To close out what has been, to say the least, a difficult year, I am pleased to bring you a bit of cheer from a most unexpected place: the war zone of Ukraine.

Welcome to the Ivan Franko Drama Theater of Kyiv.

And say hello to its current director, Yevhen Nyshchuk . . . who, after serving a year at the front following the Russian invasion in 2022, was able to return to his career in the theater along with other former actors.

Since its reopening six months after the start of the war, the Ivan Franko Drama Theater has staged more than 1,500 performances, attended by more than half a million patrons. Most, if not all, of their plays and concerts have sold out in minutes. [Svitlana Vlasova, CNN, December 29, 2024.]

One devoted theatergoer, Olha Mesheryakova, expects to attend at least a dozen performances in the coming year . . . despite not knowing what the coming year will actually bring to the lives of the Ukrainian people. She explains that the theater offers a sense of hope:

“This creates a certain expectation, gives a kind of structure, great support at a time when the world around me has gone crazy, and I know exactly what I’m going to do on December 23, for example, because I bought tickets in the summer. Honestly, it gives me hope and faith in the future. It’s some kind of magic.” [Id.]

And if a performance is interrupted by air raid sirens, as they frequently are . . . well, then the audience and the performers leave the theater and take shelter at the nearest metro station. If all is clear within an hour, the performance resumes; if not, the show continues on another day.

It reminds me of stories I’ve read of the London Blitz during World War II: stories of unimaginable courage and resilience in the face of interminable misery and fear.

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And it’s not just the theaters that are going strong. The number of bookstores in Ukraine has actually increased since the start of the war from around 200 to nearly 500 today. The largest, Sens, opened on Kyiv’s main street while the war raged. It is crowded at all times of the day, and says that it had more than half a million customers this year. They also have events planned for months in advance. [Id.]

The store’s founder, Oleksiy Erinchak, explains the rationale behind his opening of a business in the midst of a war:

“[A] book is the most convenient way to spend time during the war when it is impossible to predict anything. Many people have switched to the Ukrainian language [from Russian]. They are trying to understand what it means to be Ukrainian. And books make it much easier to do that.

“Maybe it’s just war, or stress, and a person just hides under the covers, under the bed, opens a book and travels to other worlds to get away from it all. Or not traveling to other worlds, but delving deeper to understand why did this happen in our lifetime? And books actually have many answers, and you can feel them, understand them, and feel better.

“Local culture always flourishes during wartime … If people are bringing money to the Ukrainian bookstore, it means that we need to invest this money further in Ukrainian books, in Ukrainian culture. We need to build this foundation in our book and cultural sphere as strongly as possible and build a semantic shield around it, a dome so that it would be much more difficult for others to break in and influence the minds of Ukrainians.”

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And for those who may find the emphasis on culture a bit frivolous or inappropriate during wartime, Yegor Firsov — a chief sergeant who has been fighting in Ukraine’s defense against Russia since 2022 — has an answer, even as he and others are living in what he describes as “real hell”:

“When it comes to women and children, I and my brothers-in-arms, and everyone, supports it. Because people are distracted from stress and in such difficult times they want to experience something genuine, and bookshops and theaters are about the real thing, about life.” [Id.]

On occasional leave from the fighting, Sergeant Firsov sometimes manages to come to Kyiv. And when he does, he also goes to concerts:

“Culture is a part of our lives, it is both about war and partly about leisure, because even we, military men, need mental healing, need to be distracted, to be resilient.” [Id.]

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All of this goes a long way toward explaining how the people of Ukraine — while vastly outnumbered and out-armed — have held out against the Russian war machine for nearly three years, without losing faith or certainty in their survival as a free and sovereign nation.

And that nobility of spirit is what Vladimir Putin has not been able to crack . . . and likely never will.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
12/31/24