A very cold and sunny day. On Saturday, I took Theo, Anton and eight other children to the party in the Hidropark, at the Paintball Planet club. The plastic bullets filled with red paint froze and exploded inside the gun barrels, but the kids waged war for almost two hours, with breaks to clean the guns.
On Sunday, Liza and I went to the Maidan, taking five kilos of buckwheat kasha. We were preparing a grown-up celebration of Theo’s birthday when we learned that Natasha Kolomoytseva was ill – heart problems. She had called for an ambulance and been taken straight to the hospital. Then Ira Khazina called to say she probably wouldn’t be able to come, because she had bronchitis, and that Petya would stay to look after her. So that is how we came to celebrate the event with three guests instead of six. The beef with rosemary was perfect. We drank tea and ate cake in front of the fire. It all ended quite early, about 8.30 p.m. But it was a nice evening.
And today, at eleven in the morning, I went to the Vidrodzhenie (‘Renaissance’) Foundation, where a board meeting was being held for a humanitarian initiative providing medical assistance for victims of the regime. There are three writers on the supervisory board: Serhiy Zhadan, Oksana Zabuzhko and myself. The fourth member will be the former Health Minister, Vasil Kniazevich. Zabuzhko attended the meeting only virtually, by telephone. She said that current events were merely the beginning of a third world war, that postmodernism’s time was over, etc. The foundation director, Yevgeniy Bystritsky, gave us a copy of a strange and very aggressive speech by Igor Lutsenko, the Maidan activist: ‘Those who spilled blood’ – undoubtedly an allusion to Pravy Sektor, the far-right nationalist party – ‘have the right to govern the country. Everyone fight until the final victory!!!’ and so on, all in the same belligerent style. In other words: the war continues.
The Kapranov brothers were barely allowed to mount the stage in the Maidan to announce the decision to organise a forum. They were bewildered and upset. Revolutionaries are becoming superfluous to this revolution. Complete unknowns decide who is allowed to speak onstage, and who should be prevented.