Some time of our lives, even if it all happened in a war, will still retain the feeling that the landscape is about the tranquility and beauty of existence. The arched forest, in which the dusty rustle of the road under the wheels of a bicycle is about to escape, should bring comfort, not harm, if you act on the basis of the instructions of this place: do not go off the paths, do not tear or put in your mouth what you do not know, or destroy birds home.
This is the forest under the house and in this forest I love a deep hole, overgrown with too green grass and a shrub unknown to me. But the most important thing at the bottom is the blueberry bushes. So I roll down, like a ball, to crush between my index and thumb a blueberry that seems to be no less than a homemade strawberry in size. I am sure that the forest and its landscape are safe, it does not threaten me. I grew up in its fascinating thickets and remnants of swamps, this landscape shaped me, kept my world small, in which no one looks for a way and from which I hardly ever cut the road.
So I roll into a hole like a ball, and only then my grandmother says that the pit is a rip from a 1941 air bomb. That is, incredibly large blueberries grow in a hole from the bomb, I am surprised, and the grandmother worries that where the grass is greener than the other, the bombs did not burst there: is a beautiful landscape capable of swallowing a bomb?
I don't see anything wrong with a bomb blast yet, if it's so green and cherishes such big blueberries — it's beautiful. Bombs are ugly. I think so for no reason, even though I have not read a book about the war yet, and my war is still far ahead.
Photographer Roman Zakrevsky has always seemed to me a master of trifles. He is the photographer I have the most affection for. Not only because we were brought up with him and are largely connected by the same landscapes of northern Ukraine, our common Chernihiv and dense corners of the region. After all, it's hard not to have a feeling for the person with whom you sat on a millennial Chernihiv mound, pondering how much love it takes for a chestnut that has just sprouted here to become a big tree.
Roman, now not only a photographer, but also a soldier, took this picture in the east — near Kramatorsk. And it is a very strange feeling for a year to observe the landscapes in his pictures, which in no way resemble the Polish lands familiar to him and me.
Roman met this nude during one of the filming, it attracted his attention with its difference from the perspective of the north and the Chernihiv horizon. Roman sees strength in this breed. He could compare it to his earlier feeling: once he was in the village and sat for a while surrounded by beehives. Evening falls, the bees gather and prepare for sleep, and their buzz — certainly primitive — seems pleasantly familiar to Roman, even though he hears such a buzz for the first time. Looking at this breed, Roman felt something similar.
We prefer the landscape to remain safe or at least in a way that does not threaten us at this particular moment. Waves of fields, cut quarries, submerged floodplains of streams under the road. And what if the landscape could take the form of our experiences, which we tie to the thin tops of spruce trees on which fog descends from the mountains, or the granite ledges above the narrowing of the river, where river mussels can be caught with our hands. Do we ourselves not provide the landscape of our pains, fears and joys. We want the rocky protrusion under our feet to bring us peace, peace, balance and even answers. How strange is it to ask for answers in landscapes, but who else to ask for them?
Only the landscape is mostly silent, marked, and sometimes doomed by our presence.
When all the landscape is doomed, sooner or later it will become a battlefield. I think of the Dnieper on the surface, but also about the number of human bones that gathered on its black during the fighting for Kiev in World War II. In the fields near Umanna, I am not surprised, now digging trenches, we will definitely dig one of the Cossacks of the Bogun who fell asleep on guard.
In addition to the desired tranquility, landscapes could definitely take care of the peace of memory and the slowness of recall. Landscapes seem to be designed to erase and hide everything we have created, good or evil. Any iron can be swallowed by the forest, any bone of the tank will be caught by the claws of wild ivy, any bomb can be swallowed by the earth, and the river takes away bodies along the banks. Nature doesn't need our direction to hide everything. Do not even hide, no! Rather, wrap it up. Envelop yourself in all sorts Dying experience, reminding us of life.
Photo: Roman Zakrevsky
Text: Vera Kuriko
