“The thing is that I don’t really have a home,” sings Ukrainian band Odyn v Kanoe. For two weeks before 24 February 2022, I kept listening to this song on repeat. No, like many others, I did not foresee a full-scale invasion. Honestly, I didn’t foresee anything at all; I just liked the music. After I heard the first movie-like explosions on the morning of the 24th, I deleted this song from my phone and haven’t been able to listen to it ever since.
In Lviv, where we went with friends on the second day of the invasion, I thought to myself, “What irony, now I really don’t have a home”. I’m not a nomad; I like to grow roots, surround myself with things I love, put magnets on my fridge, and keep a waffle jar in the cupboard even though I use it once every two years. I want to know that my glass figurine collection and photos of Franz Kafka I’ve securely hidden from my cat. I love Victorian literature—though I’ve only recently learned to admit it—because the domestic slowness and gentle aesthetic excess appeal to me.
I barely remember my father’s house, although, from the age of five, I’ve been spending there every summer. A large courtyard, chickens, rabbits, a sleepy local market, walls adorned with seashells—my father arranged it all by himself. However, the idea that somewhere in Rubizhne, I had one of the branches of my family was a significant fact – I’m convinced that family is a tree that entwines the north and the east, and now its branches reached into the western regions. Rubizhne didn’t have the mythology of Donetsk; it’s a city where chemical production determines the rhythm of life, yet no one brags about it.
Now my father’s house is gone—a direct strike from the Russian side. Well, this is not Facebook, and I can safely write ‘damn Russians’ without using the asterisks. There are no rabbits or chickens left there, although perhaps the local market survived. Ukrainian markets, so persistent and resolute, flourish in the most challenging conditions; they stay strong like trees growing on a wind-swept rock. I like to think that the seashells could have survived as well, and a thousand years later, archaeologists will find an encrusted concrete fragment and say, “People here thought about beauty; they had a certain aesthetic excess. Perhaps they read George Eliot here?”
I write these words on the 576th day of the war in Kyiv, in my home, with my mother living in the building nearby and my father a few hundred kilometres away from us on the front line, which is now his home. Last night, the air defence systems went off, and my little kitten heard explosions and saw the light from explosions for the first time in her life. She wasn’t frightened; she is a child of war, after all. While I was restlessly sitting in the hallway (for we didn’t have time to run to the bomb shelter) at four o’clock in the morning, I thought to myself, “What is home for me today? What do roots mean when a storm like this rages, ready to uproot everything living and flush it all away?”
There is a simple answer to this question – home is people. Home is any place where you are surrounded by people who are important to you and where you can lean on someone. But do we feel at home abroad, even when our friends and relatives live nearby? Does a tube station become a home to those who hide there from endless bombardments? What if you lived there for several months like many Kharkiv residents actually did when the Russian invasion started? Is home a mobile or a stable concept?
There is another answer. A home is a place of growth and the formation of one’s personality. You always feel at home in a place where you spent your childhood. In this case, though, my home is scattered: these are Kyiv apartments on the Left Bank of the Dnipro River, a recreation base on the Ros’ River, the Crimean Cape Meganom, a school, and, of course, Rubizhne. And countless other places, even the park in the Rusanivka district, where you could buy alcohol, and no one asked for your ID. This way, home becomes a real mosaic, a complex structure where each location is tagged to certain hashtags: functions, rules, levels of freedom, and people you met there. This theory is more comforting to me because it means that it is more difficult for Russians to destroy our homes: different elements are located in different places, and everything is set like an air defence system. And if one location on the map disappears, others will prevail, and later, another significant place will appear. Home is threads that connect important locations; it’s the road between them, a connection that only you truly experience. Charles Baudelaire was one of the first to propose the concept of a flâneur, a person who feels comfortable just walking around the city, for whom the city is home. Later, in his “Parisian Arcades”, Walter Benjamin unites space and premises: his glass arcades are like an idealised home that you can buy.
Even if our home is scattered today, something still connects these disparate points. For me, it’s the level of freedom you feel there, the rules you set yourself. A home is a place whose transformation you define. That’s why, for many people of my parent’s generation, their parental home is not theirs – we were told the phrase “in my house, you’ll do as I say” way too often for us to feel freedom there. Security—yes. Freedom—almost never. Lot’s nameless Biblical wife knew what home was: a place where you defined the rules of life yourself. You lose your home not when it’s engulfed in a fiery whirlwind but when you’re forbidden to think and mourn for home; you lose your home when you erase your own memory. Home is a mental construct.
In Martin Heidegger’s articles from the 1950s, the concept of Heimatlosigkeit, or ‘homelessness’, often appears; this should be understood as a loss of a safe environment for existence. Essentially, all Ukrainian cities are in a state of Heimatlosigkeit, but none of us is ‘heimatlos’, homeless. Because Heimat is the homeland, and we definitely haven’t lost it.
Peter Sloterdijk, another great German philosopher, noted that we try to surround ourselves with a safe sphere, a bubble because today we can’t trust the outside world. Things that had seemed safe before, like air, can now pose a threat, and we resort to designing the atmosphere, i.e., filtering it and adapting it to our needs. When nuclear warheads became the viral memes again (memes are a great way to define our main trigger), I bought everything to survive the apocalypse: long disposable raincoats, gloves, special glasses, masks, and shoe covers. In fact, ready-made costumes create a safe microclimate, a tiny survival bubble—that’s Sloterdijk’s sphere, a home within a home that, fortunately, has not yet been needed.
The constant threat to the homes of civilians is terrorism, and in this war, Russians resort to it on a daily basis. Sloterdijk writes about the despair of victims of such terror: when the environment itself, the world around us, becomes dangerous, we lose support. However, here Peter lacks at least some practical knowledge: over the 576 days of the invasion, countless times I felt anger, nostalgia, hatred, and physical fatigue, everything cranked up to the maximum, unclouded and pure, yet never even once I experienced despair. Grief—yes, despair—never. Most of the time, I was filled with love – for my family, my friends, and even for those I saw for the first time in my life or watched through the screen of my phone. Expressions of humanity touched me like never before; simple actions led to great transformations. It seems we have overcome another concept of Sloterdijk, perhaps the main feature of the modern person—a cynical reason. We can be anything: romantic, ironic, tired and inspired, but certainly not cynics. The crystallisation of values, the struggle that often costs lives, makes cynicism laughable and inappropriate. Cynicism is a trait of intellectuals on the opposite side of the front. They cover up with it to avoid saying something serious. We wrap ourselves with love, which becomes our collective sphere, our home.
After February 24, the concept of home paradoxically changed for all of us: it expanded to the size of the entire country and shrank to the dimensions of one suitcase or shoulder bag. The ideas of personal and collective home were mixed up. People resemble a colony of mussels: we have to stick together for comfort (and so that enemy crabs brought from other seas won’t eat us), but everyone needs a separate shell that can hold even onto a piece of concrete.
There is another factor defining my shell—a place where my cat sleeps. Probably, responsibility for home is formed this way: when there is someone to take care of, it is easier to mobilise sources and build a new dwelling for yourself. The thought of leaving the animal behind and looking for a new home without it is unthinkable for me. My cats have always been my home.
Everyone decides for themselves what to call a home—this is already a wonderful thing. Fluid markers are not always painful; sometimes, they are convenient and non-traumatic, especially when a cat purrs nearby.
