After thirty-five days of silence, Hryhorii Afanasiev returns with the beginning of a personal history spanning Donetsk, family, architecture, war and the accidents through which a person becomes himself — Vudi Xhymshiti [London based editor OF MAISTERNIA].
UKRAINE — It has been thirty-three days since my last Hryhorii Afanasiev appeared on 24th of August1. I did not intend to disappear for more than a month, and I know that some of you have wondered where I went. I am back, although I cannot yet explain everything that happened during my absence. Some experiences need time before they can be carried safely into public, and lately my time has not belonged entirely to me. I will leave you to consider what that might mean. What I can say is that a death close to me interrupted the rhythm of my life and forced me to confront a subject I had successfully avoided: my own mortality.
I began asking myself what I would leave behind and what anybody would truly know about me if I suddenly disappeared. Would they know only the finished surfaces, the architectural drawings, photographs, music and carefully written sentences, or would they understand what stood beneath them?
I will soon be twenty-eight, which is an absurdly young age at which to begin writing one’s memoirs. At twenty-eight, one is supposed to be creating the incidents that will later be exaggerated in them. Yet I have already experienced events that many people twice my age have been fortunate enough never to encounter. Some of those stories can be told now, others will emerge over the coming series.
This will not be a heroic or sanitised account. Architects are skilled at concealing pipes, correcting crooked lines and presenting a finished building as though it appeared without arguments, compromises, unpaid invoices or frightened people making decisions under pressure. I do not want to treat my life in the same way. If I am going to explain who I became, I must show the unfinished structure, including the mistakes, poverty, prohibitions, faith, love, fear and occasional stupidity that supported it. The proper place to begin is Donetsk, on 18th October 1998, in the maternity ward of Hospital Number Nine in the Budionivskyi district.
My mother entered and confidently informed the medical staff that she had fifteen minutes left. When they asked what she meant, she told them that she was about to give birth. Her father had become tired of waiting for his grandson and had declared that I would be born that day, according to her, everything he said came true. The nurses were unimpressed. She still had another month of pregnancy ahead of her, they reminded her, but agreed to examine her. Moments later, the scepticism disappeared and somebody shouted for the delivery room to be prepared immediately.
I arrived precisely at midnight, accompanied by the Kremlin chimes sounding from a television somewhere in the ward. The birth was difficult, and once I had finally appeared, the doctors encountered an administrative problem: should I be registered on 18 October or 19 October? They resolved the question by recording my birth at 24:00 on 18 October 1998, a time that technically does not exist. My first achievement, therefore, was to arrive at the exact boundary between two days and compel several adults to negotiate with the calendar.
The following morning, my relatives gathered beneath the maternity-ward window. My grandmother shouted up to my mother and asked how much the baby weighed. “Two kilos nine hundred,” my mother replied. Then my grandmother asked what I had been called. When my mother answered, “Grisha,” my grandmother turned around and walked away. Throughout the pregnancy, I had been expected to become Andrii. My father had chosen the name in honour of his closest friend, and my grandmother had spent months waiting for Andrii to arrive. My mother, however, had decided that no son of hers would bear that name. Both of her grandfathers had been named Hryhorii, and she remembered them as sincere, honest and exceptionally kind men. That was how I became Hryhorii Yevhenovych Afanasiev. My grandmother refused to speak to my mother for several weeks, which meant that I entered family politics before I had even learnt to hold up my own head.
My first clear memory comes from my fourth birthday in October 2002. I became so overwhelmed by the congratulations, attention and candles on the cake that I crawled beneath the table to recover from the experience. That day, somebody gave me a small plastic piano. It was brightly coloured, light enough for a child to carry and capable of producing several sounds that its manufacturer had generously classified as music. Nobody in the room could have known that music would become one of the principal languages through which I understood the world.
Many years later, on Volodymyrska Hill in Kyiv, I would play one of my own compositions on a real piano while an air-raid siren warned of another Russian missile attack. The siren joined the performance without invitation and showed little interest in harmony. That story belongs to a later series, because before Kyiv there was Donetsk, and before I understood music or architecture, there was a wooden house on the city’s outskirts, beyond which the road already belonged to Makiivka.
I remember entering that house when nobody lived there. The wooden floor creaked beneath my feet, and a chandelier made from small glass cylinders hung from the ceiling of the largest room. For years afterwards, I continued finding pieces of that chandelier scattered around the garden. My parents decided to demolish the building and replace it with a new house conceived in the grand tradition of post-Soviet gigantism: ten metres by ten metres, two storeys and large enough to suggest that prosperity had arrived before the family could afford it. On the upper floor, my father began constructing a winter garden for my mother, complete with an enormous panoramic window.
We never lived in that house. Our family occupied a sixteen-square-metre outbuilding that had once served as a summer kitchen. The shower and toilet were outside, and I watched my father dig the toilet pit, assemble its wooden frame and cover it with square pieces of rubber that had previously served as flooring. It was there that I learnt one of my earliest architectural lessons: materials rarely remain what somebody first intended them to be. A floor could become a roof, a discarded window could become a wall, construction waste could become a child’s house, and sixteen square metres could contain an entire family’s life.
That cramped outbuilding, rather than the large unfinished house beside it, became the true foundation of my imagination. It was where five people lived, cooked, prayed, worked, argued and imagined a different future. It was also where I began constructing things from whatever adults had abandoned. In the next piece, I will tell you how I built my first house from discarded window frames, climbed onto its improvised roof and collapsed the entire structure on top of my younger sister while she was preparing lunch made from sand.
Fortunately, neither of us was seriously injured. The family’s response to my early experiment in structural engineering was another matter.
Editor’s note: Dear reader, something significant has happened in Hryhorii Afanasiev’s life, although circumstances do not yet allow us to explain it publicly. Some future entries may therefore answer certain questions while necessarily leaving others unanswered, and the diary may not appear as regularly as either Hryhorii or his readers would wish. Nevertheless, we intend to preserve it and publish whenever circumstances permit.
I am Vudi Xhymshiti, a London-based journalist and the founder and editor-in-chief of The Frontline Media Group. After seeing the remarkable initiative Hryhorii had begun with Maisternia, I agreed to become his editor and help him turn these experiences into an honest and enduring record. The donation button below offers a practical way to support Hryhorii and help him continue writing during this uncertain period. You may as well subscribe to his substack for a $5 monhtly.
If you value his work and are able to contribute, please consider doing so.
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It reminds me that someone beyond Ukraine wants me to breathe, sip a coffee and keep stitching letters into words, and words into stories that need to be told.
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The First Bell Has Not Rung Yet
On a Kyiv beach, an architect remembers the humiliation of preparing for school and imagines a neglected building becoming a place of learning again.
The First Bell Has Not Rung Yet
Ukraine turns thirty-five today. It is Independence Day, which, given the neighbours, has become less a birthday than an annual act of professional stubbornness. There will be flags, jokes, memories, sirens and, because Ukrainians remain irritatingly committed to living, probably coffee before all of them. So, on this 24