When nothing in particular happens in the life of a man and his country, the man might believe his existence to be stable and eternal. In fact, that life – where time is measured in career changes, in the purchases of new houses or cars, in family gatherings, in weddings and divorces – truly is stable. The man who lives in one of the world’s ‘hot spots’, or who simply lives next to an active volcano, has a different view of time. The worth of each day, each hour experienced, proves infinitely greater than that of a peaceful week. When you live next to a volcano, real or metaphorical, the day is filled with so many events that it proves physically impossible to remember them all. These events inevitably end up in the history books, sometimes comprising only a few lines, sometimes one or two pages.
I now understand why, when I was at school, I much preferred reading the private diaries of writers or politicians who had witnessed history to reading actual history books. I remember the diary of the great Russian poet Alexander Blok, covering the years 1917–18. I remember Franz Kafka’s diary, and I remember in particular the diary – which I read recently in its complete version – of the famous Ukrainian film-maker Alexander Dovzhenko, in which he would sing the praises of Stalin or revile the Jews and the Ukrainians, just in case he was arrested and the KGB read his notebooks, so he would be able to point out these passages as proof of his loyalty to the Soviet regime.
I have kept diaries for more than thirty years. Several times, my Ukrainian editors have asked to publish them, even if only fragments of them, but until now I have never been able to force myself to extract from these private writings anything I was ready to share with readers.
And then, having been led on more than one occasion into the path of a whirlwind of history, I found myself the witness to the dramatic events that arose in November 2013 in Ukraine, events of which we have not yet seen the end. I do not know what will happen next, or what lies in store for me and my family. I only hope that everything will be all right.
I am not leaving. I am not shying away from reality. I live each day in the very centre of reality. All five of us – myself, my wife Elizabeth, and our children Gabriela, Theo and Anton – continue to live in the same apartment, in the heart of Kiev, five hundred yards from the Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Ukraine’s Independence Square. From our balcony we have seen smoke rise from blazing barricades, we have heard the explosions of grenades and gunshots. Life goes on, throughout all of this; not once has it stopped. And I have recorded this life almost every day, so that I can attempt, now, to recount it to you in detail. A life in times of revolution, a life spent waiting for war. A war that, as I write these words, seems terribly close, closer than ever.