In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Soldiers of the Invisible Front: How Ukrainian Therapists Are Fighting for the Mental Health of the Nation Under FireIrina Deyneka and Eva RegelIrina DeynekaWhen the Russian army attacked my country, I became a volunteer for a hotline offering psychological support to those in crisis; refugees, those who were under the shelling, those who were hiding in bomb shelters, and who were directly in the zone of fighting. People (...) were lost and disoriented by constant bombing, by the fact that their country was under attack. Once, I had a woman who lived in Mariupol on one of these calls. I was living then in another city, Odessa, but was experiencing the same horrors of war that my client was—the shelling, uncertainty, and despair. We were processing my client’s feelings of grief and anxiety when I heard the sirens on her end. I offered to stop our session so she could seek shelter. She told me she would not have time to find shelter and wanted to continue our meeting. And so, we continued... But soon, Odessa’s sirens broke the silence, and it was my turn to decide what to do; should I continue our session or try to find a bomb shelter for myself? I decided to stay because I thought that was the right thing to do morally, professionally, and personally.I eventually left Odessa, but only after a bomb destroyed a house next to mine, and I saw a family, my neighbors, perish in the destruction. I am now a member of one of Slovakia’s Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and work in a mobile brigade providing medical and psychological support to refugees. I can remember every one of my clients. Children, adults... I can remember their stories, their traumas, their memories of the horrors of war and devastation. Sometimes I meet with them only once, and they move on to another refugee center or are on their way to a Western part of Ukraine, trying to escape the war. And frequently, I do not know how many sessions I will be able to have with clients. Sometimes it is only one time, and sometimes we can meet for many months. Initially, I thought, What can I do in one therapy session? Now, I know that I can do a lot. I can provide people who survived the most inhuman conditions and witnessed death and destruction around them with a space and time to talk through and process their experiences. I am their support, and they lean on me as they try to make sense of what has happened to them and their country. I always tell my clients that my goal as a psychotherapist is to help them withstand, survive, and hold on while still being able to continue to function in a country at war. All I can do is treat each of the therapy sessions as our last one and try to provide as many strategies and skills as possible to cope with anxiety and depression, to be able to function, and to live in the present.Every session is about installing hope, moving slowly forward, and away from traumatic events. One of my clients, a 14-year-old boy, was diagnosed with a neurological condition, involuntary facial muscle spasm, or tics. He was barely talking when I first saw him, and I decided to use art therapy as a trauma-processing tool during one of the therapy sessions. He was drawing an explosion, fire, and destruction of his neighbor’s house. He blacked out the horrors of his experience to preserve his strength. Yet, he began slowly remembering his experiences, re-creating the story of his trauma, and making memories. I was fortunate to work with [End Page E4] him for many months, carefully and thoughtfully helping him re-create the sorry of his trauma, helping to become its witness. Ultimately, it was great to see that he could control his memories and his emotional stress; he felt empowered and in control.Eva RegelThis is the story of Irina Deyneka, one of many Ukrainian psychotherapists working in Ukraine, providing mental health support to a nation ravaged by... (shrink)

Purpose. To study the phenomenon of a woman-author as a subject of culture and philosophy from a development of literary aspect in the works both Western and Ukrainian scientists. To define the significance of the philosophical representation of the gender stereotypes to reconsider their place and role in the socio cultural discourse. Theoretical basis. To investigate the theoretical framework in the postmodern philosophy the cross-disciplinary approach is used. The comparative approach is methodologically important to clarify the problems concerning (...) a woman-author as a subject of culture. It is underlined that the boundary line between literature and philosophy is movable, which coincides with the shapes of the human experience. Based on the conviction that gender has integrated into all social relations, that means it is a gender context of any social interaction, it is important to emphasize the productivity of a new scientific methodology of sociocultural constructing of gender. Originality. Is in systematic literary analysis of Ukrainian and Western women’s prose as specific philosophical phenomenon. It was proved that the investigation of women’s literature, its identity is an important focus of both philosophy and culture, which helps find philosophical problems in literary texts. Besides the analysis of gender implications in texts allows to start theoretical dialogue on gender problems, which means the participation in the discussion about the targets of our cultural life. Conclusions. It has been proved that literature of the ХХ th -XXI st centuries is characterized by strengthening interaction between philosophical systems and literary works that reflects mainstreaming of intellectual and thinking bases. It was revealed that women’s philosophical and literary conceptions have created a unique woman’s world of being and an image of "a new woman", thus leading the way towards the new stereotypes based on comprehension that sex differences should not be determining factors both in cultural and social coexistence. (shrink)

In this article "The antinomy "man-woman" in the personal perspective of the formation of the individual religiosity of the Orthodox believer" by Anna Kulagina-Stadnychenko explores the antinomy of the phenomenon of "manwoman" from the point of view of theology and secular science, examines the peculiarities of its functioning at the level of individual religiosity of the Orthodox believer and in the Ukrainian context. Attention is drawn to several challenges that have always been the cornerstone of the collision of (...) alternative thoughts in solving the antinomy "man-woman." The significance of the latter for the Orthodox believer in view of finding the meaning of life, which is due to awareness of the individual finale of the person. It is shown that the category of reciprocity remains universal for the phenomenological understanding of the meaning of gender. However, unlike secular approaches, apologists of Christianity prefer to talk about the formation of gender identity, and not to look for differences between sexes. Instead, a scientific approach clearly distinguishes the gender identities. It was investigated that the distribution of gender roles is significantly influenced by cultural and religious traditions. Regarding the influence of Orthodoxy on the solution of antinomy "man - woman" in the formation of the individual religious faith of a believer in Ukraine, here the author defines certain features. Finally, it is argued that religious pluralism, the temporary integration of certain parts of Ukraine into other Western European states, led to the inclusion of different ideological models into the individual religiosity of an Orthodox believer, practically made it impossible for a strict patriarchal dependence, and thus, reduced the relationship between "man-woman" through more partnerships. (shrink)

Purpose. The purpose of this paper is to study the behaviour of women in extreme conditions, to establish various social roles of women, ways of their adaptation to extreme conditions on the example of Ukrainian anti-Nazi underground during Second World War. Theoretical basis. The authors derive from the fact that historical anhropology is a leading and promising area of historical research. Originality. For the first time, the authors have shown that in conditions of constant stress state and direct threat (...) to life and health, the behaviour of underground women was determined by adequate survival strategies, i.e. by the life circumstances and personal qualities of the underground members. Conclusions. Permanent existence on the verge of life and death often led women to emotional actions, deviant forms of behaviour. Their actions could be controversial, and the motives – confusing. At the same time, the majority of women left in the Soviet underground chose as a strategy of survival the path of confrontation with occupiers, held true to their choices, often showed courage, ingenuity and self-sacrifice. (shrink)

In the life of the Ukrainian people, women have always played an important role that went far beyond their motherly function - to give birth to children for the biological change of their generations. The Ukrainian woman in the full sense of the word acted as the guardian of her people, having a direct relation to the national self-identification of Ukrainians, because as a tutor of their children, they instilled in their souls positive psychological qualities for the (...) community. Given the expressive religiosity and national character of the Ukrainian woman, one can speak of her soteriological function in the life of the Ukrainian nation, because, thanks to her religion and her native church, the Ukrainian people were able, despite the difficult trials of fate, to preserve themselves as a full-fledged ethnic group capable of creating social levels. being. But, of course, it is not religion itself that saves someone from any troubles, but people as subjects of religiosity, who properly do the will of God toward themselves and their loved ones. (shrink)

The article is devoted to study of the modes of inheritance of cultural symbols. In particular, it is a research of perception in Christianity of preceding cultures’ archetypes. The study provides the analysis of semantic links between the symbols of the World Tree, the Vivifying Cross and the meaning of the Blessed Virgin image. The article shows how the pre-Christian symbols of the World Tree and the cross itself were merged and transformed in Christian theology, liturgy and iconography in the (...) image of Golgotha Cross. The cross acquires the features of a Cosmic Tree, which combines the lower and the upper worlds – the heaven and the earth, life and death. The symbol of the tree is often substituted by the image of a woman appearing in this case as a symbol of life and fertility and evokes the associations with the genealogical tree. Therefore, the connection between the World Tree and the Blessed Virgin is proved to be natural. On the basis of the historical sources the author analyzes the legends and evidences of the revelations and discoveries of the Blessed Mary’s icons on the trees of a certain kinds. The study explicates the symbolic meaning of those trees spread in a global world, in Slavic and Ukrainian cultural traditions. In particular, the research encloses the semantics of the following kinds of trees: fir tree, linden, pear tree, oak, willow, blackthorn. Every kind of those trees has a special symbolic meaning. The novelty of the research is that it for the first time proves the semantic connection of sacred meaning of miracle icons and of the certain kinds of trees. The study defines the limited range of those trees and, on the other hand, the kinds of other trees believed to be vile and thus never appeared in the legends about the discoveries of miracle icons. As a conclusion, the research proves the existence of the autochtonal tradition of correlation of the semantics of miracle icons of Our Lady with the certain kinds of trees in the result of synthesis of the ancient symbolism and Christianity. In every case, the symbolic meanings of trees had archaic origin and connection with the ancient cosmogonical concepts. Depending on the particular semantic nuance emphasized in the World Tree, the priority of a certain kind of tree determined. On the whole, the study demonstrates the importance of the symbols in forming of cultural identity and for understanding of interrelations of cultures at the deep semantic level. (shrink)

The use of gender in print media is poorly understood both at the level of the post-Soviet journalism studies and in the general context of social research. A similar situation is observed with regard to the study of the gender sphere of concepts, and at the postmodern stage of development of periodicals. Postmodern convergence of methodology and research objects of the humanities will make it necessary to study social and mass media phenomena from the point of view of linguistics, sociology (...) and journalism. This makes it relevant to study media issues of gender through links with language. The purpose of the work is to clarify the gender sphere of concepts in the study of Ukrainian periodicals for women and men. The article implements a combination of concrete-historical, structural-typological, system-functional methods. Descriptive and comparative methods, typology, modeling methods are used at different stages of work. The study used the method of content analysis to study the gender content of modern gender-labeled magazines. The article proves that the gender sphere of concepts is based on the basic gender macroconcepts “woman” and “man”. They are used in the periodicals under study in various proportions, depending on what roles are played by a woman or a man in society. It is from the balance, thoughtfulness, responsible selection of gender characteristics that are presented in gender-labeled periodicals that modern and future gender images are formed, the idea of ideal women and men, their needs, opportunities, responsibilities in the family, at work, and in general in all spheres of life. (shrink)

The article reveals the features of the contemporary periodicals conceptual sphere for women and men (based on examples from magazines of all-Ukrainian and regional purposes. The study made it possible to determine which interpretations of the concepts of "woman" and "man" can be found on the pages of modern gender-labeled periodicals, and thus analyze in detail the gender conceptual sphere through the prism of the specific characteristics of the concepts. The features of the use of gender concepts in (...) modern periodicals for women and men were determined. The most frequently used derivatives of these macroconcepts were identified and analyzed in detail. It has been found that publications for women and men are full of various gender concepts that are used in different contexts. In general, the analysis of the concept-maximums and concept-minimums of gender and their characteristics is carried out in the context of gender stereotypes that have been formed and function in the society, systematizing the actual presentations. (shrink)

The article examines the individualistic manifestations of the heroes of Lesia Ukrainka’s poetic dramas. The key point is focused on the confrontation between a free personality and a passive mob. The author draws parallels between Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Lesia Ukrainka’s individualistic manifestations, and describes how the Ukrainian poetess creates her own accounts of individualism, which are close to Nietzscheanism: anti-Christianity, will to power, acceptance of destiny, self-overcoming, etc. The main difference between the two thinkers consists in Lesia Ukrainka’s approach (...) when her ideas are expressed by a strong type of woman. (shrink)

Don't tell terrible stories—everyone here has enough of their own. Everyone here has a whole bloody sack of terrible stories, and at the bottom of the sack is a hammer the narrator uses to pound you on the skull the instant you dare not believe your ears. Or to pound you when you do believe. Not long ago I saw a tomboyish girl on Khreshchatyk Street demand money of an elderly woman, threatening to bite her and infect her with (...) syphilis. Don't stroll through Volodymyr Hill Park, don't stroll around the botanical garden, and especially don't stroll on Kontraktova Square. Don't stroll anywhere. Don't go to the pavilion with the Golgotha panorama near St. Alexander's Church. Not even the twelve-meter-tall crucified Christ will save you. Don't go outside when it's dark and people turn into shadows a shade darker than dark. Also don't go where you can be seen from far away. Not to imply that people used to be like a bunch of lilies, but now they stink like a cellar of cabbage.The city, which earlier might have had some fun, is now going crazy. It's like a fish in warm water: it doesn't react to anything, swims slowly like it doesn't care if it swallows a hook or not. The excitement and exaltation pass into oppression, just as our necks have sunk into our shoulders, our shoulders into our lumbars, our lumbars into our nether regions. The holiday turns into a funeral, the parades into explosions, depression into mania. Winter passes into summer, people turn into beasts, the hours into ages, and the ages into hours. It's worth simply walking around the city to see a soldier from an unknown army taking a piss near the opera. Farther on is a row of identical old widows selling ball gowns and candelabra. Then there are the aristocrats and manufacturers who throw so much at the prostitutes that they'll soon be richer than their wives.I returned late through the Kyryliv Wood, not heeding all the warnings that I myself have given here. It really is dangerous—the place is famous for it. There's a madhouse nearby, caves where criminals and the sick can hide out. Also, once upon a time, as they say in fairy tales, the great dragon Zmei Gorynich lived here beside the Puchai River. The stench in these places drives away the most committed misanthropes and even one type of philanthrope—that is, perverts. It sounds dumb, but the stench is cleansing. I don't know where it comes from. After the operating theaters and the rooms with amputees, the stench no longer repelled or attracted me; it just was. And this was a great place to think. As I walked, I considered an incident with our patient.The patient, a respectable individual whose name carries too much weight for me to state it directly, one day began to assault people. He nearly strangled a merchant who he believed asked too much for a beaver coat. He likewise wanted to kill his business partner when he didn't say hello loudly enough. But the worst was, he lost all shame of his own nakedness. At first it was the police who took care of it. When our future patient slipped off his pants and undergarments, he was taken to Kyrylivska, which has had means for dealing with such cases dating back to the day when unhinged Cossacks and composers from Kyiv Mohyla Academy were taken there.During the examination we determined that the patient was experiencing a severe breakdown. His wife added that lately, more than once, he had allowed himself strong words in front of the children and often suffered from ennui. Furthermore, she said, the patient had been undergoing treatment for “the French disease” for some years—which was, obviously, where we needed to start.“Syphilis!” Skorsky spat out the matchstick he was chewing on. He was a specialist on the psychological aspects of diseases related to the venereal. “Tertiary syphilis! When poorly treated, over time ‘the French disease’ can destroy the central nervous system. Hence the patient's chicanery. Such theater!”Skorsky and I had not spoken since the incident at Bilinsky's. Meanwhile, something significant had happened to him. The most boring person on earth, Skorsky had simply caught fire. He said hello and kibitzed. I even heard the doctor got drunk alone in his office, then wandered through the forest. Could he be using narcotic substances?“Cocaine!” was the doctor's second proclamation. It was his favorite treatment for the psychological complications of syphilis. Skorsky himself never took what he called “the universal drug”—good for alcoholism and toothaches, neuroses and morphine dependency—though he had read in an article by a respectable Viennese physician, who used cocaine as a panacea, that it was not addictive. That doctor subsequently recanted, but Skorsky paid no attention. He believed the retraction was made under pressure from pharmacologists who had no incentive to cease production of the medications that cocaine might supplant. Their representatives either paid or threatened the Viennese to repent.As the patient was escorted to his room, he assaulted the orderly, Alevtyna. They tried pulling him off her, but, though he released his fingers from her neck, he buried his teeth in her leg. The poor orderly, who had not until then been attacked by a psychotic, nearly died of fear. Later, panic set in over Skorsky's diagnosis. He told her about the consequences of syphilis: grotesque patterns on one's face due to infection of the skin, mucous membranes, cartilage, and bones. He went on about the devastation to the central nervous system, which they had just observed in real life: “The face starts to look like lace some mangy dogs fought over before rolling in the mud.”Alevtyna, who had not yet regained her faculty of speech, straightened up. Ignoring the slavering male orderlies, she bared her leg to get a better look at the wound. She then ran down the hall and out into the garden, where she fell on the ground to rip up grass and small bunches of daisies. Alevtyna ate them along with the soil in their roots.“Minor hysteria. She needs fifteen milligrams of cocaine.”Skorsky took a snuff box out of his pocket and scooped up some white powder with a toothpick made from a goose feather. He gave the order to close Alevtyna's mouth and one of her nostrils, forcing her to snort the medication.We fretted over her so long that evening fell. I decided to walk down, along the ravine, behind the church.It was unlikely there were any large beasts there, but something was rustling. The pits and mounds, ravines, paths, graves of witches whose living sisters flew in the treetops from time to time, the whispers of the forest spirits, the spirits of the nutcases who died in the hospital, the spirits of the monks from the St. Cyril Monastery, Zmei Gorynich and the bogatyrs who wanted to defeat him. The city would be calmer without this forest. I saw the gaps between the trees and went off in the direction of the tram tracks.As I was coming out of the forest, there was a patch of Amanita muscaria that had been trampled into porridge. A bit farther on, the body of Professor Bilinsky lay killed in the blackberry bushes. The way he was lying it looked as though he had not struggled before death. I quickly examined his body but saw nothing out of the ordinary. There were no wounds, no dirt under the fingernails. Animals had not yet smelled the carrion, but swarms of various insects covered him. Oh, why did I have to find the putrid body?The best thing would be to take the tram to his house to inform his relatives. The doors closed, and I noticed my own calm. This death had not evoked any emotions in me other than a feeling of responsibility, the need to tell the family. But also—some alarm at the thought of who the murderer could be. I knew that it was murder.“Your nose is bleeding.” A woman as round as an onion, carrying two baskets full of strawberries, offered me an ironed and starched handkerchief.“Have I dirtied my shirt?”“No, it's as neat as a pin. It's just your nose that's dirty. Wipe it now before you spray blood on my strawberries.”“No one will see the red on red.”“Ah, but it's salty!”“You know why it's not sweet? We'd drink it like syrup.”“Those with Christ in their heart do not talk that way.”“Are your strawberries expensive?”“Why? What?”“I'm checking to see if you have God in your heart.”“Child, if you knew how I have to work for this berry! I have to weed it a hundred times. In a week, the quitch grass grows as high as a horse. And I water it with water I carry from the stream, it kills my arms... ”“How much are the berries?”“They're not for sale. Anyway, soon money won't mean a thing. Soon all money, all these papers made from the skins of sinners on their satanic presses will be annulled. What matters is how we treat each other.”“So if I try your strawberries for free, my ‘thank you’ will be enough?”“Hands off!” she said and thwacked my fingers.I heard loud laughter behind me—same laughter as from the café near the Continental. There was no one sitting near Alina. (This is what fate looks like, remember.) Without asking, I sat next to her, away from the old lady.“Excuse me, but the night before last didn't you, yes, didn't you intrude on my privacy?” She started right away.“I saw it a little differently. Who was that young man with the mustache who paid me for you?”“Are you checking to see if you can flirt?”The tram stopped. People got on and off.“Are you coming back from the hospital?” she asked. “Don't be shocked. My uncle works there. He's told me all about you.”“An uncle by the name of Skorsky?”(Remember: this is what fate looks like.)“Yes. Skorsky's been strange recently—says things that make me wonder if he hasn't lost his mind. Have you noticed anything?”“I don't know.”“You know perfectly well.”“Where are you going?” I tried to change the subject.“I have to send something to my theater friends in Odesa. By the way, they'll be putting on Oedipus Rex soon in Kyiv—in Ukrainian.”“Greek tragedy in Ukrainian! That's a first.”“Exactly. The troupe is rehearsing now in Odesa. The theater where they will perform this fall is being remodeled.”“Wait. Now I remember where I've seen you before—it was at a performance! Vynnychenko's Black Panther and White Bear, at the Bergonier on Fundukleivska.“The same director is doing the Oedipus. He's my friend.”“He's your friend in what sense?”“Again with that tired subject. By the way, I've been thinking about you.”“And I about you.”“That's good. I was thinking not about you, to be precise, but about that elevator you invited me on.”“Who was that man with you?”“Like a broken record! Even if he had been my fiancé, I'm not bought or inherited. I'm not a brooch or a hundred acres of land, and I'm not a house in Kaniv!... Who was with you when you saw Black Panther?“Ah, so.”“Answer!”“That was my mother. She looks very young. She is coming to Kyiv the day after tomorrow. I can introduce you.”“Oh, this is my stop.”I looked out the window and realized that I had long since passed the stop for Bilinsky's.“Can we see each other again?”“We can. But you have only one chance.”Alina the anarchist wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to me.Morning, not morning but a thick porridge (I hate porridge). Dew, thick spit, crushed fruits, urine, all on the sparkling cobblestones. The sun, just barely having made its appearance, is already scorching. The human masses scurry and grumble like poorly digested food inside a stomach.I walked diagonally across St. Sofia's Square, then along the perimeter, then one edge, then again diagonally across. I went underground. The basement café of the Continental Hotel was practically empty. I again asked the server to bring the cloth with the embroidered portrait, but I couldn't remember the musician's last name, only that it ended with -sky. The server said that -sky was currently in the southern cities of Yalta and Odesa. I added that Kurbas, the director, Alina's friend, was also in Odesa, rehearsing Oedipus Rex, and that he'd previously put on Black Panther.I was bored, so I walked along Khreshchatyk and then headed down, calling to mind all the Kyiv churches of Podil: there's Birth of Christ, St. Nicholas on the Shore, Intercession, Pyrohoshcha, Holy Presentation, St. Dymytrii Rostovsky, St. Illia's. And also the Epiphany Brotherhood Monastery, Ascension Convent, and St. Katherine's, all these whipped-cream churches on the waffles of our streets. A few of them reminded me of themselves by appearing suddenly out of nowhere.The smells on Kontraktova Plaza where commerce buzzed were like multicolored light bulbs turning on one after another. Here you could catch the aroma of Balabukha jam, which blended with the next smell, English shoe polish at the Raiskys’ shop. Then the crunchy-smelling cabbage from old women standing in a row like herons and spitting out the shells of sunflower seeds. Farther on, the stench of a good-sized rat that crawled under Mrs. Shevchuk's shop where she sells broadcloth. Oh, she can't scream: no, she'll quietly dig that rat out herself so as to not scare off her clients.I bought a paper and two pairs of underwear. I asked two laughing young chambermaids who were secretly puffing in a grape-filled yard for a smoke. I wandered around Podil until evening when I came across a sawmill near the Dnipro that surprisingly smelled pleasantly of mazut fuel oil. The weather was dry, yet in the middle of the road was an enormous puddle, a deep dark black. A forty-year-old woman in a pale pink dress stood near it. The theatricality of it all provoked me to pose her a question,“Ma'am, what should I do?”But she paid me no attention. I shouted,“What should I do?”“What to do, what to do?” she said in Polish. “Jump in the water and swim so far away that you cannot return.”I quickly crossed a section of the forest. The wind brought a mixture of unpleasant air, like a stinky handkerchief held under one's nose. Passing the trees, I saw light in the spaces between them and exited at the hospital.Outside the windows, two orderlies lay in chairs with their heads thrown back. Two others—fools—ran around the yard in different directions, peering out at... something. The lights on the first floor of the hospital were on, and the staff milled about.“You're just in time!” said Ivan, a tall, young orderly.“For what?”“Your patient ran away! We went into his room and he wasn't there.”“What patient?”“The one who bit Alevtyna,” said Danylo, the other orderly, short and middle-aged.“That's Skorsky's patient, not mine.”I had no intention of helping them. This was all history—like my family, Kyiv, and my previous life. I had no intention of thinking about it. I wanted to go to my office, pack up my field surgery kit, and get out. So what? Their psychotic syphilitic ran away—it happened.Of course, that patient could have something to do with Bilinsky's murder. But that was no longer my problem.“What a strange coincidence!” the doctor on duty said. “Comrade doctor, the other one responsible for this patient was just here.”“And where is he now?”“He took off toward the church to look for the patient.”“Didn't the patient escape earlier?”“Don't know.”“How do you not know? You had better call the police, moron, before he kills someone. And get those sleeping orderlies to look for him.”“They can't... ”“Why not? Should I go wake them?”“They're on morphine.”“And you, I can see, have lost your mind. Go, catch your psycho! If it turns out that he killed Bilinsky—and on your watch—you can't imagine what's in store for you.”I adjusted my homburg and set off in the direction of St. Cyril's, that unwelcoming monolithic cube. I glanced around—what if our escaped syphilitic were to jump out of the bushes and bite or strangle me. I looked around because I wasn't sure of my actions, wasn't sure of my choices. Tripping over a clump of clover, I reached the open doors of the church. I couldn't stop myself from going in.The walls and ceiling were covered with frescoes. There was what used to be an angel rolling up the sky on the southern column of the narthex. But also graffiti: people scratched their names on it so as not to be forgotten—their idea of eternity. Prince Volodymyr the Great compared this activity to the desecration of graves. The vandals paid a fine and were beaten with canes. During the raids of Batu Khan, the church was deserted and cracks appeared all over it. Wild martens and feral dogs sought shelter here; insects swarmed under the ceiling with its red mosaics. Birches grew in its midst. Water seeped in the cracks, the water became ice, the ice widened the cracks, more water seeped in the cracks, becoming more ice that further widened the cracks, the wall split and nearly fell over, and then the wall fell over. Yet the angel is still rolling up the sky... When I reached the exit, I heard a rustling behind me. I turned after I stepped outside: in the depths of the church, like a stick in a pot of tar, stood a man with a large bag thrown over his shoulder and a revolver pointed right at me.“Is that you, Doctor?“Don't move!”“What's... Skorsky, what's with you?”“Don't move, I say!”“What are you doing here?”And finally I understood... Skorsky was himself the psycho! (Really, I had known for a while.)“You are the murderer! I knew it! But—why?”“Shut up.”“It was you. You! The stolen cigarettes, the strange behavior, Bilinsky. If I shout, everybody will come running. They've already called the police!”There was heavy breathing behind me. And then a gun rang out.The city is overgrown with new buildings. They encircle everything that was once on the periphery. Kyiv has become an old lady that can no longer restrain herself in the face of pastries. The city climbs farther. It steps over the swamps, turns the old rivers into a series of lakes; the other bodies of water it drives into canals. The grain that falls from the wild wheat is black. When the sun heats it, the grain melts and trickles into the earth. St. Cyril's stands indestructible. No one spackles the small cracks in its walls with either expensive putty or glues, nor with cheap cement and whitewash. One day a small fox appears in the doorway. It runs inside and along the floor of simple gray tiles. The gods watch from the walls, watch and fall into ruin. The fox runs to the iconostasis. Before it is a time-darkened Virgin Mother and Child in oil on sheets of zinc. The fox runs the metal steps that wind up to the second floor. The fox runs past all the vaults, naves, all the frescoes. A buckthorn seed flies in through a broken window. It will be the first. Soon the buckthorn will grow everywhere. A dumb hare will make its nest in the buckthorn bushes and nightingales will settle in the upper branches to sing until the end of the world. The fox runs between the thick rays that penetrate the windows. It catches one of the rays, squints its eyes, and warms itself in the sun.The shot rang out, but I did not fall. I looked around—and on the church threshold was our syphilis patient bearing a rod. His head lay on the rocks by the doorway.“If only he'd been at the stage of nose deformity! Just imagine: a hole instead of a nose plus a hole from the bullet—like an extra pair of eyes!” Skorsky laughed at the corpse.“We need to call the orderlies.”“They heard the shot. They'll run here on their own. You see, Professor Bilinsky believed it would take two or three years to wrap up this patient's case,” Skorsky told me. “But I took care of it much faster!”“Excuse me, but I'm going crazy in this city. I thought that you were Bilinsky's murderer.”“Just so. Why not? I am Bilinsky's murderer.”“Don't tease. You've changed a lot recently, so... ”“Yes, I've started killing people. You might term such a change significant.”“You have the right to irony.”“I am not being ironic.”“Let's call it sarcasm.”“It's the honest-to-God truth.”“And yes, you have the right to mock me.”“Well then, let's be done. To the horses!”“What horses?”“Alina's waiting!”Alina, her uncle Skorsky, a few others I didn't know, and I rode like the wind that ripped off my homburg and carried it back to Kyiv.“There's a fresco in the choir loft at St. Cyril's where Vrubel painted himself and patients from the hospital as the apostles. When I came across it by accident, I really believed they were saints,” Alina said.“I've never been up there. I've only seen the church from below.”“Remember the way back so you can see it sometime.”“The Puchai River used to flow here. You shouldn't trust the landscape,” Skorsky said, reaching for something, perhaps his bag, just when we left the darkness of the trees and saw the endless steppe ahead of us.We rode all night without stopping. Though no one was chasing us. Though we had nowhere to be. We rode like beasts released from a cage. The promises of the horizon turned what we'd left behind into a cage fit for those from whom freedom had been severed, like an anomaly, at birth.The pre-morning sky looked at first like a sack of turnips—filled with something heavy. But with each verst, the sky became lighter. When it was finally light enough to see clearly, we arrived at a knoll at the foot of a stone wall that from a distance had appeared to be a gigantic piece of halva. The exterior ruins of the castle gave no hint of how it was when all was fine here, when people defended themselves successfully from the nomads’ raids. From far off, the wreckage looked like a natural agglomeration of stones—a rocky elevation, no more: a cluster of cliffs. It would rain a few hundred more times, a few hundred more winds from a few hundred directions would blow on this heap, and it would collapse as though nothing had ever been here.A few stalks of wheat grew from one of the rocks. Someone had probably cast a handful of grain here for some birds that forgot to eat it.“Who could this castle belong to?” I asked Skorsky.“I reckon the Swan Princess,” the doctor rejoined, hoping to sound knowledgeable.From behind one of the piles of gray sandstone emerged a young man in a black reptilian coat and a white papakha as lush, bright, and out of place as a dahlia. His name was Artem. The heat was melting our brains, but he was dressed like that, in rooster fashion, which was popular among the otamans. Artem helped Alina dismount her horse and tried to kiss her on the lips, but she offered him a cheek instead.Had she been racing to see this clown?We entered the yard—the ruins had fashioned an internal space that was more or less protected, at least from strangers’ eyes. It turned out that there were even places where it was possible to hide from the rain, and from there the ruins didn't look half bad.In the center of the court was a table, and on it a wooden bucket with pink gladiolas. How romantic! It all looked like it came from outer space. Where on earth, in the middle of the steppe, far from any village or town, did this table, this simple table, come from? And the gladiolas? The steppe hadn't been plowed in so long that any cultivars would have gone wild, degenerated, dried up completely.A campfire crackled nearby—a little preview of what we would soon do to the houses, villages, and cities. Artem the otaman brought over a cezve from the fire and poured the first portion into a small, copper cup for Alina. He also got out a porcelain cup with images of rosy cherubim—but how...?“Who else would like coffee?”Only Skorsky and I responded. The question excited me, even distracted me from the thought of the kiss I had recently witnessed and the Kyiv I had recently left.“It's obvious who the professors here are; cultured people drink coffee. Are you both doctors?”“Uh-huh.”“For wolves of the steppe, like us, doctors are gold, even more precious than gold. Actually, a Hippocrates like you should eat more, because those in your profession will soon be worth your weight in gold. Work on your figures, both of you.”“Who will take pity on the horses that have to carry us?”“We'll find the horses. And very large doctors can be transported on machine-gun carts. We'll need to seat the otamans near you. Only a fool would shoot at a doctor.”“I think we'll find quite enough fools here.”“With your beard, Doctor, you look like Tsar Nicholas II. But even so you won't be shot. You might even be canonized!”“We've only just arrived and you're going on about executions,” Skorsky grumbled and checked to make sure that he still had his bag.“Apologies, apologies, pardonnez-moi. But you are not merely a doctor. A venereologist! Skorsky, you're a specialist! A venereologist is the most important person in wartime. The most valuable! You are the botanists of war. You can't imagine what varieties of flowers grow here, and these beds have long awaited a proper gardener. Or even just a man with a scythe!”“Bite your tongue,” Alina said. “I don't need to listen to this.”“Yes, yes, of course. Excuse me, my r—. ” He almost said “rose.”We rested all day. We went down to a surprisingly close river overgrown with lilies. We rowed the boats left by fishermen. I talked to Skorsky. He took his bag everywhere, refusing even to swim so he wouldn't have to part with it. I asked him what he had in it, but he said it wasn't my damned business.Alina rowed with the otaman to the middle of the river. They were having a loud discussion. She was waving her hands. The current carried their boat downstream slowly and smoothly. What a nuisance, that current!I tried to meet with Alina one-on-one, but she was avoiding me. In the morning I was confused, by lunch I was sad, and after lunch I got angry.In the evening, I lay on the hot grass and drank another cup (I have no idea where they got such good coffee), which had no effect at all on my sleep. I watched the Perseids. Every year, the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle. People can see the meteor shower and make a wish. I wished. I counted forty-seven falling stars. All forty-seven of my wishes were for the same thing.Around the campfire, they were sitting, talking. I saw how he tickled her face with a piece of grass and she brushed him off in annoyance. Then they were screaming at each other. Later they again spoke kindly, after which they again quarreled. My joy grew after each tiny mistake that Artem made. I wanted him to show the worst he was capable of.They were screaming at each other, but all I could hear was beautiful opera singing. The stars fell to the sound of their screaming. The stars blessed my joy.Then this happened: Alina kicked the fire, scattered burnt kindling, and burned some of the grass. Artem grabbed her by the arm, but she broke away from him and ran off to the horses.“Go then! I guarantee you'll get to Katerynoslav and return with your tail between your legs.”“I'm going to Huliai-Pole! To Father Makhno!”I jumped up and ran after her.“Where do you think you're going?” Artem shouted.Really—where was I going? I was going after her: to Huliai-Pole, to Katerynoslav, to Rome, to Washington, to Istanbul, to Montevideo... “Go to sleep,” he said. “Come morning, this coquette will be here, right as rain. We've already been through this show. Tomorrow she'll be right here next to my boot!”... No, she won't.In some sort of shape we entered some town. There were some buildings that were some colors, some trees, some streets, some roads, and some signs. Posts, flustered birds’ nests, echoes, colors, shapes—each of some kind. A wedding procession was coming toward us. If you want to make orange, you need to add yellow to red, and then bam—it's black. If you want to salt the soup, shake in a little, and then bam—two handfuls. You want to say a kind word, and then bam—a punch in the face. I was rocked around like a watermelon on a boat and threw up my breakfast straight into the horse's fluffy mane. Sanko found this hilarious, but I said I'd pulverize him. So Sanko sped ahead.No one knew anything about Alina. The daytime sky was like a poorly washed bowl. The sun was a squashed, rotten apricot. The night sky looked like the sole of a boot to me. The moon was a dirty cheap copper coin that had gotten stuck to the sole. Everything seemed spoiled to me, irrelevant, unnecessary. Without her, this journey was a waste of time.“You'd better stay away from everyone,” Artem said. “You'll infect us with your pining, and pining is worse than the clap.”The wedding procession was before us. The young couple, still utter children, walked so calmly it was as if they didn't see us. As if we were made of a light breeze—our bodies, clothes, our horses and their iron shoes—of the lightest gasses. As if we were visible only to ourselves and the coal-black dog that barked, panting and gasping.The wedding was headed straight for us. We were in the middle of the road, and so were they. We approached each other slowly, a wave going toward a wave. Some ten meters before their indifferent faces, I noticed the color of the bride's eyes. And the coral-colored tulips that fell on the road before her. Round goose eggs on meaty stems, the flowers were falling and falling before her. The bride's eyes were almond shaped.“Hey there,” Artem shouted at me. “Wake up!”I came to and saw the whole village, everyone there, not realizing my group had turned left onto a side street away from the procession. The tulips disappeared—where'd they get tulips in the fall? I was sitting alone on my horse in the middle of the road, and the entire wedding procession came to a stop. I moved to the side, and the throng marched on, cutting off our escape route. We rode a few more meters and came across the synagogue.“You know what, you're right,” said the otaman.“Who is?”“Oleksii is the only one here who's right.”“About what?”Artem turned his horse and raced back. Everyone stood still while he ran his horse into the crowd and began firing his revolver. People scattered in all directions. Artem trotted, cackling like an imbecile. The horse kicked an old guy in the mouth. The man fell, spitting out his gold teeth. We rode up to the commotion and formed ranks, but none of us wanted to join the otaman.The bride stopped in the middle of the street. On both sides were buildings and trees, as well as dust, sky, and sun. She stood still, beautiful, as if nothing had happened. Then she adjusted her garland and walked calmly on.“Well, should we get some sugar now?” Artem laughed, looking at the bride, and off he went toward the sugar factory.It was then I noticed that all of the houses had shutters—fuchsia, blue, ocher—and that all the shutters were closed.We flew toward the dirty building, whistling and shouting. If there had been aesthetes among the otamans, they would certainly have razed the abomination in this field after seizing it. They would have spread soil on top and sown buckwheat. Long live buckwheat!, that wonderful crop. Like hunting dogs hot on the trail, we raced to our defenseless victim, with the baying of hundreds of hounds behind us. The field shook beneath us. We became an artist's canvas, evolving from Realism to Romanticism, Romanticism to Expressionism, Expressionism to Suprematism. If we had been painted in black and white, we would have been splotches (until the ink ran, annihilating all remaining patches of white).Two men stood near the gate—unarmed and undressed, in nothing but their undershirts and boots. Our fervor, our kinship with the elements, our entirety, were all for naught.“Jesus Christ! What bores!” Artem exclaimed. “How boring you are!”“Maybe boring for us, but fireworks for them,” Sanko said, dismounting his horse.“The fear of death engenders creativity,” our otaman—a distinguished philosopher of the early twentieth century, that demonic breed—prophesied.He went on, “Excuse me, but with all due respect, we are not going to search you. Just show us right away where the money is. Why are there so few of you? Don't say there's not much money. I want piles and piles of money! If you don't show it to us, we'll print our own on your skin. Believe me, we will.”We entered the factory grounds. There were no workers, only an enormous mountain of sugar beets that looked like a pile of coal from a distance and a pile of dead rats from up close.“So, did you have a good year?” Artem asked a man in an undershirt.“Not really—too dry.”“Nah, that's fine. You wouldn't have been able to gather most of the harvest this year anyway. There's a fire burning across all of Ukraine, all of Russia. The whole world!”While Artem tossed thoughts like well-chewed sunflower seeds into the crowd, the two men quietly stepped aside and then ran fast ahead to the factory's main hall. The gigantic door slammed shut. The gate was locked behind us! The windows were smashed! The factory roared from inside like a cumbersome machine starting up. Bullets whirred through every window.“Bastards! It's a trap! Quick, after me!”Still on horseback, Artem bounded over to a vast window, low to the ground, and smashed it mercilessly. He broke the frame and jumped inside on his horse. I and a few others followed. We broke into their lair, threw open the doors, and let the other warriors inside.Iron vats of hot sugar were steaming, pipes were clattering; machinery groaned.“Parasites!” Artem gritted his teeth. “I'll get you. I'll get you red sons of bitches. Painted whores!”At the word “painted,” his horse fell to the ground. Lying prone, Artem continued fighting, but the red soldiers wouldn't let him stand. Fighting nearby, I rode over to assist but did not know where to aim. Artem got up, ran forward, and brought his sword down on the head of the closest soldier, all the way to the middle of his skull, to the bridge of his nose. It was like butchering a pig. Artem thrust the sword into the buttock of another who was fleeing and cut off his leg at the bend in the knee.“I'll cut off every last one of your asses! Cut off your asses!” Artem bellowed.A half hour later, the dead were lying, the captured sitting, and the victors doing anything they pleased.“Skorsky, are there a lot of casualties?” I asked the doctor, whose hour it was. I hoped not, because I was too tired to help him.“Just a few. The dead are already dead, and the wounded are not ours.”Though Skorsky rarely asked my help, and though I'd become an ordinary soldier, the doctor in me was still present in the most unpleasant attribute—knowledge. Others saw an eviscerated man, pieces of dusty flesh smeared with clay, soil, sand, and straw. I saw a perfectly formed kidney hanging perfectly from the rest of its body like a child's mitten from its coat. You could try this death on for size. Wear it like a sanbenito of the Inquisition.Artem counted the money and then lay on the floor alongside the gigantic sugar mountain in the middle of the room. From time to time, the crystals rustled as they fell.“I didn't think you'd be such a fighter!” the otaman said without turning toward me. “I thought you'd be healing us. You'd keep to the rear and we'd hide you like a girl. But here you are, in the vanguard, like a lion!”“I got excited,” I told him, choosing not to react to the “girl” part.“’Cause Alina said there was no sense counting on you to fight.”“Really?”“Does that sting?”“Why would it? I'm a doctor—not everyone is. It requires a brain. Unlike waving a sword.”“Yeah, yeah. I gave her gladiolas. We were lying in the boat near that castle, doing all manner of things, and she told me all about you. How you met.”“You were lying in that boat talking about me?”“It was the day before you left Kyiv. You agreed to go with the anarchists so quickly!”“Were you surprised? Doctors make fast decisions.”“But you probably had great prospects. Your parents are rich, right?”“And who are your parents?”“Probably all your relatives fled abroad—bourgeois. Why did you stay?”“What the hell's your point?”“Alina, by the way, died a while ago. Probably.”“Don't jinx her.”“Listen here,” he said, staring at the ceiling. “And listen good. If you have designs on her—dead or alive—it's best you castrate yourself now.”“After you.”“If I want to kill somebody, you know, I just do it.”At last he looked at me. I was lying on the floor nearby and looking in his direction, sweaty and relaxed, my appearance complemented by my disdain for his opinion, his authority, his stupid hat. His everything.Artem raised his arm above his head, stuck a finger in the sugar mountain, and licked it. We both got up. Had I anticipated this turn of events, I would have readied a gift for him. Artem held his revolver. Under my hand I found a knife the workers used for gathering beets: it was a deliberately sharpened arc they sank into the swollen brassicas. I jumped up and quickly stepped around the sugar mountain.Artem's bullet hit a pane and broke the glass.“Not man enough for hand-to-hand?”The otaman shot again.“You should've challenged me to a duel, you romantic!”Encrusted with white crystals, I charged Artem from the sugar mountain. We fell in, and the sugar stuck in our hair, mustaches, nostrils, armpits.The gang ran in to get us apart, then backed off because it had nothing to do with them. By now the sugar mountain had burst its banks. Of the once perfect pyramid, a deformed mound remained.Wounded, Artem fell on the sugar mound, turning the white red.I stood before the gang sugar-coated and holding a bloody hook. The old otaman was drawing his last breath. Blood trickled from the corner of Artem's mouth and streamed from the left side of his breast.“What's the commotion?” Old Roman had just come in.“Be quiet,” the boys told him. And a good thing they did.“You killed him? You killed the otaman!”“Shut your mouth,” the boys told him.“You... ”I slugged Roman's stinky herring mouth. How did that son of a bitch find pickled herring in a sugar factory? My fist was now bigger and stronger than ever before, a steel anvil that could split nails and shatter memorial plaques. The unfortunate man's jaw twisted like an upper millstone that had gone off track from the lower.“Let's get out of here and go to Makhno's camp,” I gave my first order.We galloped so fast the grass burned beneath us. The birds and bugs had no time to fly out of the way; hooves trampled the burrows of rodents who didn't dare crawl out of their holes for a long time after. We raced like no one had ever raced before.The steppe, that sly fox, pretended to be an innocent fool. The steppe said, “I'm like Adam: I don't even know my own name.” But its grass harbored the tracks of thousands of armies and the heels of Herodotus, the crunch of Trypillia vessels, and the smell of Scythian hemp, Roman coins, clay figures of wolf people, the chevrons of Denikin's army, glass from the Chekists’ ruby stars, traces of uranium from flying saucers. I threatened it: “Steppe, show me your layers, or I will burn you, plow you under, flood you.” But it just replied: “I'm like Adam: I don't yet know my name.”I lost geography as if it were a silver coin. It fell out of my pocket and rolled through the feather grass that blanketed the steppe in white foam. The open space ahead was so endless that the whole world might as well have been steppe. If people ended up here from somewhere else, they would conclude they were on another planet. The coin fell and became an argentum, became one with the ring on the hand of the princess who had one green eye and one blue, with the twisted candlestick at the monastery on the other side of the steppe, with melted ingots. It broke down into simpler elements, simpler and simpler yet. The horse carried me spreading the seeds of northern plants to the south, just as southern riders had once brought flowers and weeds to the north. And then I turned back. Just as I had no geography, I had no time. Every night I fell asleep with the thought that the next day I would again race. Through all spacelessness, all timelessness. I exchanged one horse for another, got on a train, on a boat, traversed forty versts on foot—in rain that brought the river up to the road, in heat that overturned cattle. The earth I walked on became mine. Mine was the water in the lakes and springs, clean water, dirty water, enlightened water, contaminated with oil, stinking of algae, of fish that died in wells, stinking of the memory of atrocities, water as clean as broken bread. The water did not become Alina.I was doing this for her: I got the basturma out from under my saddle, sodden with the horse's sweat, sliced the throat of a rich man whose daughter I had danced with at a ball, climbed into a vat of beet juice and took a sugar bath, carried out the expropriation of the savings banks, wiped the sweat from my face with my shirt—and the cloth turned red; I didn't know from what. If it was someone else's blood, I didn't care; if it was my own, even less.We mostly came across Reds. We scraped them up like old red paint on a door in order to repaint the boards black. Black looked better. Red is tasteless, but black has style. Healthy men died before us of myocardial rupture like bunnies found in the nest. The ones whose hearts were sewn of steel wire envied the deceased. Seizing estates, banks, distilleries, and prisons reminded us of gathering in the harvest. If you're too lazy to pick an apple, you can shake the tree; some of the fruit gets bruised when it falls. We seized buildings like we were shaking apple trees. No one picked the fruits, we just shook: shook under the beds, under the tables, behind the curtains. No, there was no picking. We just shook until the red juice spurted from the apples.Near the Khorol River with Father Makhno and me in charge, we captured sixteen machine guns and four cannons, as well as five hundred prisoners who immediately came over to our side. The villagers voluntarily gave us bread and cheese, chickens and kvas. People joined us. The front of the machine-gun cart said “You can't run,” and “You won't catch us” at the back. We took factory after factory. Millions of karbovantsi, thousands of poods of sugar, weapons. We smashed the telephone exchanges and captured the telegraphs. We made alliances with some and then with others. Lenin, Wrangel, Frunze, the Germans, Chinese, Australians, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Cleopatra, Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina. We ran the steppe. There were a hundred thousand of us. There were three hundred thousand of them. There were three hundred thousand of us. There were a million of them. There were two million of them. We were all of humanity. We were so many that we were none.The nobles’ estates were long ago forsaken. In the people's deepest trunks lay silks and guipure laces that were once perhaps used only to cover a table. Five steps from the barn in the direction of the pear tree, some silver candlesticks are buried; there's a plaster figure of an angel in the chicken coop, covered with shit and feathers.I was reluctant to be going to my home, but I didn't see any way out. Fate intended me to be a different being from the one I was before.Here my grandfathers and great-grandfathers were born. Here the ones who caused my grandfathers and great-grandfathers to flee had stopped. When we were still far off I noticed that someone was in the house. It was our men—Skorsky had brought them here, about twenty in all. I asked Sanko, whom I had walked with side by side more than once, where the doctor was now. All the men answered that he was around somewhere, but I didn't see him that evening.In 1918, the spirit of my great-grandfather Stepan, along with my mother and uncle, had gotten into a britzka and scrambled off to Paris, to Napoleon, against whom my great-grandfather had fought with the Cossacks, to whom the Russians promised to return self-rule. Following him in the cart went the soul of Grandpa Oleh, who lost a finger when he cut down the old linden near the house; his second finger was blown off by a cannonball near Balaklava, and later his entire hand was cut off by some Turk. Next went the spirit of my father, also Stepan, who did not take part in any war but died of measles at the age of forty. They all got the hell out of here. First, they went to Kyiv, led by my mother, Tamara Makarivna, in order to collect Uncle's family and me, their son. And their son, it turns out, has now come back to rob his own home (I didn't drive my war buddies away, did I?). It's a shame that I didn't know where the bathtub was, or whatever they bathed me in when I was small. It would have been good to walk through the ranks of anarchists with that basin and tell them all to spit into it.Remembering every room, I carried Alina upstairs to my mother's bedchamber. There was no longer furniture or pictures, only bare walls. The bed and mattress remained, but that was enough. Mother hated noise, so she set up her room far away from the running in the halls and the creaks on the stairs. I adjusted the mattress; in a gap, looking like a stalk of wheat, there lay a gold bracelet that she lost in the haste and that the thieves could not find in the mayhem. I tucked it into my pocket.The place could still be saved. It was strong, built under the leadership of my grandfather, who knew how to do it right. He built a sawmill, a gristmill, a dress factory (today it's probably been ransacked, maybe even by our own men).Alina had a complete, displaced break in her right fibula. We needed water first. I went downstairs—the guys were dragging out the piano like an old cow to the slaughter.“What are you doing with that?”“Taking it out.”“Why?”“What's it to you? We want to have fun.”“Can you play?”“We're not your bourgeois lily-handed bitches.”They couldn't play, but they were famous at destruction. “Noise is the music of the new time,” one of the smarter among them might have said. “But noise is the opposite of music. Just as a rose is the opposite of your ugly mugs,” I'd have responded if there was anyone to say it to. I could also have said that this was a Bosendorfer grand piano, that it was very valuable—but do the guys not deserve such a luxury?“Why are you so boring? We're relaxing.”“Then let me play a little first.”“Go ahead, but fast. One-two.”So I played. As before. My fingers ran up and down the black and white keys, which weren't simply keys of these, the simplest, colors. These were the keys that remembered my fingers specifically—achieved by that slovenly German Katerina, our governess. She knew a bundle of languages, could play the piano, and was interested in the latest scientific discoveries. But she had not an ounce of sympathy for anyone who couldn't master anything on the first try. More than once she hit my pinkie against the black key that remembered every one of its four thousand touches. She would pound it on the key and shout, “Si bémol! Si bémol,” and later bang my fingers and translate, “B flach! B flach!”I played. I could not expose myself, so the only thing I could do was believe in miracles. What if these coarse men saw value in this bit of furniture so unintelligible to them? And what if they didn't destroy it, this emblem of my childhood, my land, my air, which I could protect in no other way? My air. My water.“Shchedryk, shchedryk, shchedrivochka,” one of them who recognized the tune began to sing along.“Look at you.” They did not expect music from me, who had until recently been drinking blood like water.They said, “Again, again!”A group of curious men gathered around me. They were ordinary farmers, thieves, and recidivists, peasants and workers, everyone except for Skorsky. They needed this music as they needed baths. The music cleansed them from the inside, perhaps. They had not heard anything besides the whistle of a bullet, the neighing of a horse, or the knocking of a chisel and the whirring of a saw, amputating limbs, for a long time.But it could not go on long. I did not close the piano lid, just stood and went to fetch water for Alina, leaving the unfinished song for later. The well was to the north—that is, at the “Head.” My father once promised to give me a compass if I could learn to identify the ends of the earth by means of the sun. And to make it easier to remember, I gave each one of them a name: the east where the day begins was “Right” (my right hand), the west “Left,” the north “Head,” and the south “Feet.” Back when I could still do whatever I wanted all day long, I would wake in the morning and say: I'm going to the Feet. The mound was at the Feet, Left had the river, Right had the forest. It was only to the Head that I rarely went, because a village was located there. When the villagers saw me, they would speak in whispers and avoid the master's son.... I wiped her brow and her burning, sunken cheeks. I lay down next to her to feel the heat of her skin.When the fire in Alina calmed slightly, I went out into our orchard. My father had once been given a gift from Japan—a tulip tree that blossomed with yellow-green flowers. It had to have grown in the time that I was away. It would have been fatal had it been cut down. I again took the stairs down into the drawing room and came across nobody—they had all disappeared in search of food or were hidden away in their burrows. In the middle of the hall, like an opened rib cage, was the piano, irreparably shattered.B Flach! B Flach!Translation © Ali Kinsella 2022. (shrink)

The glorious Sophia image of Nikolai Mokrogo, now completely forgotten, was the oldest national shrine and one of the first miraculous icons of Kievan Rus known to us. The name of the icon is associated with the "Miracle of the Infant in Kiev", which dates from the researchers no later than 1090. The legend tells about the marriage, which went to the pilgrimage to the relics of Boris and Gleb in Vyshgorod. They returned to Kyiv by the Dnipro in a (...) boat. In the road, a tired woman was asleep and dropped into the water a baby, which immediately drowned. Parents of the child turned to despair in despair. Mykola "having a great faith in him", asking for help. Indeed, the next morning the child of a bud was found undisturbed on the outside of the chambers of Sophia of Kiev: "... the child is lying wet in front of the image of St. Nikolai "[Leonid, Archimandrite. Life and miracles of St. Nikolai Mirlykysky and praise him. Investigation of two monuments of ancient Russian writing of the XI century. - St. Petersburg, 1881. - P. 90.] The icon of the saint, under which was found miraculously saved sv. Nicholas is a child in wet diapers, nicknamed Nikolay Mokrogo. For centuries it was located on the choirs of the St. Sophia Cathedral in the iconostasis of the Mykolaiv altar, on the right of the royal gates, occupying the place of the temple image. (shrink)

One of the central places in the cult of the Catholic Church is the virgin Mary, the Virgin. She is revered as a woman who gave life to the son of God Jesus Christ and brought him up.

It is not objectionable in modern science that the woman was deified earlier than her husband, and the sacred books of religions of the Abrahamic tradition capture the next stage of society's development: the transition to a new way of farming and the rule of man in all spheres of life. Judaism and Islam did not recognize the cult of the goddesses and always struggled with it. For the Jews, Yahweh was both a patron of women. In Judaism, a (...) woman does not actively participate in religious life. It is not necessary here, because its vital activity is itself a religious one. The functions of a woman in a family are identical to religious service. Each Jewish woman is a Goddess. Like God, she creates a man and she is unnecessary intercessor to the outside world. A man has to pray for her, for she is, by his very nature, the leader of the will of God. (shrink)

One of the tendencies of modern transformations in the religious sphere, in particular in the world of Protestantism, is the desire for gender equality. The problem of "woman and religion" has become extremely urgent over the last decades, especially on the issue of women's priesthood. There is evidence that the proportion of women in the religious life of only Christian denominations has increased from 10 percent in the early twentieth century. to 40 at the beginning of the XXI century. (...) The theological justification for the idea of ​​women's participation in organizing and conducting worship services was first formulated at the beginning of the 20th century in the Church of England. And it was the discussion around this provision that went beyond the Anglican Church that led to a radical revision of the traditional position of some Protestant churches, both as a motive and a reflection of profound changes in Christianity. (shrink)

Gender is known to be a term used to define the sociocultural form of the existence of gender: man and woman act not as natural definitions but as sociocultural phenomena. If gender is determined on the basis of physical, organic and psychophysiological characteristics, then, unlike it, gender is derived from the social, cultural and historical features of human being. Human behavior in society and how it is perceived in it and defines gender as a social gender. Gender is thus (...) one of the ways of social stratification of a society that, in combination with such socio-demographic factors as race, nationality, class, age, organizes the system of social hierarchy. Because gender is not a natural thing but a social construct, it implies self-awareness and self-determination. Gender has always been and remains a meaningful term. In the social sciences, "gender" has become more narrowly defined, denoting "social gender", that is, socially determined roles, identities and spheres of activity of men and women, which depend not on biological sexual differences, but on the social organization of society. Central to gender studies is the problem of social inequality between men and women. (shrink)

Interview of Illia Davidenko, Kateryna Kruhlyk, Daria Popil with Viktor Kozlovskyi.

Interview of Illia Davidenko, Kateryna Kruhlyk, Daria Popil with Viktor Kozlovskyi.

Interview of Illia Davidenko, Kateryna Kruhlyk, Daria Popil with Viktor Kozlovskyi.

A psychoanalytic and philosophical exploration of sublimation as a key term in Jacques Lacan's theories of ethics and feminine sexuality.

The article, authored by Ukrainian and Polish social researchers, analyses normative approaches towards understanding models of democracy and their relation to civic space. Despite the existence of multiple models of democracy, they can largely be reduced to two main forms: direct and representative democracy. Deliberative democracy is posited as a third form, which, according to some scientists, combines elements of representative, direct, and participatory democracy. The analysis is based on the assessment of democracy and civic space in Ukraine, utilising (...) data from six applied international social studies, as well as the evaluation of the modern characteristics of some components of Ukrainian civic space. According to the rating of CIVICUS Monitor, Ukraine has been classified in the category of countries where the civic space is “obstructed” from 2019 to the present time (Autumn 2023). Currently, the advancement of civic space in Ukraine towards more favourable forms of freedom of association, peaceful assembly, and expression of opinion in the country are threatened by several factors simultaneously. The article also uses the results of the authors’ previous and current academic research, as well as the results of twenty years of advocacy and analytical work as public experts in Ukraine and Europe. (shrink)

WREI's acclaimed biennial series examines the current state of women and leadership.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.1 (2001) 13-15 [Access article in PDF] Anorexia:Social World and the Internal Woman Juliet Mitchell This is a nicely presented argument--as far as it goes, but is that far enough? The problems of a reconciliation between psychoanalytic and feminist-social explanations of anorexia seem to me greater than this account allows. Social pressures and intra-family dynamics and innate mental characteristics doubtless all play a part (...) and can perfectly well co-exist side-by-side--that is, anorexia (or whatever else) will be a product of all three. The question is: Do these three dimensions need to interact in such a way that each is transformed by the interaction? By using Kleinian notions of phantasy (unconscious), Sarah Richmond is able to propose a reconciliation with social theory that is reminiscent for me of John Bowlby's work in, say, vol. 3 of his trilogy, Attachment and Loss (1969-73). There is nothing wrong with this--indeed, it must be right, but I think it misses the difficulty. The difficulty can, perhaps, best be addressed if we look not at phantasy but at the symptom. If a phantasy is truly unconscious, its form will not bear a recognizable relationship to what it is about--it will need to be deduced from the "free associations" as with a dream. If it is recognizable, it is almost certainly preconscious and can be made conscious without any intervening association or interpretation--it will look like what it in fact represents.With phantasy a slippage between unconscious and preconscious is common. The unconscious phantasy latent in anorexia may be envy of the mother's fertility and, at the same time, a preconscious refusal of the secondary status accorded in Western society to motherhood (Choderow 1978)--it can be both, as Sarah Richmond says, but the unconscious envy will be distorted. An unconscious envious phantasy about the mother might attack the full "womanly" maternal body--it is more likely to do so in a disguised form. The preconscious hostile response to social pressure to become a mother will attack this body probably in an undisguised form.The "true" anorexic sees a grossly fat person where there is a grotesquely thin one. The "real" is transformed and "unrecognizable." Why is there a delusion at the center of anorexia and what are the features and meanings of this delusion? In phantasy, the line between unconscious and preconscious is often not drawn. This cannot be the case with the symptom. A symptom is always a distortion. The same is the case with a delusion--by definition a delusion has transformed "reality."A second characteristic of a symptom is its driven, compulsive quality: The anorexic cannot stop even though she may want to. Clearly, social theory doesn't touch this--but nor does invoking unconscious phantasy per se because here the "unconscious" is often, technically, preconscious; that is to say, available to consciousness without translation.I have not myself made any proper study of anorexia. The following suggestions are just [End Page 13] that--suggestions. I have studied hysteria (Mitchell 2000), and anorexia was once considered an expression of hysteria rather than a discrete illness. The relationship of unconscious symptom or preconscious phantasy in the two conditions are, I suggest, the same. In Hystories, Elaine Showalter (who also considers anorexia to be hysterical) cites a nineteenth-century case of a man with pendulum spasms and suggests that, the man being poor and inarticulate, his spasms may have indicated his hatred of his job. He was a watchmaker (1997). If so, this would be what I am calling preconscious--unconsciously, we cannot know what it means without associations. We can make a guess that shows the process, however. The sort of meaning it might have had is that the watchmaker could possibly have had forbidden grandiose desires that had been repressed but inadequately so; hence, these desires would have returned in the conflictual form of the compulsive, bizarre symptom. The symptomatic expression of his forbidden desire, I playfully suggested, might have been modeled on Voltaire's well... (shrink)

Purpose. Romanticism as a movement developed in Germany, where, becoming the philosophy of time in the 18th-19th centuries, spread to all European countries. The "mobility" of the Romantic doctrine, its diversity, sometimes contradictory views, attitude to man as a free, harmonious, creative person led to the susceptibility of this movement by ethnic groups, different in nature and mentality. Its ideas found a wide response in Ukraine with its "cordocentric" type of culture in the early nineteenth century. Since the peculiarity of (...) "Ukrainian Romanticism" was its "literary-centric" nature, the purpose of this study is to analyse and comprehend the place of man in the national philosophy and literature of this period. Accordingly, the main tasks of the work are as follows: to determine the main features, the nature of Ukrainian Romanticism; to trace the main vectors of comprehension and image of man in the literature of this time. Theoretical basis. The ideas of European Romanticism were creatively rethought and assimilated during the emergence of new Ukrainian literature. It provided samples of highly artistic works, unique names of talented writers – creators and thinkers, who in their works reflected the philosophy of time. Based on the works of F. Schlegel, partly E. Husserl, M. Heidegger, K. Jaspers, Romanticism in the Ukrainian humanities, in terms of philosophy, culturology, as well as at the intersection with literature, was studied by T. Bovsunivska, Y. Hrybkova, S. Efremov, N. Kalenichenko, S. Kozak, T. Komarynets, D. Nalyvayko, Y. Nakhlik, I. Ogorodnyk, V. Ogorodnyk, A. Sinitsyna, D. Chyzhevsky, M. Yatsenko, E. Kyryliuk, M. Biletsky, D. Dontsov, S. Efremov, G. Kostyuk, S. Krymsky, Y. Sherekh and others. Originality. The authors of the article prove that Romanticism in Ukraine, being "literary-centric" inherently, having absorbed the main ideas and features of European Romanticism, has its own features and vectors of formation and development. Man in this kind of movement, thanks to the means of art, appears very clearly as a spiritually rich, sensitive, vulnerable and strong person. For him or her, the highest value is freedom, the ability to make freely independent fateful decisions. Conclusions. Ukrainian writers, reflecting the philosophical ideas of Romanticism, saw in man a harmonious combination of "natural" and "social", through which he indirectly carries out his own national existence. In addition to the objective realities of the external world, in their works, Romantic writers appeal to the subjective, internal, spiritual, "ideal" world of the hero, who interacts with reality through his own system of values. At each level of development of the humanities and methodology of cognition, this allows a new reading of these works. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 234-236 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Dreaming Me: An African American Woman's Spiritual Journey Dreaming Me: An African American Woman's Spiritual Journey. By Jan Willis. New York: Riverhead Books, 2001. 321 pp. This book invites comparison with Diana Eck's Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras(Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). Both are by prominent women scholars, both have "spiritual journey" in (...) the subtitle, and both are about Christians who come to terms with a non-Christian religion—Hinduism in Eck's case, Buddhism in Willis's case. But as soon as one gets past the titles, it is the differences that strike one. Where Eck maintains an Olympian poise, hobnobbing with Hindus but remaining a Christian and an objective scholar, interpreting and analyzing as she goes, Willis plunges into Buddhism without rejecting her family's Baptist tradition, becoming a fully participant observer so as to ask how her own history and the history of her fellow African Americans can be healed by an intensely personal internal dialogue. Eck gives us theology. Willis gives us herself. Recognized as "one of the first American scholar-practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism" (294), her students ask her if she practices meditation as well as teaching it. She gives a carefully crafted answer that unifies the practice of Buddhism with the practice of academic teaching as an authentically human activity within the Humanities.The book has the form of a Hindu epic, incidents from Willis's life interrupting the frame story, the dreaming of the title. This dream (whether actual or metaphorical, we are not told) moves with considerable dramatic power from the terror of being pursued by lions to the dreamer's transformation into a lioness who roars the Dharma like Queen Shrimala. Its five parts are called Birth, Odyssey, Choices, Becoming, and Return, taking us from her childhood as a Baptist in Docena, Alabama, to Cornell University, to India and Nepal, and back to Docena, as a self-described Baptist-Buddhist (310).Willis's journey is intimately bound up with her search for self-acceptance as a "white gal"—a noticeably light-complexioned black woman in the Jim Crow South —and for the nobility of African Americans as fully human beings. Her early experiences [End Page 234] were not encouraging. Blacks were not only physically segregated in Docena, they were electronically expunged from television shows by spurious technical difficulties ("trouble along the cable"), and she endured an attack by the Ku Klux Klan on her family's home. The customary but thoroughly illegal suffrage examination administered to her father included such questions as "How many words are there in the U.S. Constitution?" (58, italics in original). He had been specially prepared for such absurdities, and he passed. Midway in her pilgrimage Willis searches for her roots (or "kin," as she says, using the Southern word) in county and federal records, and her initial excitement turns to humiliation as the white historian tells her, with disdainful triumph, that her intelligence must have come from the white slave owner who "everybody says" was her "granddaddy's daddy" (251). A black woman was presumed to be lacking in native intelligence, and Willis's intellectual powers suffered insult not only from whites but from her own mother, who, perhaps having internalized the white folks' contempt, regarded being smart as somehow evil (25). As a student at Cornell, Willis discovered black power and participated in Black Student Alliance (BSA) demonstrations, sometimes involving guns, but she came to believe that direct political action was not for her. She was, she decided, a teacher at heart, and after much soul searching she opted for the "peaceful transformation" (129) that she hoped would come from the study and practice of Buddhism.Although her skin color was a puzzlement to some Indians, who wondered about her caste, her Tibetan teachers in Nepal accepted her as a student who was at least the equal of the white students, and even, perhaps, superior to them. A spot of blonde in her hair was interpreted as the... (shrink)

The association of poetry and femininity … excluded women poets. For the female figures onto whom the men projected their artistic selves—Tennyson’s Mariana and Lady of Shalott, Browning’s Pippa and Balaustion, Arnold’s Iseult of Brittany—represent an intensification of only a part of the poet, not his full consciousness: a part, furthermore, which is defined as separate from and ignorant of the public world and the great range of human experience in society. Such figures could not write their own poems; the (...) male poet, who stands outside the private world of art, has to do that for them. The Lady of Shalott could not imagine someone complex and experienced enough to imagine the world beyond range of her windows, or to imagine her. A woman poet who identified herself with such a stock figure of intense and isolated art would hardly be able to write at all. Or, like the Lady of Shalott preparing her death-ship, she could write only her own name, only herself. For a man, writing poetry meant an apparent withdrawal from the public sphere , but for a woman it meant just the opposite: a move toward public engagement and self-assertion in the masculine world. She could not just reverse the roles in her poetry and create a comparable male self-projection, since the male in this set of opposites is defined as experienced, complexly self-conscious, and part of the public world and therefore could not serve as a figure for the poet. We can formulate the problem like this: a man’s poem which contains a female self-projection shows to distinctly different figures, poet and projection; in a woman’s poem on the same model, the two would blur into one.Furthermore, it’s not really poets that are women, for the Victorians: poems are women. The cliché that style is the man arises more readily and with much greater literalness and force when the stylist is a woman, and it is often charged with erotic intensity. The young lovers in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe describe their perfect love by singing that he is the sculptor and she the clay, he the singer and she the song. Ladislaw in Middlemarch tells Dorothea that she needn’t write poems because she is a poem. Edgar Allan Poe remarks in a review of Barrett Browning’s works that “a woman and her book are identical.” In her love letters Barrett Browning herself worried about the problem of her identity—was she her poems, were they she, which was Browning in love with? “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,” he had written disconcertingly in his first letter, “… and I love you too.” […] As we can see in Tennyson’s The Princess, the lyric in particular seemed female to Victorians—private, nonlogical, purely emotional—and it is surely no accident that large numbers of English and American women began to publish poetry in the nineteenth century, when the lyric established its dominance. Victorian poems like Victorian women were expected to be morally and spiritually uplifting, to stay mostly in the private sphere, and to provide emotional stimulus and release for overtasked men of affairs.9 All this may have encouraged women to write poetry, but at the same time it made writing peculiarly difficult because it reinforced the aspects of conventional Victorian femininity—narcissism, passivity, submission, silence—most inimical to creative activity. Since women already are the objects they try to create, why should they write? 9. John Woolford points this out in “EBB: Woman and Poet,” Browning Society Notes 9 : 4. Dorothy Mermin is professor and chairman in the department of English at Cornell University. She is the author of The Audience in the Poem and is currently working on a critical study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. (shrink)

The works of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) ranged from the early _Thoughts on the Education of Daughters_ to _The Female Reader_, a selection of texts for girls, and included two novels. But her reputation is founded on _A Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ of 1792. This treatise is the first great document of feminism—and is now accepted as a core text in western tradition. It is not widely known that the germ of Wollstonecraft’s great work came out of an earlier (...) and much shorter vindication—A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), written in the context of the issues raised by the French Revolution. This edition, which follows the model of other Broadview Editions in including a range of materials that help the reader to see the work in the context of its era out of which it emerged, is arranged chronologically, opening with Wollstonecraft’s “other vindication.” It also includes a wide range of other documents in appendices, as well as a comprehensive and authoritative introduction, chronology, and full index. (shrink)

B a c k g r o u n d. According to the genre characteristics, the article is a form of publicizing analytical conclusions from the experience of research in the field of the philosophical Chinese studies at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine from 1991 to the present day. The material for understanding was supplied from the environment of scientific professional activity of prominent figures of Ukrainian philosophical Sinology from the H. Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy of the (...) NAS of Ukraine and the A. Krymskyi Institute of Oriental Studies of the NAS of Ukraine. The scientific achievements of academic Sinologists, who are leading researchers of Chinese philosophical education, science and culture from the archaic to modern times, are highlighted. They are, namely: V. Kiktenko, V. Pyrohiv, V. Hamianin, S. Kapranov, Y. Hobova and A. Usyk. M e t h o d s. The article uses an analytical approach based on the study of historical and philosophical sources. The methodological basis of the research is the main methods of historical and philosophical science: problem-categorical analysis, socio-cultural analysis and biographical analysis. At the same time, the methods of situational and contextual analysis of scientific texts are applied. R e s u l t s. Four conditional thematic vectors of the progress of academic philosophical Sinology in modern Ukraine are classified, namely the study of: 1. the history of ancient Chinese philosophy, especially Confucianism; 2. the history of Chinese philosophy in the 19th – early 21st centuries; 3) the history of Ukrainian Sinology in the 18th – early 21st centuries; 4. the history of modern foreign Sinology. The director of the A. Krymskyi Institute of Oriental Studies of the NAS of Ukraine and the head of the Ukrainian Association of Sinologists V. Kiktenko very effectively studies all these vectors, especially the last three of them. His colleagues at the institute V. Pyrohiv, V. Hamianin and Y. Hobova mainly research the first of these vectors, and primarily the history of Confucianism. Employees of the H. Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy of the NAS of Ukraine S. Kapranov and A. Usyk are also focused scientific attention on the history of Confucianism, in particular, the second of them studies social ethics and anthropology of Confucius. C o n c l u s i o n s. As a result it was established that modern domestic philosophical academic Sinology is a qualitatively new and innovative direction of Oriental studies in independent Ukraine. This discipline was formed as a result of the two-century progress of Ukrainian Chinese studies from the era of Hetmanshina until now. V. Kiktenko and his colleagues have made a significant and already internationally recognized contribution to the study of both the classical philosophical schools of Ancient China and their ideological heirs, in particular, the leaders of the PRC and the CCP from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping during these thirty years. V. Kiktenko also laid the foundations for the study both of the history of Ukrainian Chinese studies and of modern foreign, primarily Western European and North American, Sinology. (shrink)

The crisis of the outdated education system in Ukraine has led to radical changes at all levels. One of such vital changes in 2016 was the New Ukrainian School reform introduced by the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine. It relies on critical theories of the postmodern philosophy of education. They are as follows: toleration of difference, rejection of stereotypes and child-centeredness; transformation of teacher’s authority and roles; individualization of the educational process. Importantly, the New Ukrainian School (...) reform has been launched in primary school as a fundamental part of the whole education system. In this regard, it is crucial to train primary school teachers of the new generation who will be able to implement the ideas of the New Ukrainian School. Consequently, it is extremely essential to update the system of corresponding training in higher education institutions in Ukraine. Therefore, the article aims to justify how future primary school teachers are trained for purposes of the New Ukrainian School in the postmodern era. (shrink)

The article analyzes the forms of rationalism and fideism proposed by Ukrainian Protestant theologians at the beginning of the XXI century. It turns out that these forms of rationalism and fideism were made possible by overcoming the anti-intellectualism that was characteristic of Protestantism in Soviet times. The opposition of tendencies to rationalism and fideism is connected with the positioning of Ukrainian Protestants in the postmodern times. Proponents of de facto rationalism propose to reconstruct the modern religious worldview, re-synthesizing (...) elements of liberal and fundamentalist concepts. The study shows that hopes for the restoration of the modern worldview in the face of the challenges of the early XXI century contain elements of utopianism. Proponents of Fideism suggest taking full account of the real state of affairs in the postmodern era and recognizing the impossibility for Christians to use modern rationalism in all its forms. At the same time, faith acquires special significance as an expression of the personal relations of the holy people with God. Ukrainian Protestant rationalism in the article is analyzed on the example of the work of Sergei Golovin as the most consistent expression of this worldview. It has been proven that his ideas depend on the concepts of Norman Geisler, a prominent Protestant theologian. Golovin, imitating Geisler, believes that the Christian worldview should be the final superstructure over the foundation of classical logical rationalism and the ontology of being. This logic comes from classical Thomism. Golovin's rationalism is the rationalism of formal logic. Golovin's first controversial proposal is to reduce the paradoxes and contradictions contained in the Bible. Such a reduction contradicts the biblical studies of the beginning of the 21st century, and therefore can no longer be convincing for professional theologians. For ordinary believers, this reduction is an obscure rationalization of the image of God they have in reading the Scriptures. The second controversial proposition is to convert people first to logical rationality as the ideological foundation of humanity, and then to their conversion to Christianity. Such a proposal is largely outdated, because in the twentieth century it became clear that rationality in itself can be an instrument of any worldview and does not ensure the preservation or rehabilitation of humanity. By comparing it with theological practices of restoring humanity through the ethics of accepting another, the author argues that the restoration of humanity is possible through recourse to the potential of existentialist spirituality, theology of interpersonal communication, and other practical strategies of Christian theology. The biggest shortcoming of Sergei Golovin's rationalism is the proposal to build his own "scientific creationism", which denies the basic scientific theories of today. The most successful element of Golovin's system was social ethics, which offers the idea of ​​a modern state governed by the rule of law as one that can be deduced from the spirit and letter of the biblical commandments. The fideism of Ukrainian Protestant theology is born from the understanding that the ethical acceptance of others and love for them is possible only on the basis of personal faith. The challenges of the beginning of the 21st century require the acceptance of another, but individuals and communities lack the natural strength to accept such. And only faith and faith-generated love help to be open to others. Also, the post-capitalist economy of mutual gift, proposed by theologians and Christian communities, is based only on personal faith. It has been proven that the fideism of Ukrainian Protestant theology is closer to the ideas of postconservatism than the concepts of postliberalism. It has been found that radical protection of individual rights and humane treatment of others is common to the rationalism and fideism of modern Ukrainian Protestant theology. It is these ideas that are important for understanding what humanity is, which should be a prerequisite for being a true Christian. (shrink)

(2008). william godwin's memoirs of the author of a vindication of the rights of woman and the gender of romantic biography. Angelaki: Vol. 13, re-coupling gender and genre, pp. 17-31.

Par sa recherche sur le concept philosophique de femme, Sr Prudence Allen apporte un éclairage neuf sur toute l'histoire de la philosophic Mon commentaire est basé essentiellement sur le texte ayant pour titre « Aristotelian and Cartesian Revolutions in the Philosophy of Man and Woman » sachant pertinemment que le livre The Concept of Woman traite de façon détaillée de ce qui apparaît dans l'article comme un exposé synthétique. Trois idées générales admises par Sr Prudence Allen font l'objet (...) de notre commentaire. Ce sont I'interpretation égalita-riste des idées de Platon quant aux différences sexuelles, la neutralité du concept d'homme et 1'interpretation philosophique de la complémenta-rite des sexes comme modèle des relations égalitaires. (shrink)

This study shows how Goethe's Die pilgernde Torin, Kleist's Die Marquise von O..., Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and James' Daisy Miller can appeal to the reader who identifies a message friendly towards woman and her plight, whether the message was the author's intention or not.

The article of Shmadylo I. «Figure of A. Richynsky in modern Ukrainian religious studies» examines the state of sources and Ukrainian historiography related to the study of theoretical heritage, socio-political and religious activities of A. Richynsky.

Religious and Cultural Situation on Ukrainian Lands at the End of the 16th Century acquired a new for the middle ages active progress. He manifested himself in the awakening of the national consciousness of the Ukrainian people, the revival of the Ukrainian culture and the revitalization of the Ukrainian religious-church life.

The article presents a comprehensive analysis of historiosophical Polish influence on the formation of Renaissance ideas and their reflection in ideology structure of the Ukrainian people. The author analyzes the basic ideas of humanism factors that penetrated into ethnic Ukraine – Rus lands, their point and the ideological sources and highlights the extent of their impact on the denomination and religious life of the Ukrainian people in the renaissance period.

In his research, the author focuses on the role played by Joseph Slipy in spiritual and religious education and the unification of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Diaspora, as he affirmed understanding of the role and place of Ukrainian religious art and enlightenment as an indispensable component of the Eastern Christian tradition.

In the history of religious organizations of Western Ukraine in the 20-30th years of the XX century. The activity of such an early protestant denominational formation as the Ukrainian Evangelical-Reformed Church occupies a prominent position. Among UCRC researchers there are several approaches to the preconditions for the birth of the Ukrainian Calvinistic movement in Western Ukraine. In particular, O. Dombrovsky, studying the historical preconditions for the formation of the UREC in Western Ukraine, expressed the view that the formation (...) of the Calvinist cell should be considered in the broad context of the Ukrainian national revival of the 19th and 20th centuries, a new assessment of the religious factor in public life proposed by the Ukrainian radical activists, and significant socio-political, national-cultural and spiritual shifts caused by the events of the First World War. Other researchers of Ukrainian Calvinism, who based their analysis on the confessional-polemical approach, interpreted Protestantism in Ukraine as a product of Western cultural and religious influences, alien to Ukrainian spirituality and culture. (shrink)

In recent years philosophers have done impressive work explicating the nature and moral importance of a kind of self-respect Darwall calls “recognition self-respect,” which involves valuing oneself as the moral equal of every other person, regarding oneself as having basic moral rights and a legitimate claim to respectful treatment from other people just in virtue of being a person, and being unwilling to stand for having one’s rights violated or being treated as something less than a person. It is generally (...) agreed that such self-respect is something all persons have a right to and ought to have and that it is morally objectionable for a person or a society to preclude or injure someone’s self-respect. But scant attention has been paid to another kind of self-respect, the kind that has to do not with the fact that you are a person but with the kind of person you are, that has to do not with rights but with character. I call this kind of self-respect “evaluative self-respect.” The central task of this paper is to explicate the moral value of evaluative self-respect. I do this by looking at the role it plays in the life of someone who is sincerely concerned to be a good person. This is not to deny that evaluative self-respect can go wrong, and I look at how it can go wrong. In particular, evaluative self-respect is, like everything else in human life, vulnerable to the distorting forces of oppression. But, I argue, evaluative self-respect can have moral value even when it goes wrong, and it can be a liberatory resource in the lives of the oppressed. (shrink)

Sati as a trope for the general status of women within certain portions of the Hindu cultures of India is examined, with a view toward clarification of its history and current context. The work of Sangari and Vaid, Banerjee and Mala Sen is cited, and the notion that sati is a misappropriated concept is analyzed.