Don't Worry Everyone, We Are Not Suicidal (mostly). The River One Song Ends With "Я річку шукати

Why Ukrainians didn’t produce a Tolstoy?

there are a lot of things that can piss me off, today it was this tweet:

and all i wanted to do was to ask this person, why the fuck do we need a racist misogynistic piece of shit as a standout author if we have Shevchenko as our prophet?

but you don’t know who he is? of course, you don’t. that is the thing with imperialism: you destroy other cultures while promoting yours as the only way to legitimise your rule. even if those territories are of higher cultural development. but there is always a way out of it: kill them all. kill anyone who poses an existential threat to your hegemony. throw them into jail. forbid them to write and paint. send them to gulag. kill them. torture them. execute them.

if you don’t know Ukrainian literature, it doesn’t mean that it‘s nonexistent. if you don’t know "a Ukrainian Tolstoy", it means there is a Ukrainian Bahrianyi, who was sent to the gulag but ran away and was the first person in the world to openly criticise USSR in his pamphlet Why I am not going back to the Soviet Union. "I don't want to go back to the USSR because a person there is worth less than an insect"

there is a Ukrainian Symonenko and a Ukrainian Stus. there is a Ukrainian Lesya Ukrainka and Olha Kobylyanska. a Ukrainian Kotsiubynskyi, Ukrainian Drach, Ukrainian Olena Pchilka and Ukrainian Lina Kostenko. and so many more of the bravest people who despite all wrote in the Ukrainian language about Ukrainian people and for Ukrainian people.

there are thousands of beautiful texts that weren’t translated because this would’ve harmed the empire. that is why you are reading Dostoevsky and not Khvyliovyi.

but there are also thousands of texts that were never written. just how many more poems would’ve Stus written if he wasn’t killed by the Soviet regime? how many more texts would have Pidmohylnyi, Semenko, Yalovyi, Yohansen, Zerov written if they weren’t shot at Sandarmokh?

just have many texts have the world missed out on because Khvyliovyi committed suicide as he couldn’t live in the world with Stalin’s repressions. "today is a beautiful sunny day. I love life - you can't even imagine how much", - he will write in his death note as he shot himself with his friends waiting for him in the next room.

or maybe there was a Ukrainian Nobel Prize in Literature waiting for Tychyna? maybe, but he submitted to Soviet authorities and started writing hails for the regime, suddenly forgetting his own literary style and living his entire life in fear. fear of what? fear of getting caught. of getting destroyed just as all of the previous Ukrainian intelligentsia.

I’m tired of my people being silenced. I’m tired of my poets being undermined by "great” russian literature. it’s not worth a single Symonenko’s poem. it’s not worth a single paragraph of Bahrianyi‘s prose.

the greatness of russian literature lies on the bones of Ukrainian writers. to be this high, they killed hundreds and they are still doing it today.

the body of Ukrainian children’s writer Volodymyr Vakulenko was found in the mass grave in Izium in September 2022.

there will be a Ukrainian Nobel Prize in Literature, and there will be more Ukrainian books. there will be Ukrainian Zhadan and Zabuzhko, Liubka and Izdryk, Sord and Kidruk. there will be Ukrainian literature.

another funny thing is that this person is Indian and let me tell you: the fact that you stand up for one empire even when your own country has suffered from the doings of another is evidence of deep colonial trauma and I hope you will cure yourself soon

Oh no. Now I'm on that level of desperation when I decided to wrote original story about OC-elf because I want some dark folklore story with all that folk shit (stolen kids, stolen wives and husbands, unfair favors, charmed people washing your dirty plates for 500 years, yeah, THIS stuff) and nobody understands. I can't find a role player who would play this with me, I have nobody to talk about it... But I want it so bad. Ugh. I'll just write this story in a google-doc and no one will see it...

But... Just why. Why I'm always into something specific that nobody likes. Why not kpop lol...

What Ukrainians ate to survive Holodomor

(translated excerpts from an Історична Правда article): + images source

The villagers would dig up the holes of the polecats to find at least a handful of grain hidden by these animals. They pounded it in a mortar, added a handful of oilcake (from hemp seed), beetroot, potato peelings, and baked something from this mixture.

Those who managed to hide at least a little grain would grind it in iron mills made from wheel axles and cook "zatyrukha" (a concoction made from a small amount of flour ground from ears of grain).

Acacia flowers were boiled and eaten raw, and green quinoa was mixed with crushed corn cobs. Those who could - and this was considered lucky - added a handful of bran. This food made their feet swell and their skin crack.

The peasants dried the husked ears of corn and millet husks, pounded them, ground them with weeds, and cooked soups and baked pancakes. Such dishes were impossible to chew, the body could not digest them, so people had stomach aches. Pancakes, the so-called "matorzhenyky", were made from oilcake and nettle or plantain.

It went so far that peasants would crumble straw into small chips and pound it in a mortar together with millet and buckwheat chaff, and tree bark. All this was mixed with potato peelings, which were very poisonous, and this mixture was used to bake "bread", the consumption of which caused severe stomach diseases.

There were cases when village activists took away and broke millstones, mortars, poured water on the heat in their ovens. After all, anything found or saved from the food had to be cooked on fire, and matches could only be purchased by bartering for their own belongings or by buying them in the city, which was impossible from villagers that were on "black lists".

Chestnuts, aspen and birch bark, buds, reed roots, hawthorn and rose hips, which were the most delicious, were used as food substitutes; various berries, even poisonous ones, were picked; grass seeds were ground into flour; "honey" from sugar beets was cooked, and water brewed with cherry branches was drunk. They also ate the kernels of sunflower seeds.

Newborns had the worst of it, because their mothers had no breast milk. According to testimonies, a mother would let her child suck the drink from the top of the poppy head, and the child would fall asleep for three days.

In early spring, the villagers began to dig up old potato fields. They would bake dumplings from frozen potatoes, grind rotten potatoes in a mash and make pancakes, greasing the frying pan with wheel grease. They also baked "blyuvaly" (transl. "vomities") from such potatoes and oatmeal mixed with water, which was so called because they were very smelly.

They ate mice, rats, frogs, hedgehogs, snakes, beetles, ants, worms, i.e. things that weren't a part of food bans and had never been eaten by people before. The horror of the famine is also evidenced by the consumption of spiders, which are forbidden to kill in Ukrainian society for ritual reasons.

In some areas, slugs were boiled into a soup, and the cartilaginous meat was chopped and mixed with leaves. This prevented swelling of the body and contributed to survival. People caught tadpoles, frogs, lizards, turtles, and mollusks. They boiled them, adding a little salt if there was salt. The starving people caught cranes, storks, and herons, which have been protected in Ukraine for centuries, and their nests were never destroyed. According to folk beliefs, eating stork meat was equated with cannibalism.

The consumption of horse meat began in 1931, before the mass famine. People used to take dead horsemeat from the cemeteries at night, make jelly out of it and salt it for future use.

Dead horses were poured with carbolic acid to prevent people from taking their meat, but it hardly stopped anybody. Dead collective farm pigs were also doused with kerosene to prevent people from dismantling them for food, but this did not help either.

After long periods of starvatiom, the process of digestion is very costing for the human body, and many people who would eat anything would drop dead immediately out of exhaustion.

If a family had a cow hidden somewhere in the forest, they had a chance to survive. People living near forests could hunt/seek out berries and mushrooms, but during winter this wouldn't save them. People living near rivers could fish in secret, but it was banned and punishable by imprisonment/death.

I hope you'll see it, @oldpaintings. What you've done here is not only rude and cruel, it's imperialistic of you to support cultural appropriationd and historical manipulation. By calling Ukrainian artist a Russian you support the cultural genoside. It's your choice as a human on which side you want to be - to support imperialistic ambitions of Russians, who want you to spread disinformation and allow them to steal others cultural inheritance, OR to call Ukrainian art Ukrainian.

By posting Ukrainian art as Russian, you are no better then thiefs. You are participating in it. And many people who'll see your post will believe this artist was Russian. And when it comes to cultutal appropriation, do you really want to participate in it? Do you really want to be one of oppressors, who are trying to erase culture and traditions?

It's just so sad, that when it comes to culture, you and many other trying to show 'Russian culture' with stolen art. If you appriciate Russian culture so much, why don't you post real Russian art? Why you post Ukrainian artist and call them Russian? It's not that you can't find Russian artists, it's something else, isn't it? Maybe hatred, maybe ignorance and cruelty. You just choose to support oppression. I really hope you'll see this post and if you did that just by mistake, I hope you'll have enough compassion to not be a part of cultural and phisical genoside.

Self-Portrait as Pierrot, 1911 by Zinaida Serebriakova (Russian, 1884--1967)

I got bored with my dark femboy, whom I was recreating in Souls games, so I created light femboy xD

It was such a good day for him, tho. Makeover, nice walk...

...bonding with donkey.

37th Ukrainian Fashion Week, Project “ORIGINS” (x)

The project combines traditional wear with modern details while paying the homage to Ukrainian culture, from its origins to its present. Project curators: gallery owner and art manager Maryna Shcherbenko, folklorist and ethnographer Marichka Kvitka.

You can never know

I just finished project dragon and want to memorize this 'cuz all this situation made me happy.

So, I had this dragon, Felis, for some time now.

Except he had another skin that didn't spark joy to me anymore for some reason. And now he wears this cool cute kitty-cat skin that can't be reprinted anymore because it's old and creator lost that image. So, there will be no new copies. And I wanted this skin so bad for so long, but never found someone who would sell it. I have come to terms with the fact that this is no longer possible. Untill this month. I maneged to buy it!!!!

And not just this one! I bought female version too! And now Felis have a sister, Felisia! She's so cuuute.

I finished her today. And I want to be happy about it!

Also, today I finally saw translation on Susanna Clarke's Piranesi to my native language. Can't wait to buy this book. Trying to find at least something to cheer myself.)

Alexandre Serebriakoff, watercolours of Château de Groussay (France). Serebriakoff (1907-1995) was a Ukrainian-born watercolour artist who lived and worked most of his life in France. He developed contacts with French and English high society, and made watercolour albums depicting the richly furnished interiors of French chateaux and London flats, so-called Zimmerbilden or portraits d'intérieur. It was once a popular and charming genre of art, of which older examples are often of interest for the cultural historian, but has faded from the mainstream. Serebriakoff was one of the last masters of the genre.

Pics from here, which also provides an interesting read.

bzzz-bzzz

What a cute little thing awww!

I like this new familiar so much! So tiny, so fluffy... and reminds me of Ukrainian flag!

Художник - Юрій Іванович Пацан.