A man mourns his mother, killed by debris from a Russian missle in a Kiev street.
Fadel Senna/AFP/Getty Images/The Times
We all, I imagine, have photographs of terrible events (World War 1, say, the Holocaust, or Hiroshima) indelibly seared on our brains. Where Ukraine 2022 is concerned, the above is the one I shall never forget.
The face is straight out of Pieter Bruegel: the pain on it is so terrible that you cannot tell whether it is a man’s or an old woman’s face. The horror, to confront your own mother as a white blanket seeping blood, is itself dehumanizing.
My eyes prickle whenever I look at this image and I hesitated many times before posting it. But like the great Bruegel, we must face the terrors that hell on earth inflicts on us. ‘Human kind/Cannot bear very much reality’, Eliot wrote. Yet only by confronting reality fully, not ducking it, can we change it. We must always face it and fight on.
If you look longer at the man’s face and body you see also that they are contorted in the most extreme pity for his mother in death. More: his horror and his pity are the expression of his boundless love for his mother. This is not just a picture of the horror of deranged Putin’s war, it is an icon of the triumph of love.
Everywhere amongst the Ukrainian people on our screens, — amongst women, children, comrades — you see love, you see it driving them. Love always wins. That is the truth.
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
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‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Patrick: I too am moved by that photograph you have posted, with the almost anonymous hooded figure mourning the dead mother in Kiev; and by your commentary, which well describes the complex and profound emotions registered on the face. You refer to Bruegel; for me, the helpless open mouth brings to mind the silent wail of Munch.
But somehow, your consolatory ‘Love always wins’ is snatched too rudely from the fire. (I think of the child in Chaucer’s ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, singing ‘Amor vincit omnia’ in ironic counterpoint to the narrative.) How does one set this consolation — which I want to share — with this kind of thing, a response from Ukrainian writer Olena Stiazhinkina which appears (translated) in the London Review of Books for 24 March: ‘These Russians are not people […] This morning, in Berdiansk, one of these monsters from Moscow shot an old man for refusing to hand over his mobile phone […] I promise: my great-grandchildren will hate theirs and teach their children the same.’ Such hatred is surely understandable, and may also (as she says) be handed down. And what does love have to say to this? ‘Love, and be silent’ is a hard injunction to follow. Is the best we can hope for that love may somehow overlay hatred, not extirpating it but insisting, patiently, on a desperate balance between the two? The greatest poets provide an insight into the question: ‘How with this rage shall beauty find a plea, / Whose action is no stronger than a flower?’
Dear Damian, many thanks. I too thought of Chaucer when I wrote ‘Love always wins’ — the cunning old poet’s final comment on the too-beautiful Prioress, that she wore a brooch inscribed Amor vincit omnia! But I was speaking purely theologically. Olena Stiazhinkina’s words are terrible. Yes, they are understandable, but if typical they would presage another Balkan tragedy, and I do not believe they are typical of the Ukrainian people. But then generally speaking I don’t believe modern writers have much of a moral or political grasp, unlike Bruegel, say, and am not a fan of the LRB, as you know. I think Cordelia said to herself ‘Love and be silent’ in a very different context? I don’t accept it, myself, in the present context, or I wouldn’t be writing these posts. Over the last ten years I have had to tell some people quite explicitly: I desperately believe in peace, but that does not make me a ‘pacifist’, let alone an appeaser of tyrants who certainly don’t believe in peace. (This was also my stance during the Cold War.) So ‘love and be silent’ is not my line…