Donbass Chronicles: Dawid Hudziec Photography
Memory is a dark subterranean river one occasionally enters at one’s own peril. In my early teens, I was obsessed with every ancient Greek and Roman author I could find in my parents’ vast library. Euripides’ atmospheric Iphigenia in Tauris was an Athenian tragedy that spoke to me most. I would pace my bedroom and read it out loud over and over again. This is how much the text possessed me. Much later in life, I learned that my paternal grandmother was born and grew up in the Black Sea region of Kherson, an Eden in Tauris where the siblings Orestes and Iphigenia lived and guarded their precious statue of Artemis. The Black Sea Iphigenia haunted the imagination of Aristotle (in his Poetics), Ovid, ancient novels, theater, vases, imperial sarcophagi…This devotee of Artemis comes to life again in the works of Gluck, Goethe and imaginations of St Augustine, Tertullian, Catherine the Great, Isadora Duncan, Hector Berlioz. Ancient residents of Tauris believed a special electrifying aura of divinity permeated their land due to its association with the Parthenos. Perhaps the strange world of wave genetics (Peter Garaev, the founder of this branch of research, passed away quite recently) does have something to offer to the world. Wave genetics posits that DNA memory is a Quantum Biocomputer (QB) with the characteristic elements of consciousness and thought. The main principles of QB are based on holographic and quantum non-locality.
As I am writing this, NATO troops are being amassed in Kherson to launch an offensive on the Russophone Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. What has set us on an extremely dangerous and suicidal collision course that would most certainly result in an obliteration of the US? The operational abilities of the new Russian military have been most persuasively demonstrated during the recent action against ISIS, Al Nusra and other foreign-funded terrorist groups operating in Syria. A long time ago Russia had to respond to provocations by fighting land battles on her own territory, then launching a counter-invasion; but this is no longer necessary. Russia’s new weapons make retaliation instant, undetectable, unstoppable and perfectly lethal.
Americans view war as an exotic foreign adventure and have no concept of what war entails in reality. This hubris, ignorance, incompetence and incessant hawkish Western propaganda have given us unnecessary wars of aggression and violent coups. Over a million innocent people have already died in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, the Ukraine, Yemen, Somalia and many other countries. However Syria and Donbass have shown the world that there is a limit to this senseless evil.
Mr Hudziec is a brilliant photojournalist, and it has been an extraordinary book to publish. Praising his work too highly would partly ruin its excellence and dull his vision. I’d rather let the images speak for themselves. My preoccupation with lost worlds may have influenced my choice of his photographs for Donbass Chronicles. I am invariably drawn to the theatrical and the sacralised and images of sibyl-like performers in flowing robes on stage may have awakened some longing for the ineffable in my deep mind. It’s a triumph of color, art, beauty over the dross of canned newspaper chatter.
Diana Thoresen
Palm Cove, Australia
31/03/2021
