Kyiv, Khreshchatyk, a few days ago, but I'm posting it today because the restaurant on the background is called Kobzar, and the guy on the bike is being such a kozak, and it's Taras Shevchenko's birthday today, and I've been reading him these past few weeks, finding his poetry beautiful, moving and/or depressing, comparing the Soviet perspective on his work expressed in my 1988 edition to some of the contemporary views that I'm aware of, realizing that neither is very close to what I feel when I read Shevchenko... Anyway, here's the picture:



P.S. Don't think what I wrote above is what I actually wanted to say: I'm absolutely allergic to the stuff we were fed in the Soviet times, and there's plenty of it in my 1988 edition of Shevchenko, but now it's sort of interesting to read through it - a good reminder of how much everything has changed in the past 20 years. As for the "contemporary" views, I don't really know much about any of them, except really superficially. And the best way for me to read Shevchenko is by pretending that no past or present perspectives exist and I'm completely on my own with his poetry. It's somewhat hard to accomplish, considering his status, past and present. But I don't even want to say that I'm re-reading him, because if I do, then all those other voices start interfering. Well, this is it, sort of.