Юрій Вовкогон Yurii Vovkohon

“Whenever fighting intensifies, people treat you like a hero. When fear subsides, well, they treat you like… I mean, after the revolution, I got it, at the end of the day, no one will take your problems too close to heart, so I didn’t have high hopes for the public. And fellows from the Armed Forces did say that when they returned to Lviv after their first tour, half of the city came out to welcome them, flowers and all. When they came back after their second, a year later, nothing. That’s how it goes. The way we roll, and nothing will change that. I knew it’d come to ‘Oh, we didn’t send you there, you were itching to go to war, so off to war you went.’ But anyway, it never bothered me. I knew what I had to do and why I was doing it. I only care about the opinions of people I respect and my closest friends. As a metal music fan from my teen years, I’m not one to seek validation from society, really.”

“Holding festivals and fighting war is probably the best way of creating a community. I’ve come to understanding that Ukraine was forged by poets and warriors. That’s how it is, really. If you have a crowd, you can turn it into a people only by shared emotions and shared thoughts, and that’s what culture does for you. And people… people need to feel support, connection, this unity, this, I don’t know, mutual trust, feeling of community — that’s what they get at festivals. Probably at soccer games, too. In uprisings and wars. TV, maybe, but it never did rise to the same level, and now it’s too disconnected actually to connect people as face-to-face interaction does. And so this air of unity, community, goodwill, that drew me in and that makes us one people — I felt it at the Weathervanes [Jazz Fest] and Sheshory [Music Fest] — at the large open-air events, where you take a sip of your beer and pass it on into the crowd and have a stranger hand you another. Of course, this is a way to spread not just culture but also germs, and yet, perhaps, that is also a way to bring in the unity of a vast community.”

“It was such a throwback. We even looked different from them (Donbas locals), and they themselves treated us as foreigners. Totally.” — “Were they hostile or just confused?” — “Both hostile and bewildered. And perhaps there was curiosity, and some understanding that we were on a different level culturally, and, because of that, some aggressiveness. Just like foreigners were probably treated in the Soviet Union back then or in Russia today. Oh, how’d they put it? ‘And who let you have this way of living well?’” — “How did Makiivka and Sevastopol compare?” — “Oh, they were quite different, first and foremost in the way of life. Also, different architecture and culture. Makiivka was such a shocker. I saw for the first time there when we went in — some of us stayed, some went about with a ballot box to visit elderly, shut-ins, and disabled people that couldn’t make it to the polling location — so I saw for the first time that apartment buildings could have firewood stockpiles next to it. People living in those apartments had potbelly stoves and had to bring in water and firewood. It was my first time seeing discarded syringes in the entrance hallways and seeing windows not with glass but with plastic sheeting. In high-rise apartment buildings. And by those tall buildings on the street were water hand pumps. And outhouses. Like in a village. In my mind, it was wild. And overall, this dullness and gloom… I had a feeling you could spend your life going to work, coming home, there and back, and just hang yourself one day without ever knowing why.”

“And the book that left the most profound mark on me is ‘White Mustang’ by Sat-Okh. It’s kinda… the story goes that this author is the son of a Native American chief and a Polish woman who, fleeing the Russian Empire, crossed the Bering Strait and was taken in by the Shawnee tribe. And these are the memories of this young Polish-Shawnee boy growing up among the Shawnee people. How they always were on the run from the Royal Mounties, who tried to move them to a reservation forcibly. And probably my own understanding of Ukraine’s history somehow mixed in with this feeling that we are just like those Native Americans, that our entire history is so alike to what they went through in their homeland. And that’s the only loot I took in Pisky in 2014 — this book that I found. It, too, was from a library, and I really, for quite a while, wanted to have this book. I found in a house, a destroyed house in Pisky — I found the book ‘White Mustang’. And that’s the only spoils I got for myself.”