Almost every day.
Mostly in Ukrainian
And every time you see a young, beautiful face in a mournful frame that shouldn’t be there, you begin to see it anew.
And hate too.
The best are leaving. It’s not by chance. It’s because the best—whole, talented, and noble – are not prepared for half measures and choose the path of freedom: a path of calling.
Today I am reading an obituary in Russian.
Timofey Anufriev
22 years old
The son of the famous conceptual artist Sergei Anufriev, born in Moscow and raised in Odessa….
“…I found everything interesting with him: attending lectures, listening to his music, giving him interviews, participating in his book events. He gave a philosophical lecture, “Ruin,” at our Catacombs. Timofey was an expert in ancient philosophy and himself the embodiment of the ancient canon: handsome, intelligent, free, courageous. Of course, he couldn’t stay away from the war. The hero’s journey.”
“When I looked at him, I thought that the future must belong to such young people. What future could there be without people like him?! Dark times became even darker with his passing. I believed that the war would end sooner or later, that he would be a living hero, that I would see him many years later, with grey hairs at his temples, and I even guessed what I would see in his gaze—such a bottomless sadness, but utterly extraordinary. And he would become the founder of a new school of philosophy—one such as has never existed before, because in the future we need a new philosophy of new people…” ( Irina Chukomina )
His call sign was “Aeneas”.
“…Aeneas considered Ukraine and Russia his native lands. An exceptionally intelligent and educated, open and kind man, he strove to be of service to the (Russian Volunteer) Corps not only in battle but also beyond its borders.
Aeneas was familiar with the cultural bohemians of the two capitals from childhood, but he was not that abstract and “airy” part of the artistic elite that exists in isolation from reality; on the contrary, he was passionately concerned about the fate of his people.
The war broke out during his first year at the University of St. Petersburg, where he was studying philosophy and planning to become a public philosopher. He was disgusted by the fact that many of his circle in Russia were pretending nothing was happening. So he decided first to leave Russia and then join the Russian Volunteer Corps.
“There’s always a choice,” Aeneas believed, and he made a choice dictated by honour. He spent his entire career as a stormtrooper—the most dangerous job in the war.
He participated in many of the Corps’ operations: assaults, cleanups, and capturing prisoners. He lived and died like a true knight and poet, in a blaze of fiery glory!
“…He had incredible potential and a bright future. But he gave his life for his struggle. It was an honour to work with him.”
Awarded the medal “For assistance to military intelligence of Ukraine”.
Not a victim, but a hero.
And today, the voices of the so-called “Russian opposition” are even more worthless and insignificant – from the singers of silence as resistance and witnesses of a passive-voice sect of innocent Russians to those accused of “Nazism” who merge with the Kremlin rhetoric.
The “opposition” figures, bravely storming grants and seats in PACE, have been unable to pronounce the word “Ukraine” for four years. An “opposition” without a position: stewing in its own amorphous and irresponsible juice, where the cuckoo praised the rooster.
“An opposition” that does not support the real heroes of the resistance with a word or a cent: the Ukrainians and those fighting on the side of freedom and justice: the Georgians, the French, the English, the Italians, and those rare Russians who save the honour of this very word.
This is opposition without quotation marks. In the true sense of the word. Resistance. A real stand against evil. At the cost of one’s own life. At the cost of hundreds of unwritten books, unmade films, undanced and unplayed games, unwritten sonatas, paintings and poems, unborn children…
And now I will not talk about the Europeans and the summit of the Coalition of the Willing and about today’s meeting in Paris…
About European stages and Russian ballets.
All this is unbearable.
Incomparable.
Glory to the heroes.
Here is the text that Timofey wrote in Serbia before leaving for the war, on 13 February 2023.
It’s called
Experience of Freedom
“The war unleashed by Russia showed the entire world one simple and banal truth: freedom must be fought for. This phrase always struck me as vulgar and clichéd, perhaps too maximalist. But reality has made its own adjustments.
I saw that freedom, like unfreedom, has a material embodiment; it is here and now. Freedom is a specific existential experience lived by a person. We can never express it in words or convey it to another person. Experience can only be individual. But many people experience it today, and it is through their example that we can, far from describing freedom, point to its experience. Just as we point to the ineffable colours “red” or “green,” to obvious Evil, to other obvious but inexplicable things.
Let’s start from the end, with the answer to the question “What is unfreedom?” Unfreedom is right here, before us, right here with us; we ourselves are unfreedom. 21st September begins. An “urgent appeal” is heard on TV—that’s unfreedom speaking. A young man in the Russian hinterland is taken to the military registration and enlistment office, and from there, within a few days, he’s sent off to war—that’s also unfreedom, living, warm, breathing. An IT specialist leaves the country to live in warmth and safety—there’s unfreedom flying across the sky. And here, unfreedom sits in a trench, dirty and shivering, not knowing why or for what purpose it’s there; it bombs cities, kills civilians, plunders homes, rapes wives and children. That’s how unfreedom is sown. We point our fingers at it. Unfreedom is helplessness in the face of tyranny.
So, where is freedom? It’s there, in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Bakhmut, Gulyai-Pole. It’s also alive, also warm. Freedom also sits in a trench, weapon in hand. But freedom knows why it’s freezing in the dugout, it knows why it’s killing people. For freedom fights to avoid being unfree, to avoid becoming a creature in the trench across the street. To avoid being arbitrarily thrown into an unjust war, to avoid being arbitrarily killed on the path to a building entrance, arbitrarily hounded, or arbitrarily locked in prison.
Freedom is the respect of people for one another, the absence of arbitrariness, and a firm belief in the social contract, in the power of Law, not the law of Force. Its metaphysics is as simple and direct as the laws of this world. They lie on the surface; they are Obvious. But how much strength it takes for a person to comprehend the experience of these laws! The experience of freedom.
And the laws of this world protect it. And those who study them, understanding the world around them, realize that freedom is the natural state of affairs, while unfreedom disrupts the order of things, violates their measure. Unfreedom is pride, the desire for infinite power, what the Greeks called ὕβρις (hybris), and what Tolkien called “the ring of omnipotence.”
Any pride, any transgression of the laws that govern the world, is punished by Nature. Whether we call this Divine Retribution, the punishment of the gods, or a neutral law is irrelevant. Alexander the Great, having conquered vast territories, died young, and his empire fell apart. Napoleon, desiring world domination, suffered a crushing defeat. Hitler, dreaming of the same, ended his life in a basement.
These are the Horae, daughters of Zeus the Just, who order the world, and Themis, who defends order, who carry out the will of their parents. These three sisters are found together everywhere: Dike, the Horae of Justice, Eunomia, the Horae of Lawfulness, and the humble Eirene, goddess of peace.
Here, a tyrant suffers defeat, breaking his teeth against a small but strong-willed country. Here, people who honour the laws of the universe begin to overcome tyranny. And by the end of these terrible and heroic events, peace arrives.”
Timofey Anufriev
