When I was fourteen, we had a school poetry evening. We dressed up, rehearsed for weeks and tried to sound much older than we actually were.

Growing up in Ukraine, we were exposed to the literary density early. Long-form novels and poems (e.g. Master and Margarita, Iliad), metaphysics and symbolism before we had the life experience to metabolize them. At the time, it felt abstract.

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This episode was originally published on February 20, 2026.

Image: Tenderness, Ivan Marchuk, 1984