Notes in the Kyiv Scrapbook: Third Year
Translators' Note:
Shortly after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and advance on her native Kyiv, Nataliia Bidenko, Dean of the Dentistry Department at Bohomolets National Medical University, a passionate local history enthusiast and talented musician, joined the fight in her several vocations simultaneously. She became a member of Teroborona, the military reserve units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. At the same time, on the academic front, she continued making sure that the basic needs of her students were met. And finally, she started documenting life during the war.
The excerpts that follow are only a tiny sample of a larger corpus of notes written in real time, covering every month of the war. The first installment published with Arrowsmith can be found here. Nataliia continues to write; she never imagined that her notes would be of interest to others, but they are. We hope the readers will listen to the various voices that reverberate these excerpts. We also hope that the full text will see the light in the not so distant future.
Finally, a recent note from Nataliia to us, her translators, may well find resonance with you, dear readers, and help to frame the text that follows.
“I understand the sadness you must feel after taking in the news. That sense of impending disaster is what constantly accompanies us now, and with this, we live, work, study, love, laugh every day and night... Perhaps that is even scarier than the rockets and explosions in the city. But we will live. We have no choice.”
— Oksana Rosenblum & Lev Fridman
March 2024
The Third Spring
The new calendar year began with a day of mourning for the more than thirty people killed after the shelling of the City.¹
The new year of war began with a day of mourning for the civilians, adults and children killed in the shelling of Odesa.
The sun hid on this spring day, and the piercing cold of February returned. The endless February of a drained country.
So came the third spring of war.
Sowing
Fields are being prepared for sowing. People walk in unbroken single file; their movements are sweeping, deliberate, precise; they walk slowly but confidently, advancing further and further.
These people are wearing camouflage.
Sappers are clearing the fields for sowing.
Vasyl Slipak
The golden calf is still standing,
His might
Is celebrated
From one end of the world to the other!
Nations and kings mix together
To hail the infamous idol
And to the sinister clink of coins
They whirl in a frenzied ring
Round and round his pedestal!
And Satan leads the dance!
These powerful sounds reverberated from the renowned opera stages of the world. The Paris Opera proudly presented the unique voice of its Ukrainian soloist, whose range combined, incredibly, a rich baritone with the magical soprano of a countertenor.
The golden calf triumphs over the gods;
Basking in
His preposterous glory
The base monster insults Heaven!
He looks down? O strange madness!
On the human race at his feet
Sallying forth, sword in hand,
Through blood and filth,
Where the burning metal is shining!²
Slipak lived in transit from one extreme to another:
baritone and countertenor;
France and Donbas,
the Paris Opera and the Eastern Front.
Videos still roam the expanses of the internet: him singing, sitting in a courtyard somewhere near Avdiivka, loading metal bullets into the magazine of his rifle.
Click.
Click.
Click…
The metal bullets click in sync with his singing. And somewhere nearby, gunshots and explosions provide an accompaniment.
Exactly a year after this video made the rounds, a sniper’s bullet pierced our singer’s wide chest.
…the burning metal is shining!
And Satan leads the dance!
A few days would pass, and in Lviv they’d be singing at the funeral services for the “best Mephistopheles” who ever lived.
This was in 2016.
The here and now seems like a completely different world, as if in another dimension, another time, in some other universe.
Still, it came to mind. Because it seems that across the planet, a single endless war is raging, at all times and on all continents, with occasional pauses and rollbacks. People call them “peace.”
And in the background, above it all, is the music of eternity.
The Mundane
On a minibus, the lively sounds of the radio. At the end of yet another advertisement, a cheerful voice offers, tripping over the words, “speedy delivery across all of Ukraine (except for the occupied territories).”
Such an irrationally terrifying everyday reality.
The Oscars
The 2023 Academy Award for Best Picture was awarded to Oppenheimer — a film about one of the creators of the atomic bomb, the first use of which reduced a city in Japan to a firepit.
Two years before the nuclear apocalypse in Hiroshima, a few hundred kilometers away in Tokyo, the mother of twelve-year-old Mahito, whose father owned a factory producing aviation ammunition, perished in an air raid. Mahito’s search for his mother in a fantasy world is the focus of The Boy and the Heron, which won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
At the same time, the commandant of the death factory known as Auschwitz was attempting to build the carefree life of his dreams just on the other side of the camp wall, complete with a home, a garden, and guests coming over. The movie telling this story, called The Zone of Interest, won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
Ukraine got its first Oscar. It was awarded in the category of Best Feature-Length Documentary for 20 Days in Mariupol — a story of how eight decades after the end of World War II, a peaceful city was turned into a firepit.
On The Southern Front
On the same day when a March snow falls unexpectedly and covers the ground, the soldier arrives in the City from the southern front: they let him take a leave for ten days. His medical unit is stationed on the Right Bank of the Dnipro in the Kherson region; doctors are not allowed on the fiery, bloody Left Bank — that’s where the combat medics work by day, and at night they ferry the numerous wounded across the Dnipro, in boats, under constant enemy fire.
He takes out his phone and, one after the other, plays videos of the medical unit at work — clips overflowing with misery, blood, and pain. Then he opens the photo gallery: photos of soldiers alternate with photos of his little children, smiling radiantly. His wife regularly sends those photos from home. He pauses, his face darkens: all these guys in the photos, his friends, are already Cargo 200.³ He can’t bring himself to delete them, so they remain in the photo gallery next to the children.
Just as in life: our dearest in heaven are alongside our dearest among us.
The Dreadful Chronology
Odesa.
Kryvyi Rih.
Sumy.
Odesa. Once again, Odesa…
Shelling of different cities every day and every night.
Days of mourning echo through our cities.
The news feed has become a chronology of murder.
Living Without Pain
An advertisement for an orthopedic center that treats diseases and injuries of the spine reads, in large script: “Life without pain!”
There’s life without pain?
Pi Day
March 14th, written out in the American style as 3.14, is Pi Day.
On this day, Einstein was born. He once said, “I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth — rocks!”
On this day in 2018, Stephen Hawking passed away. He predicted the end of civilization on Earth — specifically, as the result of nuclear war. He believed that Einstein was wrong when he said, ‘I am convinced that He does not play dice.’ Speaking remotely at a forum in Kyiv in 2017, Hawking wished Ukrainians more freedom, and at the end of his speech advised them to remember to look up at the stars and not down at their feet.
Now, there are mines underneath our feet.
Across the starry sky, missiles and drones leave behind their trails.
Freedom is becoming increasingly elusive.
Civilization on Earth persistently flirts with its own demise.
God plays dice with the Universe.
And Pi remains infinite.
Glide Bombs
“The russians⁴ dropped a bomb on a house near Vuhledar in the village of Maksymivka: there are casualties.”
It’s the third year of war, yet the brutality in the news still sounds like it is unprecedented.
Hundreds of guided bombs - in the Sumy region, the Kharkiv region, the Chernihiv region, in the South, in the East. They work on the principle of “drop and forget” — they’ll reach their destination on their own. When the glide bombs appeared, old unguided bombs received the nickname of “dumb bombs.”
“Dumb” death and “guided” death. And then there is also the winged, the ballistic, the phosphorus…
And still only one life.
The War with Light
In February 2022, on the 24th day, a full-scale war began.
In March 2024, on the 22nd day, it entered a qualitatively new phase, which some inexplicably called a “real war,” as if up to that point it was being played out with toy soldiers.
The new stage began after the spring equinox, along with massive bombings across the country, for several nights and days in a row. When the shelling knocked out half of DTEK’s generating capacity⁵ and damaged the DniproHES, darkness once again descended on the cities of the country.
When it turned out that our international allies were more bothered by a possible increase in oil prices than the war in Ukraine. When the West shouted, “Please stop shooting at russia!”
When, for the first time in several years, Europe and America hurried to send their condolences to the russian president on account of the terrorist attack in Crocus City Hall, which still generates more discussion in the world than russian war crimes committed in Ukraine.
When someone in the US suggested that Ukraine’s victory in this war might consist solely of Ukraine’s continued presence on the map, regardless of our country’s borders.
When a Russian missile accidentally flew into Poland and they were afraid to shoot it down.
When in the City center, ahead of the air raid siren, debris rained down from a hypersonic Zircon missile, faster and more powerful than the Kinzhal.
When experts started to seriously consider the enemy’s plans to encircle and capture Kharkiv.
When white “dragon’s teeth” and several new defensive lines stretched out around the City.
When by decree, the russian orthodox church council in moscow designated the Special military operation a “Holy War.”⁶
All Is Well
Got a response to a worried text message from Kharkiv, relentlessly shelled, not for the first day and not the first month: “All is well. No electricity. No water. No heat. They’re shooting. I’m sleeping. All is well.”
Songs
Before the war, I knew him just a bit. When he joined the military, he started writing to me little by little. From the frontline, he didn’t send texts or voice messages about what was happening to him. He simply shared links to songs that, perhaps, resonated with his soul at every turn of his difficult path. The first one, at the beginning of the war, was the original singer-songwriter piece by Aleksandr Gorodnitskii from 1960’s, The Rapids:
Stones command, the wind commands
My leaky boat.
By morning I’ll have reached the great river,
By morning summer will have ended.
But I can’t let on
That I don’t want to die.
And in the first days of March, Maybe I, Maybe You from 2004 by the Scorpions arrived:
Maybe I, maybe you
Can make a change to the world
[...]
Maybe I, maybe you
Are just soldiers of love
Born to carry the flame
Bringing light to the dark.
As it turns out, the path of a human being in war can go from fear of death to love.
Birds
Early in the morning, the bird-song was particularly loud and resonant after a night of alarms and explosions. Dozens of rockets hit Podil, Sviatoshyn, Kurenivka.⁷
When the smoke rose to the sky over the Right Bank, the sun rose over the Left. And between the banks, the Dnipro seethed: twisted whirlpools and frothy waves heralded spring flooding.
The next night, however, the menacing phantom of a more terrifying flood would surface: because of powerful shelling, the largest and oldest hydroelectric dam on the Dnipro river, the Dnipro Hydroelectric Station (DniproHES), caught fire. That night, a huge flock of predatory iron birds consisting of about a hundred rockets and shahed drones covered the country with a dense net of their trajectories, destroying the energy infrastructure.
A fog of memories — rolling in.
An old photo of the DniproHES dam, blown up by the Red Army during the retreat in 1941 — death and destruction on the flooded riverbank.
The shelling of the dam in late October 2022.
The blackouts last winter, when the darkness almost prevailed.
The Kakhovska HES blown apart by the occupiers in June, 2023 — death and destruction on the flooded riverbank.
In the morning, the birds will sing again, predicting the warmer weather. And then the sun will have to rise.
March gives way to April.
___________________
1. Kyiv
2. Jules Carré and Michel Barbier, Faust (1859). The original libretto was published in French.
3. A code referring to soldiers killed at war.
4. Here and throughout the text, the references to Russia, Moscow, and Russians are written in lowercase, which has become accepted in Ukrainian informal writing since the beginning of the full-scale invasion.
5. The largest energy enterprise in Ukraine.
6. “Special Military Operation” is a euphemism used by the Russian government to denote the war against Ukraine.
7. Names of Kyiv neighborhoods.
Oksana Rosenblum is an art history researcher and translator based in New York City. She was born and raised in Ukraine but calls NYC her home since 2003. Her poetry translations from Ukrainian, essays, and book reviews appeared in National Translation Month, Versopolis, Ukrainian Weekly, Asymptote, Bracken, and Arrowsmith. She co-edited a bilingual volume of the early poetry of Mykola Bazhan, an important and prolific 20th century Ukrainian poet (Academic Studies Press, 2020), translated V. Domotovych’s novel On Shaky Ground (Central University Press, forthcoming in 2024), and co-translated Artem Chekh’s novel Rock, Paper, Grenade (Seven Stories Press, forthcoming in 2025).
Lev Fridman is a Speech-Language Pathologist based in New York City. He has facilitated translation projects and publications, and his own writing, translations, and reviews have appeared in various publications. He is co-editor of Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul: Mykola (Nik) Bazhan’s Early Experimental Poetry (Academic Studies Press, 2020). Most recently he was co-translator of Today is a Different War by the Ukrainian poet Lyudmyla Khersonska (Arrowsmith Press, 2023).
Nataliia Bidenko is a medical doctor, professor, physician, scientist, and educator, who has been teaching at the Oleksandr Bohomolets National Medical University in Kyiv for over 30 years. She is the author of over 200 academic articles and has contributed to the creation of more than 30 textbooks and manuals for medical students and doctors. She has traveled extensively throughout Ukraine with medical and archaeological expeditions, and is passionate about photography and music, in particular playing traditional flutes from various regions of the world. Nataliia continue to participate in musical projects that highlight the richness of Ukrainian culture. Notes in the Kyiv Scrapbook is her first experience of creating a lengthy diary that reflects on the tragic events of the present through the eyes of a participant and eyewitness.