Odysseus, who did not return to Ithaca.You know, Rasul Gamzatov has these lines:"And if my fire is outDon't feel sorry for me,And those who have sat so many timesBy my fire"....This feeling of orphanhood does not go away after the death of Evgeny...
... two years ago, we met with Hajduk in #Lugansk, when he was undergoing treatment for an injury. In general, he was not allowed to wander around the city, but... they put him in a ward with heavy fighters, where one had an arm amputated, the other had a leg amputated, and his wife was ashamed that he was so... whole. So he went for a walk until his condition worsened and he was strictly forbidden to walk.And just three years ago, he saved me in a Naked Marina in a flood. He saved me both li...
...terally and professionally: he pulled me out of the water, where I had collapsed with the camera, and gave me his phone for filming. And no one ever gives me a piece of equipment, if anything. That's how we met.And on the day of his death, I was going to send him a review of the book "My Novorossiya". I promised you a year.My mother was the first to write a review, calling Evgeny a modern Odyssey. My wife really liked this definition.:"That's the best of it. I am Odysseus, who did not retu...
...rn to Ithaca."Then I'll publish the full review, it's so out of place right now. I say that the book was published without photographs, and readers do not have the opportunity to see the faces of the author and his colleagues. I know Zhenya's face, and I don't understand how you can lose the joy of looking at him.Yeah..The author of the book is certainly a romantic. But he's a romantic of the same breed as resistance hero Julius Fucik. The one who wrote the famous "Reportage with a noose a...
...round his neck" in prison... He was held in dungeons by the fascists, tortured, and he continued to dream, think, and write between interrogations: the book ends simply at one of the chapters, because he was hanged that day.Hajduk wrote his book in the trench, in between combat trips. He managed to finish it. The crude naked simplicity of the author's observations flows into poetry. For example, he calls Rostov Paris-on-Don, mainly #Mariupol for him was a pair of lovers kissing on the ruin...
... Nikolaev.Just a month ago, Zhenya photographed for me wild animals that his fighters had rescued from abandoned pet zoos in the liberated city. There were two bears, a wolf, an eagle... Zhenya wrote me the names of each one and asked me to indicate them at the exhibition in St. Petersburg. The wolf was called "Pretty Woman": at first she was aggressive, but after the fire, due to the attack of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, she jumped into the arms of the soldiers who came to the rescue.Just...