On a picturesque street in Kiev, the memorial plaque honoring Soviet writer Mikhail Bulgakov, author of “Master and Margarita”, has been sprayed with red paint, a sign of the culture war simmering in Ukraine.
The plaque is on the facade of the 19th-century house where this famous native of the Ukrainian capital grew up, which became a museum in the early 1990s. The problem for some: Bulgakov was born in Kiev to a Russian family.
The director of the museum, Lioudmyla Goubianouri, has no intention of cleaning the red paint that covers the commemorative plaque.
“The fact that they threw paint on it is also a sign that we, as a museum, have not done enough work” explanatory, she told AFP.
She designed a sign that will hang under the defaced plaque, reading: “History should be studied, not dismissed.”
“All of this is of course related to the war with Russia. The reason why this happened is absolutely obvious and clear,” she points out.
According to the director, the suffering caused by the Russian invasion in February 2022 has radicalized Ukrainians, who now only see in “black or white”.
“It’s a very difficult time for the country,” she said.
However, the museum had recently changed the inscription on the plaque in honor of Mikhail Bulgakov. Originally, it was written in the Russian language and called him a “Russian and Soviet writer”.
The new inscription put up last month simply called him “an eminent Kyiv resident, doctor and writer”.
Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) wrote his novels, plays and newspaper articles in Russian and spent the last two decades of his life in Soviet-era Moscow.
Fascinated by kyiv, the writer was on the other hand contemptuous towards Ukrainian nationalism, Ukrainian culture and language.
However, it is not the only target of the “derussification” policy vigorously pursued by the Ukrainian authorities, who have dismantled many monuments and renamed streets, memorials and inscriptions.
A 16-year-old teenager, Mykhailo Soboliev, assured AFP that he was the one who sprayed paint on Mikhail Bulgakov’s plaque, according to him an “act of public protest” with the aim of “derussifying and decolonizing Kiev”.
Mykhaïlo like his parents consented to his name being published by AFP.
The teenager took part in several protests against Soviet-era monuments in the Ukrainian capital, including the statue of Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, which was covered in graffiti calling for its demolition.
Mykhaïlo Soboliev accuses the Bulgakov museum of having carried out a kind of “manipulation” to circumvent the rules of “derussification” by removing from the plate the inscription which indicated that the writer was Russian.
“Bulgakov was opposed to the creation of a Ukrainian state. He was against the Ukrainian language. He ridiculed people who changed their surname in the Ukrainian way,” he said.
“I don’t understand why the Bulgakov museum is in kyiv,” the teenager said.
The National Union of Writers of Ukraine also called for the museum to be closed, calling the famous writer a person who “hated sovereign Ukraine”.
03/06/2023 15:15:25 – Kiev (Ukraine) (AFP) © 2023 AFP
