Marek Šindelka for Ukraine

“THE AUTHORS’ READING MONTH” 

The first thoughts coming to my mind in connection with Ukraine are these: about eight years ago, we are sitting in a pleasant park with my friend Alex, drinking bottled beer and listening to a couple arguing near a huge and ugly monument. We are sitting and chatting about Ukrainian literature. Nowadays, Alex is an extraordinary writer, back then he still worked as a translator. 

We couldn’t stand being in our apartment. Ivan Martin Jirous had been cooking borsch already for three days there. I will teach those Ukrainians how it is done, he said the very first evening (he had said the same about drinking vodka, too). Later, we had a nice little evening, reciting bad poems by some local poets, drinking coffee (I desired to hear Andrukhovych, Zhadan, Taras Prochasko – but they came up with poets linked to the previous regime and read their poems about wild flowers) and I was asked about my most favourite contemporary Czech poet. With Jirous’ last three poetry collections on my mind, I had to admit it was him. It was not easy at all to do it there – as I was speaking, Jirous was throwing their books on the good-hearted poets, shouting the poems of Taras Shevchenko in their faces to explain to them what he considered to be fine poetry. 

Then they took us to our apartment with a necessary stop at “our” kiosk where Jirous, all touched, fed local stray cats. As soon as he sat down at home on the balcony and, tired by all these adventures, began to nap, Alex and I ran as far as we could. To walk a little and take a breath of the fresh evening air. That’s how we found ourselves in that nice park, immersed in the distant love argue (only God knows why I can hear Jirous’ lines „learn to pass the knife and the cue“ in my head), we sat down on a bench, feeling like removal men after an exhausting shift, holding heavy beer bottles in our hands and talking late into the night.  In the meantime, the borsch ominously bubbled on the stove back home. And as Alex later explained to me, the park was called the Babin Jar. 

Lviv 2017