For centuries, Ukrainian culture learned to endure better than anything else. It was a mastery of submission as a form of survival. A millennial strategy of concealment: keep the grain under the snow, do not stand out, wait for spring, exhale the word “after.” This security code is written into the body like an instinct.
There was a precise moment when this code stopped working. It happened where the boundary between survival and disappearance blurred. You can preserve the territory, the language, and the genetics, but lose the source. You can survive but turn into an empty shell.
For centuries, Ukraine was convenient chernozem (black soil). Polish nobility, Russian messianism, Soviet utopianism – we allowed these ideologies to grow on our land. Not out of love, but out of that same instinct for preservation. We were a landscape upon which someone else’s history took place.
But now, something has happened that does not fit into any familiar plot: we have ceased to be the soil. We have become a force that gives names.
Ukraine today bursts into the sterile space of the “end of history” civilization with its will to reality. We no longer wait for someone to explain to us who we are. The position of an object accepting foreign meanings is in the past. Now, we are becoming the source – a place where meanings are born that could not have been calculated in cozy offices. Our chaos proves more viable than their order.
The world expects clear reactions from us. It wants us to fit into ready-made cages: either a victim to be pitied or a hero to be admired. These are convenient scenarios for a foreign conscience. But subjectivity begins where you refuse to be an illustration for a textbook.
This happens on every level. When a city burns, and we continue to turn sentences inside out, seeking not comfort, but a precise definition. When death becomes the background, and shame is caused not by pain, but by the insufficient depth of one’s own thought. It looks like madness or a terminal form of contempt for circumstances, but it is the only form of presence that is not a betrayal of the source.
The civilization of comfort is used to the idea that cultures in catastrophe must either howl in despair or scream in rage. They have no right to sophistication. They have no right to an irony that hits harder than a shell. They have no right to think about meanings while waiting for evacuation.
But we think.
And this is not heroism. It is a fact: we have too much excess for fear to order it. Destruction did not kill this excess – it sharpened it, stripped our language of everything superfluous. This will to create did not arise in spite of pain. It arose from it.
The greatest danger today is not death. The danger is becoming understandable.
Remaining at the level of flat rage or predictable trauma. If we become only a reflection of someone else’s expectation – a heroic function or a surviving victim – we will disappear. We will cease to be the source and again become soil on which others will build their explanations of the world.
That is why we choose to be complex where the world demands simplicity.
When everything quiets down, there will not just be victory or defeat left here. There will be proof that even at the core of hell, we continued to give names. A culture that for millennia learned to survive through patience has finally begun to create through excess.
Not because we became stronger than others. But because any other version of us is no longer us. It is simply an empty space filled with someone else’s dead expectation.