Notes from Mykolaiv: How Moscow's missiles are knocking down the imperial myth from our South

Mykolaiv is constantly being hit by ballistic missiles, targeting the shipyard, the city theater, the regional administration... The first day after my arrival, I was taken out of my sleep in the morning screaming: "Wow!" – it seemed that the explosion had occurred right under the hotel windows, although in fact the rocket hit a service station across the river, on the outskirts of the city; one person was killed.

In the evening after the performance, during the autograph session, I heard young women talking in the queue: "Well, the day started so hard, and it ends so well!" (that's what literary festivals are for during the war!).

The next day, I had a chance to look into the city theater (formerly the Chkalov Russian Drama, sic!!) and see that it was also overcrowded (the stage is in a shelter), with spectators sitting on folding chairs (I also sat on the stage! – wherever there was room).

And everywhere Mykolaiv residents boast about their "was – became": here we had an arrival, we made signs, you can see them by QR code, and here we left a piece of a rocket stuck in a tree, and here we changed the exposition after the arrival, we haven't finished yet, but the fireplace has already been restored, if you want to see?. .

The memorialization of the current events is very active here, and it is clear that this is where the city's vibrant life and creative energy pulsates, right up to the appearance of "people's monuments.".

For example, I was never able to find out who the author of the monument in the photo that ends the Heroes' Alley on the central square is. Mykolaiv residents shrugged their shoulders – "they just poured it out," they said, at one of the local factories – that's how you forget the author of a song, because indeed, the monument turned out to be universal, "about everyone," and it fits perfectly into the area, including the bombed-out regional administration in the background (I wish I could show you this in a photo, but you'll have to take my word for it).

Perhaps it is in Mykolaiv that we can most clearly see how the current war is decolonizing Ukraine – how Moscow missiles are knocking down two hundred years of imperial myth from our South.

However, the matter has not yet come to the release of the Cossack myth buried under it (and, accordingly, the theme of the participation of our Cossacks in the development of the empire, which, as it turned out, "does not go without us") – the monument to Mykola Arkas (the second), promised to the city at the dawn of Independence as a separate stele, still does not stand there, on the site of the Arkas Palace destroyed by the Bolsheviks.

And there is no mention in the city's toponymy of Mykola Mykolaiovych's mother, Sofia Bohdanovych-Arkas, or of his grandfather, Petro Bohdanovych, one of those Cossacks, who, after the fall of the Hetmanate, turned from bunchuk comrades to tsarist counter-admirals, or rather, according to Shevchenko, to "uncles of a foreign fatherland" (c), but whose grandchildren founded the "Hromada" and "Enlightenment" for us a hundred years later, and not only in Mykolaiv

On the backbone of this dynasty alone, one could restore the city's own history, not imported "from Luzhkov and Catherine II," as indicative of our entire Black Sea region, but this has not yet become the subject of local identity wars.

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