Kharkiv: Scenes of a City Long Before and After the Invasion | EUROtoday

Alexander Gurzhy cherished nonetheless life. A glass bowl, a knife with a white deal with, a lightweight piece of bread topped with brilliant pomegranate seeds. Or is it currant jam? An elongated vase with willow branches, lit from beneath at an angle in order that the shadow on the wall towers over it. The smoke from a candle that has simply gone out, subsequent to it the skinny thread of smoke from a cigarette.

In normal, Gurzhy appreciated the quiet moments: rain-soaked streets at night time, rows of timber within the fog, wasteland on the outskirts of town. In the gap the prefabricated buildings of Kharkiv. Or a sequence that exhibits the Lenin monument on what was then Dzerzhinsky Square: Lenin can solely be glimpsed within the fog, the images are additionally barely angled, as if the revolutionary chief was regularly slipping away and dissolving on the identical time.

The nice Kharkiv photographer Boris Mikhailov as soon as stated that it was solely in his hometown that he was capable of finding his personal visible language, that he was solely in a position to work there: as a result of there was nothing occurring in Kharkiv through the Brezhnev period and likewise below Gorbachev. Because there was no artwork enterprise there, as a result of there was nearly nothing there anyway. Kharkiv, right now the second largest metropolis in Ukraine, was as soon as the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. But you can even really feel one thing misplaced on the earth in Alexander Gurzhy’s footage. Wide streets with hardly any vehicles on them, quiet portraits of males studying newspapers and young children waving purple flags. A lady strolling in a white polka dot gown behind the Great Synagogue.

The synagogue was broken by bombs originally of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Lenin monument has lengthy been gone, and lots of streets and squares have lengthy been unnamed. Gurzhy’s footage, like Mikhailov’s, had been created primarily within the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties. Gurzhy, nevertheless, was not an expert photographer, however a dentist by career. In 1995 he moved to Potsdam together with his household. His son, the musician, composer and creator Yuriy Gurzhy, born in 1975, now lives in Berlin.

Yuriy Gurzhy has now printed a small, very charming quantity of his father’s images and written a sequence of quick texts about it. Memories of his childhood in Kharkiv stand alongside scenes from his journeys to town through the warfare. For a very long time, little Gurzhy believed that the outdated man with a beard, whose portrait hung in his mother and father’ condo, was a distant relative – till he noticed the image in his buddies’ flats and realized that the supposed relative was the author Ernest Hemingway, who was revered in Ukraine on the time. There was even a bar in Kharkiv referred to as The Old Hem, which Yuriy Gurzhy used to frequent with one other well-known Kharkiv, Serhiy Zhadan. It was destroyed by a Russian missile in mid-March 2022.

The lyrics in “An Aquarium Full of Keys” impress with their cheerful serenity. They will not be accusatory texts, however secret declarations of affection. Even if Gurzhy is straight away provided Nazi memorabilia on the vintage vendor due to his German accent, or if a lady who sells outdated postcards simply needs to be left alone – the Russians ought to win the warfare, she says – Gurzhy sticks with a good friend who moved from Lviv to Kharkiv: “Kyiv is dead! Lviv is over! Real life is in Kharkiv, man!”

Of course, he does not inform his mom that he is so near the entrance and claims he is in Kiev. And the vintage vendor tells how the neighbors all got here to him after the invasion and gave him the keys in order that he may verify on issues from time to time. He then put all of the keys in an outdated aquarium. Where they nonetheless lie right now, an unphotographed nonetheless life.