Eros. This plough was mounted on the rear of the tractor, and through ingenious use of balance springs it could be raised or lowered by the driver using a lever beside his seat. Ford, meanwhile, was developing its own tractors. The Ferguson design was more advanced, and made use of hydraulic linkage, but Ferguson knew that despite his engineering genius, he could not achieve his dream on his own. He needed a larger company to produce his design. So he made an informal agreement with Henry Ford, sealed only by a handshake. This Ford-Ferguson partnership gave to the world a new type of Fordson tractor far superior to any that had been known before, and the precursor of all modern-type tractors. However, this agreement by a handshake collapsed in 1947 when Henry Ford II took over the empire of his father, and started to produce a new Ford 8N tractor, using the Ferguson system. Ferguson’s open and cheerful nature was no match for the ruthless mentality of the American businessman. The matter was decided in court in 1951. Ferguson claimed $240 million, but was awarded only $9.25 million. Undaunted in spirit, Ferguson had a new idea. He approached the Standard Motor Company at Coventry with a plan, to adapt the Vanguard car for use as tractor. But this design had to be modified, because petrol was still rationed in the post-war period. The biggest challenge for Ferguson was the move from petrol-driven to diesel-driven engines and his success gave rise to the famous TE-20, of which more than half a million were built in the UK. Ferguson will be remembered for bringing together two great engineering stories of our time, the tractor and the family car, agriculture and transport, both of which have contributed so richly to the well-being of mankind.

To understand what ended up happening in the 2016 presidential election, you have to understand this: When protests toppled the Ukrainian government, Putin interpreted that as the United States coming into Russia, akin to an act of war; when he launched his counterattack—annexing Crimea, creeping into eastern Ukraine—he weaponized information and showed a willingness to lie, using traditional media like television, and new media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, to spread disinformation into open, Western societies like a virus. Eventually, the Russians would come into America, as they believed we’d gone into Ukraine. They took advantage of the fact that we were worn down by decades of political polarization and the balkanization of our media. America’s antibodies to the sickness of Russian disinformation were weak, if they were there at all.

One presenter was reporting on the fatal shooting of a suspected organized crime figure behind a downtown strip club, which involved much breathless speculation laid over meaningless pictures, mostly of the closed gate in the pink fence, above a ticker that said Moscow Comes to Phoenix, which Reacher figured would annoy Ukrainians everywhere, the two countries being entirely separate now, and proud of it, at least in one direction.

Як у Польщі, в Аргентині, в Бразилії, в Канаді, в Австралії, так само є українці в Дагестані. Навіть у путівникові "Дагестан - страна здоров'я" указується певне число українців у кожному місті і в кожному кантоні Дагестану. Число, указане в путівникові, звичаєм буває невелике, бо поза межами України за українців вважається тільки людей у вишиваних сорочках, із довгими вусами і з тупими фізіономіями, що вживають у розмові головним чином слово "позаяк".

the Chernobyl coffin: Yes, chernobyl is Ukrainian for wormwood; on paper that looks as if it means something. However, Chernobyl is also the city nearby the power plant of the same name, both dubbed such because the herb wormwood (which our etymology study showed to be unrelated) grows in that area. If wild roses had coincidentally grown there instead, the area of the nuclear plant explosion may have been called Roses or Troyandy (the Ukrainian word for

Mine was, probably, the easiest imaginable kind of arrest. It did not tear me from the embrace of kith and kin, nor wrench me from a deeply cherished home life. One pallid European February it took me from our narrow salient on the Baltic Sea, where, depending on one's point of view, either we had surrounded the Germans or they had surrounded us, and it deprived me only of my familiar artillery battery and the scenes of the last three months of war. The brigade commander called me to his headquarters and asked me for my pistol; I turned it over without suspecting any evil intent, when suddenly, from a tense, immobile suite of staff officers in the corner, two counterintelligence officers stepped forward hurriedly, crossed the room in a few quick bounds, their four hands grabbed simultaneously at the star on my cap, my shoulder boards, my officer's belt, my map case, and they shouted theatrically: "You are under arrest!" Burning and prickling from head to toe, all I could explain was, "Me? What for?" Across the sheer gap separating me from those left behind, across that quarantine line not event a sound dared penetrate, came the unthinkable magic words of the brigade commander: "Sholzhenitsyn. Come back here." "You have ..." he asked weightily, "a friend on the First Ukrainian Front?" I knew instantly I had been arrested because of my correspondence with a school friend and understood what direction to expect danger.

Зараз мені 30. Що змінилось за останні 15 років? Змінилась пам'ять — вона стала довшою, але не стала кращою. Сподіваюсь її вистачить ще років так на 60 тривалого побутового похуїзмуй незламної душевної рівноваги. Чого я собі й бажаю. Амінь.

Життя — це як космічна ракета, і якщо ти заліз до неї, то сиди і нічого не чіпай, просто будь готовий до того, що життя твоє круто зміниться. В кожному разі дітей у тебе точно не буде. Та й загалом — нормального сексу. Це ти мусиш із самого початку враховувати — або секс, або космос, і тут є з чого вибирати, тому що насправді жодне трахання в світі, хай навіть найбільш підривне трахання, не варте того великого й прекрасного, що відкривається тобі з ілюмінатора твоєї бляшаної ракети, деякі краєвиди в цьому житті, деякі ландшафти варті того, аби за них заплатити найдорожчим, що в тебе є, себто ерекцією, але щоби зрозуміти це, потрібно бути щонайменше космонавтом, ну, на крайняк — ангелом, що в умовах розпаду капіталу — однофігственно.

My point is, or should be, simple: history happened. The object is not to undo it, distort it, or to make it fit our present political attitudes. The object of history, which each generation properly interprets anew, is to understand what happened and why. A multicultural Canada can and should look at its past with fresh eyes. It should, for example, study how the Ukrainians came to Canada, how they were treated, how they lived, sometimes suffered, ultimately prospered, and became Canadians. What historians should not do is to recreate history to make it serve present purposes. They should not obscure or reshape events to make them fit political agendas. They should not declare whole areas of the past off-limits because they can only be presented in politically unfashionable terms any more than they should fail to draw object lessons from a past that was frequently less than pleasant and less than honourable. Because the past was not perfect, it must not be made perfect today.

In my native valley of the middle Dniester, gentry spoke Polish, peasants — Ukrainian, officials — Russian with the Odessa accent, merchants — Jewish, carpenters and joiners — being Filippians and Old Believers — Russian with the Novogrod accent, the kabanists spoke in their own dialect. Additionally, in the same area there were also villages of Polish-speaking noblemen, and nobles who spoke Ukrainian, Moldovan villages speaking in Romanian; Gypsies speaking in Gypsy, Turks were no longer there, but in Khotyn, on the other side of the Dniester and in Kamieniec, their minarets were still standing...All these shades of nationality and languages were also in a semi-fluid state. Sons of Poles sometimes became Ukrainians, sons of Germans and French — Poles. In Odessa, unusual things happened: the Greeks became Russians, Poles were seen joining Soyuz Russkavo Naroda. Even stranger combinations arose from mixed marriages. ‘If a Pole marries a Russian woman,’ my father used to say, ‘their children are usually Ukrainians or Lithuanians’.

...Радість і спокій тримаються саме на великому логічному поєднанні тисячі нікому не потрібних, аномальних шизофренічних штук, які, сполучившись у щось єдине, дають тобі, врешті-решт, повне уявлення про те, що таке щастя, що таке життя, і головне — що таке смерть

Two types of sweets were served with the tea: one was varenya, a chunky jam chock-full of whole pieces of fruit, usually grapes. (Who had money for strawberries? my aunt Batsheva pointed out when she read a draft of this book.) The other was “herring tails,” as my grandfather called herring, which was to him—and now to me—better than any sweet the world over. Grandpa Aharon called it selyodka and told the following story about it: In the shop that his family had “back there” in Makarov, in Ukraine, “we sold products for the body, products for the soul, and products for between the two.” When I asked him what he meant by that, he explained. “Products for the body were axes and hoes and boots for the Ukrainian farmers. Products for the soul were tallises, tefillin, and prayer books for the Jews.” Then he fell silent and stared at me in order to get me to ask what the products in between the two were. “Grandpa,” I said, “and what were the products in between the two?” “In between the two,” he chuckled, “is selyodka, herring. It’s for both the body and the soul.

She was watching morning television on a local Phoenix affiliate, which had shoved recipes and fashion aside in favor of crime. One presenter was reporting on the fatal shooting of a suspected organized crime figure behind a downtown strip club, which involved much breathless speculation laid over meaningless pictures, mostly of the closed gate in the pink fence, above a ticker that said Moscow Comes to Phoenix, which Reacher figured would annoy Ukrainians everywhere, the two countries being entirely separate now, and proud of it, at least in one direction.

It’s funny, but when I talk about this business of my father and Valentina with my women friends, they’re absolutely appalled. They see a vulnerable old man who’s being exploited. Yet all the men I talk to—without any exception, Mike” (I wag my finger) “they respond with these wry knowing smiles, these little admiring chuckles. Oh, what a lad he is. What an achievement, pulling this much younger bird. Best of luck to him. Let him have his bit of fun.” “You must admit, it’s done him good.” “I don’t admit anything.” (It’s much less satisfying arguing with Mike than with Vera or Pappa. He’s always so irritatingly reasonable.) “Are you sure you’re not just being a bit puritanical?” “Of course I’m not!” (So what if I am?) “It’s because he’s my father—I just want him to be grown up.” “He is being grown up, in his way.” “No he’s not, he’s being a lad. An eighty-four-year-old lad. You’re all being lads together. Wink wink. Nudge nudge. What a great pair of knockers. For goodness’ sake!” My voice has risen to a shriek. “But you can see it’s doing him good, this new relationship. It’s breathed new life into him. Just goes to show that you’re never too old for love.” “You mean for sex.” “Well, maybe that as well. Your Dad is just hoping to fulfil every man’s dream—to lie in the arms of a beautiful younger woman.” “Every man’s dream?” That night Mike and I sleep in separate beds.

Dead on time. Not late at all. He was small, white as a sheet, thin as a specter, always moving, even when he was still. The twenty-nine-year-old veteran. He was dressed all in black. He saw Westwood and headed over. He nodded three ways and sat down. He said, “The Valley likes irony, but you got to agree happy hour in a Soviet shrine is the ultimate contradiction in terms. And speaking of the former USSR, my blog alerts tell me a Ukrainian named Merchenko was a mob hit last night. Which is a happy coincidence. But he will be replaced. The market will fill the void. So I’m still not going public.

Діти, перед вами білочка, ворог лісів. (Зоя Жорівна підключає білочку до штепселя і продовжує розповідати.) Нервове посмикування білочки – це живе свідоцтво міці нашого електричного струму, а також розплата за загублену білочкою тайгу. (Зоя Жорівна виключа білочку і кидає у вікно її обсмалені рештки.)

But I must tell you, comrade Lenin, that your assertion that the anarchists don’t understand ‘the present’ realistically, that they have no real connection with it and so forth, is fundamentally mistaken. The anarchist-communists in the Ukraine (or the ‘South of Russia’ to you communist-bolsheviks who try to avoid the word Ukraine), the anarchist-communists, I say, have already given many proofs that they are firmly pklanted in ‘the present’. The whole struggle of the revolutionary Ukrainian countryside against the Central Rada has been carried out under the ideological guidance of the anarchist-communists and also in part by the Socialist Revolutionaries (who, of course, have entirely different aims from the anarchist-communists in their struggle against the Central Rada). Your Bolsheviks have scarcely any presence in our villages. Where they have penetrated, their influence is minimal. Almost all the communes or peasant associations in the Ukraine were formed at the instigation of the anarchist-communists. The armed struggle of the working people against the counter-revolution in general and the Austro-German invasion in particular has been undertaken with the ideological and organic guidance of the anarchist-communists exclusively.

It is the same kind of deep internal disgust that takes hold of me when I see a rich eighty-two-year-old man surrounded with “babes,” twentysomething mistresses (often Russian or Ukrainian). I am not here to live forever, as a sick animal. Recall that the antifragility of a system comes from the mortality of its components—and I am part of that larger population called humans. I am here to die a heroic death for the sake of the collective, to produce offspring (and prepare them for life and provide for them), or eventually, books—my information, that is, my genes, the antifragile in me, should be the ones seeking immortality, not me.

Berta, like so many Great Russians, thought of Kiev and the surrounding provinces as a Russian outpost: provincial, backward, but Russified to some extent. She had a respect for both the Polish and German influences there, but agreed with the authorities that the Ukrainian culture and language had little to offer. It was banned in the schools and in the government institutions and was thought to be the purlieu of reprobates, lazy slum dwellers, and rustics. Berta was born in Little Russia, a small fact that she never bothered to share with anyone of consequence. She was a Great Russian, as anyone could see by her fierce accomplishments, tasteful dress, and overall refinement.

We used to pay too little attention to utopias, or even disregard them altogether, saying with regret they were impossible of realisation. Now indeed they seem to be able to be brought about far more easily than we supposed, and we are actually faced by an agonising problem of quite another kind: how can we prevent their final realisation? ... Utopias are more realisable than those 'realist politics' that are only the carefully calculated policies of office-holders, and towards utopias we are moving. But it is possible that a new age is already beginning, in which cultured and intelligent people will dream of ways to avoid ideal states and to get back to a society that is less 'perfect' and more free.

In a certain sense the country of ‘Russia’ as such did not exist: it had for centuries been an empire, whether in fact or in aspiration. Spread across eleven time zones and encompassing dozens of different peoples, ‘Russia’ had always been too big to be reduced to a single identity or common sense of purpose.14 During and after the Great Patriotic War the Soviet authorities had indeed played the Russian card, appealing to national pride and exalting the ‘victory of the Russian people’. But the Russian people had never been assigned ‘nationhood’ in the way that Kazakhs or Ukrainians or Armenians were officially ‘nations’ in Soviet parlance. There was not even a separate ‘Russian’ Communist Party. To be Russian was to be Soviet.

To celebrate the Russian/Ukrainian partnership, in 1954 the 300th anniversary of the Pereiaslav Treaty was marked throughout the Soviet Union in an unusually grandiose manner. In addition to numerous festivities, myriad publications, and countless speeches, the Central Committee of the all-union party even issued thirteen "thesis", which argued the irreversibility of the "everlasting union" of the Ukrainians and the Russians: "The experience of history has shown that the way of fraternal union and alliance chosen by the Russians and Ukrainians was the only true way. The union of two great Slavic peoples multiplied their strength in the common struggle against all external foes, against serf owners and the bourgeoisie, again tsarism and capitalist slavery. The unshakeable friendship of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples has grown and strengthened in this struggle." To emphasize the point that the union with Moscow brought the Ukrainians great benefits, the Pereiaslav anniversary was crowned by the Russian republic's ceding of Crimea to Ukraine "as a token of friendship of the Russian people." But the "gift" of the Crimea was far less altruistic than it seemed. First, because the peninsula was the historic homeland of the Crimean Tatars whom Stalin had expelled during the Second World War, the Russians did not have the moral right to give it away nor did the Ukrainians have the right to accept it. Second, because of its proximity and economic dependence on Ukraine, the Crimea's links with Ukraine were naturally greater than with Russia. Finally, the annexation of the Crimea saddled Ukraine with economic and political problems. The deportation of the Tatars in 1944 had created economic chaos in the region and it was Kiev's budget that had to make up loses. More important was the fact that, according to the 1959 census, about 860,000 Russians and only 260,000 Ukrainians lived in the Crimea. Although Kiev attempted to bring more Ukrainians into the region after 1954, the Russians, many of whom were especially adamant in rejecting any form of Ukrainization, remained the overwhelming majority. As a result, the Crimean "gift" increased considerably the number of Russians in the Ukrainian republic. In this regard, it certainly was an appropriate way of marking the Pereiaslav Treaty.

University, organized on the Soviet system, was just like high school: daily classes from 9-2 p.m., daily written assignments; attendance strictly kept, no choice of courses beside the major. We studied Ukrainian, Russian grammar as well as literature. It sounds ridiculous, but we learned spelling in one lesson and had to read Pushkin, in the original text, next period. The same was repeated with Ukrainian spelling, grammar and also the reading of poetry by Taras Shevchenko. That was similar to learning the verbs to be or to have and read also Shakespeare. (Actually, that was how I learned English in 1938.) The subjects that were most important: History of the Party and Dialectic Materialism. That had to be learned the way they explained it and no questions should be asked; no doubts were permitted.

Окреслення "українська" стосовно всієї мови є зовсім недавнім: Закарпаття ледве чи користувалося ним до 1938 р. Бувши первісно реґіональною (тобто вживаною на позначення козацьких земель), ця назва ступнево набула загального поширення, частково з огляду на відіграну козаками роль в історії країни, починаючи з ХVІ ст., а частково через те, що від половини XVII ст., коли українці почали частіше стикатися з росіянами, стала потрібною нова назва для країни та її мови. Перед тим мова, що тепер зветься українською, була відома як 'руська'. Однак ця назва почала вносити плутанину, відколи Україну було приєднано до Росії, бо й росіяни позначали свою мову прикметником 'русский'. Після певного періоду вагань, під час якого мову України намагалися відрізнювати від російської за допомогою термінів на кшталт 'югоруський', 'малоруський' тощо, окреслення "український" урешті перемогло, піднісшися від реґіонального до загальнонародного статусу.

The Sarcophagus needed the strength to withstand Ukrainian weather for an estimated 20 years - time to develop a more permanent solution - and contain the astronomical levels of radiation within. Erecting the enclosure involved a quarter of a million workers, all of whom reached their lifetime maximum dose. In order for the Sarcophagus to be built, the radioactive graphite and reactor fuel first had to be cleared up and buried, so remote control bulldozers were brought in from West Germany, Japan and Russia to dig up the earth. Workers had originally piled up rubble at the base of Unit 4 and poured concrete straight onto it, intending to seal in the radiation, but that didn’t last long. “Geysers are starting to shoot up from the wet concrete. When the liquid falls on the fuel in the pile, there is an atomic excursion or simply a disruption of heat exchange and a rise in temperature. The radiation situation deteriorates sharply”, reported Vasiliy Kizima, chief of the construction project at the time.229

The Soviets were content to give Hitler the green light for an assault on Poland because they saw ways of capitalizing on it. German forces invaded Poland on September 1, and as expected, Britain and France issued an ultimatum that two days later led them to declare war on Germany.17 The Kremlin had wanted to coordinate with Berlin regarding plans for the attack on Poland, but given the shocking speed of the German advance, it had no time. Poland was already in the throes of defeat on September 17 when the Red Army ignobly invaded from the east. Stalin relished finally getting into Poland, for the initial Bolshevik crusade to bring revolution to Berlin, Paris, and beyond had ended at the gates of Warsaw in August 1920. At that time Polish forces had stopped and encircled the Red Army, taken more than 100,000 prisoners, and begun driving out the invaders until an armistice was reached in October. Poland celebrated the great battle as the “Miracle on the Vistula,” but now in 1939 the Red Army was back. Poland, Stalin said in early September, had “enslaved” Ukrainians, Byelorussians, and other Slavs, and when it fell, the world would have “one less bourgeois fascist state. Would it be so bad,” he asked his cronies rhetorically, “if we, through the destruction of Poland, extended the socialist system to new territories and nations?”18

Чорт, мене це завжди дратує, в сенсі коли я бачу, що до мене, виявляється, теж хтось жив, і на відміну від мене жив справжнім життям, їв сніданки, займався сексом, може, навіть любив когось, ходив на ринки і в магазини, купував не те, що зміг, а те, що хотів, кетчуп, мав роботу, спілкувався з різними людьми, носив одяг, який йому подобався, їздив у відпустку, у нього була справжня відпустка, їздив на пікніки, вмів готувати, смачно готував різні штуки і навіть не їв їх, кетчуп, кетчуп, коли хворів, лікувався не лише водкою, а мав якісь ліки, домашню аптечку, знайомих лікарів, в обідню перерву міг зайти до ресторану, причому не для того, щоби випити, а щоби перекусити, мав улюблені страви, улюблені, блядь, спеції, кетчуп, кетчуп, кетчуп, а де в цей час був я? чому тут не було мене, серед всіх їхніх шаф і диванів, политих кетчупом і цитриновим соком, чому мене ніхто не всиновив, скажімо, тоді, як я кілька діб жив на автовокзалі і спав на дерев'яних кріслах, або коли я кілька діб харчувався кип'ятком, зрештою, чому мене зараз ніхто не всиновлює, чому мене цей підар всиновити не може? Я був би сином підарського полку, мені вже 19, я вже достатньо самостійний, я не потребую постійної уваги, мені не треба міняти підгузники і мене не потрібно годувати кашею — так, якийсь мінімальний харч, тепла вода, туалетний папір, порнофільми по відео, тьолки на кухні, конопля на балконі, але навіть це не головне, головне, щоби була батьківська увага, нормальна і постійна батьківська увага, справжня батьківська увага, як по телевізору.

I got back into my car and followed the trucks; at the end of the road, the Polizei unloaded the women and children, who rejoined the men arriving on foot. A number of Jews, as they walked, were singing religious songs; few tried to run away; the ones who did were soon stopped by the cordon or shot down. From the top, you could hear the gun bursts clearly, and the women especially were starting to panic. But there was nothing they could do. The condemned were divided into little groups and a noncom sitting at a table counted them; then our Askaris took them and led them over the brink of the ravine. After each volley, another group left, it went very quickly. I walked around the ravine by the west to join the other officers, who had taken up positions above the north slope. From there, the ravine stretched out in front of me: it must have been some fifty meters wide and maybe thirty meters deep, and went on for several kilometers; the little stream at the bottom ran into the Syrets, which gave its name to the neighborhood. Boards had been placed over this stream so the Jews and their shooters could cross easily; beyond, scattered pretty much everywhere on the bare sides of the ravine, the little white clusters were multiplying. The Ukrainian “packers” dragged their charges to these piles and forced them to lie down over them or next to them; the men from the firing squad then advanced and passed along the rows of people lying down almost naked, shooting each one with a submachine bullet in the neck; there were three firing squads in all. Between the executions some officers inspected the bodies and finished them off with a pistol. To one side, on a hill overlooking the scene, stood groups of officers from the SS and the Wehrmacht. Jeckeln was there with his entourage, flanked by Dr. Rasch; I also recognized some high-ranking officers of the Sixth Army. I saw Thomas, who noticed me but didn’t return my greeting. On the other side, the little groups tumbled down the flank of the ravine and joined the clusters of bodies that stretched farther and farther out. The cold was becoming biting, but some rum was being passed around, and I drank a little. Blobel emerged suddenly from a car on our side of the ravine, he must have driven around it; he was drinking from a little flask and shouting, complaining that things weren’t going fast enough. But the pace of the operations had been stepped up as much as possible. The shooters were relieved every hour, and those who weren’t shooting supplied them with rum and reloaded the clips. The officers weren’t talking much; some were trying to hide their distress. The Ortskommandantur had set up a field kitchen, and a military pastor was preparing some tea to warm up the Orpos and the members of the Sonderkommando. At lunchtime, the superior officers returned to the city, but the subalterns stayed to eat with the men. Since the executions had to continue without pause, the canteen had been set up farther down, in a hollow from which you couldn’t see the ravine. The Group was responsible for the food supplies; when the cases were broken open, the men, seeing rations of blood pudding, started raging and shouting violently. Häfner, who had just spent an hour administering deathshots, was yelling and throwing the open cans onto the ground: “What the hell is this shit?” Behind me, a Waffen-SS was noisily vomiting. I myself was livid, the sight of the pudding made my stomach turn. I went up to Hartl, the Group’s Verwaltungsführer, and asked him how he could have done that. But Hartl, standing there in his ridiculously wide riding breeches, remained indifferent. Then I shouted at him that it was a disgrace: “In this situation, we can do without such food!

During the Russia-NATO Council session in Bucharest in April 2008, Putin called Ukraine “a complex state formation. If the NATO issue is added there,” he said, “along with other problems, this may bring Ukraine to the verge of existence as a sovereign state.” Later during the same summit, in a discussion with U.S. President George Bush, Putin said that Ukraine was “not a real country.” This is clearly light-years away from the “common principles” laid down in the Founding Act, signed by Russia and the members of NATO in 1997, in which Russia had recognized the inherent right of all countries “to choose the means to ensure their own security.” Putin’s declaration was a scarcely veiled threat that Russia would intervene if Ukraine decided to join NATO. Doubts on Ukraine’s viability as a sovereign state were expressed on many occasions by leading Russians. On March 16, 2009, the Kremlin ideologue Gleb Pavlovsky wrote in the Russkiy Zhurnal, a Russian online magazine of which he is the owner, an article titled: “Will Ukraine Lose Its Sovereignty?” This article was followed four days later by an interview with Sergey Karaganov, the éminence grise of the Russian foreign policy community and head of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. This article had the title: “No One Needs Monsters. Desovereignization of Ukraine.” Karaganov depicted Ukraine as a failed state that was in a process of “passive desovereignization.” The process was, however, not only “passive.” Karaganov warned that “Russia will not want to see absolutely ungovernable territories close by.” Yuriy Shcherbak, former Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, wrote in response: “In military language it is called the ideological-propagandistic support of the future operation on capturing the territory of a sovereign state.” In fact, Russian politicians continued to denounce Ukraine as an “artificial” country that had no right to exist. At the height of the financial crisis Valery Fadeyev, editor of the political journal Ekspert, wrote: “Ukraine is cheap, we can buy it.” It sounded less aggressive, almost as a joke, but it expressed the same contempt for Russia’s neighbor and its status as an independent, sovereign state [239―40].

Десь далеко-далеко, на Сході республіки, зовсім поруч із державним кордоном, небо пахне ранковим лісом, пахне, зовсім по-особливому, брезентовими наметами і сосновими гілками, що кладуть на ці намети свої важкі лапи. Я йду довгою-довгою лісовою доріжкою, ліворуч від мене і праворуч від мене — високі і теплі сосни, які зігрівають своїм диханням пісок навколо себе, і повітря, і ранковий суботній ліс, і птахів, що трапляються час від часу, і загалом — усе це небо, і, очевидно, державний кордон — сосни це такі собі батарейки, котрі пустили коріння, якраз вздовж ріки, ріку видно за стовбурами ліворуч, і ми йдемо вздовж ріки, власне ми йдемо вгору, проти руху води, мені шість років, я дуже люблю ліс і ріку, а головне — я люблю вікенд, мені цілком зрозуміло, що сосни на вікенд особливо теплі, а небо — особливо мирне. На мені якась дурацька футболка і дурацькі шорти, і запилені сандалети, якими я буцаю соснові шишки, підіймаючи хмарки ранкового пилу, тоді моя подружка повертається до мене і просить, аби я заспокоївся і такого не робив. Моїй подружці 16, вона погодилась зі мною погуляти, власне, її попросили мої батьки, котрі товаришують із її батьками, вони всі залишились на річковому пляжі, сидять собі і готують салати зі свіжої вологої городини, плавають у ранковій ріці, попереду цілий вікенд, тож вони займаються своїми нецікавими дорослими справами, натомість я знайшов серед сосен доріжку і моя знайома без особливого, слід завважити, бажання, повела мене по ній, так, щоби я врешті пройшовся і заткнувся і вже нікого не діставав, хоча вона до мене добре ставиться, вірніше, це я за нею постійно тягаюсь, але вона тримається доволі добре і особливих претензій до мене не висловлює — так лише — аби не здіймав пил, аби не хапав її за руки, одне слово — не поводив себе як дебіл. Мені подобається пісок під ногами, мені подобається мокра трава на піску, мені подобаються сосни, в яких тривожно перетікають електрони, мені подобаються крикливі безтурботні птахи на високих соснових гілках, мені подобається небо, тому що воно тягнеться далеко-далеко і ніколи не закінчується, це мені подобається найбільше, я дуже люблю, коли щось ніколи не закінчується, і небо саме з таких речей, мені подобається, що ця доріжка теж не закінчується, теж тягнеться без кінця проти руху води, то наближаючись до неї, то знову закочуючись за стовбури, нарешті моя знайома не витримує, добре, каже, пішли скупаємось і назад, я намагаюсь виторгувати в неї ще з півкілометра, але вона говорить — досить, купатись і назад, і я змушений із цим змиритись. Вона сходить зі стежки і йде просто до води, я намагаюсь не відставати, йду слідом і розглядаю її чорний блискучий купальник, такі тоді, в кінці 70-х, саме були в моді, її купальник особливий — по його чорному тлу розсипані жовті, червоні та помаранчеві листки, справжній листопад, хоча в листопаді, здається, ніхто і не купається, але в неї справжній падолист на тілі, і тіло в неї — красиве й міцне, їй дуже пасує це листя, це навіть я у свої 6 розумію, інакше б я за нею не йшов, вода ще не встигла прогрітись, берег порожній і прохолодний, моя подружка підрулює до води і починає поступово в неї входити, я дивлюсь, як під водою зникають її стопи, її високі тьмяні литки, її коліна, її стегна, врешті вона падає на поверхню води, топлячи в ній все своє листя — і жовте, і червоне, і помаранчеве, і повертається до мене — давай, кричить, давай, іди сюди, холодно, кажу я з берега, перестань, кричить вона, нічого не холодно, іди сюди, вона випливає на середину ріки, течія починає зносити її вниз, і я раптом лякаюсь, що ось її понесе вниз, а я залишусь тут сам й буду стояти на цьому березі нікому не потрібний, перед холодною глибокою водою, котра тече невідомо куди, і я не витримую і стрибаю у воду, навіть забувши, що не вмію плавати, і рухаюсь до неї, вона мене помічає і починає підпливати до берега, я б'ю по воді руками, намагаючись не захлинутись ще на мілкому.

THIS IS MY ABC BOOK of people God loves. We’ll start with . . .           A: God loves Adorable people. God loves those who are Affable and Affectionate. God loves Ambulance drivers, Artists, Accordion players, Astronauts, Airplane pilots, and Acrobats. God loves African Americans, the Amish, Anglicans, and Animal husbandry workers. God loves Animal-rights Activists, Astrologers, Adulterers, Addicts, Atheists, and Abortionists.           B: God loves Babies. God loves Bible readers. God loves Baptists and Barbershop quartets . . . Boys and Boy Band members . . . Blondes, Brunettes, and old ladies with Blue hair. He loves the Bedraggled, the Beat up, and the Burnt out . . . the Bullied and the Bullies . . . people who are Brave, Busy, Bossy, Bitter, Boastful, Bored, and Boorish. God loves all the Blue men in the Blue Man Group.           C: God loves Crystal meth junkies,           D: Drag queens,           E: and Elvis impersonators.           F: God loves the Faithful and the Faithless, the Fearful and the Fearless. He loves people from Fiji, Finland, and France; people who Fight for Freedom, their Friends, and their right to party; and God loves people who sound like Fat Albert . . . “Hey, hey, hey!”           G: God loves Greedy Guatemalan Gynecologists.           H: God loves Homosexuals, and people who are Homophobic, and all the Homo sapiens in between.           I: God loves IRS auditors.           J: God loves late-night talk-show hosts named Jimmy (Fallon or Kimmel), people who eat Jim sausages (Dean or Slim), people who love Jams (hip-hop or strawberry), singers named Justin (Timberlake or Bieber), and people who aren’t ready for this Jelly (Beyoncé’s or grape).           K: God loves Khloe Kardashian, Kourtney Kardashian, Kim Kardashian, and Kanye Kardashian. (Please don’t tell him I said that.)           L: God loves people in Laos and people who are feeling Lousy. God loves people who are Ludicrous, and God loves Ludacris. God loves Ladies, and God loves Lady Gaga.           M: God loves Ministers, Missionaries, and Meter maids; people who are Malicious, Meticulous, Mischievous, and Mysterious; people who collect Marbles and people who have lost their Marbles . . . and Miley Cyrus.           N: God loves Ninjas, Nudists, and Nose pickers,           O: Obstetricians, Orthodontists, Optometrists, Ophthalmologists, and Overweight Obituary writers,           P: Pimps, Pornographers, and Pedophiles,           Q: the Queen of England, the members of the band Queen, and Queen Latifah.           R: God loves the people of Rwanda and the Rebels who committed genocide against them.           S: God loves Strippers in Stilettos working on the Strip in Sin City;           T: it’s not unusual that God loves Tom Jones.           U: God loves people from the United States, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates; Ukrainians and Uruguayans, the Unemployed and Unemployment inspectors; blind baseball Umpires and shady Used-car salesmen. God loves Ushers, and God loves Usher.           V: God loves Vegetarians in Virginia Beach, Vegans in Vietnam, and people who eat lots of Vanilla bean ice cream in Las Vegas.           W: The great I AM loves will.i.am. He loves Waitresses who work at Waffle Houses, Weirdos who have gotten lots of Wet Willies, and Weight Watchers who hide Whatchamacallits in their Windbreakers.           X: God loves X-ray technicians.           Y: God loves You.           Z: God loves Zoologists who are preparing for the Zombie apocalypse. God . . . is for the rest of us. And we have the responsibility, the honor, of letting the world know that God is for them, and he’s inviting them into a life-changing relationship with him. So let ’em know.